Vanishing

Sunday I returned to the hilltop  from 3/18/2012.  This is the first group of propped boulders that I noticed formed a "corner".  Heading uphill, the first propped boulder I visit  is this huge one, with a cavity  8 feet long, 4 feet high, and 3 feet deep.  With a sloping roof and side, the useful space would be about 24 cubic feet.  This cavity  could have been used as a shelter.

The cavity floor has a couple of rocks.  The flat one is too close to the boulder roof  to be practical as a work surface.

The granite in this area is foliated, and breaks into neat slabs.  A side view of the boulder shows two such slabs, which have slipped off. There are no tool marks visible along the edges of these slabs.  Presumably, the cavity was formed by chipping away  the lower layer of rock.

    If this was  a home or a women's food processing area, there would be some grinding slicks around.  They are not easy to find since they are often covered with dirt or moss or leaves. Sometimes the little bowl is filled with leaves or pine needles, highlighting it on top of a rock. Here is the most likely grinding slick, in a broken rock a few steps from the propped boulder.

I couldn't find any grinding slicks at the other propped boulders in the corner.  Instead, I found evidence of quartz quarrying near the hilltop site with the large pedestal boulder.

Note the propped boulder in the left foreground.  It split vertically, producing the flat slab my knapsack is resting on.  About 140 feet from this site is this boulder.

A careful look inside reveals this large chunk of quartz, left from a vein.

In front of this little quartz mine.

Maybe the table site was the men's stone work area and meeting place.  Even though the granite rocks seem permanent, they are slowly splitting, breaking, and shifting. These sites are only shadows of their original structure, and are vanishing.