Thanksgiving in Lexington

This Thanksgiving I visited some relatives in Lexington, MA.  After dinner, the whole family went for an afternoon walk through some undeveloped land behind the house. There were many familiar sights, such as stone walls,

and loose rock piles.

Then I saw this, a propped boulder resting on a large central support stone.  The bottom edge of the boulder seems to curve around the support stone, as if someone chipped away rock to get this effect.

A marker or memorial left by Natives, and hidden in plain sight?

A Corner with Directional Alignments

Most of the groups of  propped boulders I have been showing do not seem to have any astronomical alignments.  One pair of propped boulders had a N-S alignment (7/24/2013).  Here is a small lakeside area in which the propped boulders seem to have alignments to the cardinal directions.

Waypoint 1857. This is the boulder to the north.

500 feet away to the south is  this impressive propped boulder, at waypoint 2134.  It is the corner, and rests on two supporting rocks, a style seen in other sites (11/13/2013, 9/4/2013).

677 feet away to the west is this propped boulder at  waypoint 1862 . There is a small stone wedged underneath it.

This area has many boulders, but the ones that have been modified seem to form lines and triangular enclosures. The lake in the diagram is dammed, so hundreds of years ago, there would have been a much smaller pond and a larger swampy area. Since these propped boulder enclosures are usually uphill from water, they may have been part of Native settlements.

Paired Propped Boulders

Somewhere in northern RI is another hilltop site with propped boulders forming a triangular arrangement.  So far, I have shown four of these sites with aligned propped boulders, including one in March 2012. These sites are all within five or six miles of  each other.   This site differs from the others in  that the propped boulders are in pairs.

At waypoint 1514001, there are two smaller propped boulders.

About 600 feet away is the corner  at waypoint 1525, with  two large propped boulders:

These are next to each other.  The larger one has a division in the base, like that of the corner propped boulder shown 9/11/2013.

Those small objects in the division are  acorns donations left by squirrels.
At waypoint 504, about 600 feet away from the corner, there are also two propped boulders.

Nearby is this perched boulder, which I have shown before (11/28/2012 ).  This seems to point to the smaller propped boulders at waypoint 1514001.  If there was anything more, it was lost to development.

Landscapes with Native Sculptures

Last weekend's outing was postponed by the nasty head cold that has been going around at work.  Finally, some time to stay in and paint!  These aren't exact reconstructions, but imagined  landscapes without overgrown trees, where propped boulders are clearly visible.  Here is the hill (10/30/2013) on a late autumn afternoon, looking past the propped boulder to the impressive boulders at the top of the hill.

Computer screens have a bluish cast, so yellows and reds sometimes look "off".  Paintings with lots of blue usually look better.   Here is a winter camp at evening, at the same site.  A little firelight shows at the smoke hole, and around the door.