 So we are admitting people, we are pretty well set up here to start with our introductory remarks. My name is George Naughton and welcome to the Friday, March 26 lecture of History Bites sponsored by the Amherst History Society. Today in keeping with our efforts to listen to other voices of other viewpoints on history, we're pleased to welcome Dr. Curtis Hoffman, who is going to talk to us about Native American stone structures, things that were happening in history before a lot of us got here. Dr. Hoffman holds a PhD from Yale University in Near Eastern languages and literature, and since 1973 has directed field operations at archaeological sites in southern New England. He is a full professor in the Department of Anthropology at Bingewater State University and has held that position since 1978, past president of Massachusetts Archaeological Society, and currently serves as the editor of their bullet. He has an abiding interest in cognitive anthropology, which is the study of the ways in which the members of cultures represent their worldview in the form of material culture. In 2019, Dr. Hoffman published his book Stone Prayers, and from the blurb on Amazon, scattered throughout the woodlands and fields of the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada are tens of thousands of stone monuments. These stone constructions have been the subject of debate among archaeologists and antiquarians for the past 75 years. Prominent among the competing hypotheses have been allegations that these structures were built by colonial farmers, removing rocks from their fields, or that they were built by pre-Columbian transatlantic voyagers. They were not the only ones here for the Irish, or that they were the result of natural deposition by glaciers, or that they were constructed as sacred places by the indigenous peoples of the region. I think from the title of your book Stone Prayers, we can guess where you come down on this debate. But we're looking forward to your lecture, so please welcome Dr. Curtis Hoffman. Okay, the introduction is a little bit out of date. I'm currently Professor Emeritus at Bridgewater State University, and I am the former editor of the bulletin of the Mass Archaeological Society. And I've titled this talk, Science Pseudoscience and Scientism, because a lot of the debate is focused not around the evidence, but around people's attitudes towards the evidence. And this is illustrated. When I was editor, the trustees asked me to pull the membership as to how they felt about the bulletin. And most of the responses were very positive, but then this one came across. No pseudo archaeology and or speculations based in contemporary religious notions that are neither scientific nor rational, they're even empirically or logically demonstrative. And then it goes on to suggest that it's not just bad anthropology, it's not anthropology. It's not completely ignoring the fact that ever since the 1870s with Edward Tyler, there has been a strong interest in anthropology in the anthropology of religion. And so there's this whole idea of pseudo archaeology involved here. And that is part of what I am going to be addressing in this talk. And first of all, it's helpful to have a definition of the scientific method. This is from a recent book by Ryan Gray on critical engagements with fringe science. And it gives you the basic methodology with which I'm sure you're all familiar. And that is that we have observation induction deduction and then a test of assumptions. And that is what we do in science. Whereas the same author defined pseudo science as claims relating to these things, an associational approach, not a contextual one, disregard for the rules of logic, tendency to look only for confirmation and attempt to create mystery rather than resolve it and base explanations on possibility rather than probability. And so it's a fairly concrete, fine line between these two. But there is also this thing known as scientism. And that is the attempt on the part of people from the perspective of what they claim to be science to attack anyone who views they do not like by calling it pseudo science. Here's a quote that I found from William McGee, the American anthropologist from 1893, where so ever workers assemble their idlers gathered to feast on the fruits of honest toil. And he goes on to talk about people cheating justice and dishonest dealing and so forth and what he is complaining about here. Mind you, are the claims in his day by people that there had been native people living on this continent earlier than 4000 years ago. That's what he's trying to debunk here. And, of course, as we'll see, that is no longer believed by anyone in archaeology. There are arguments as to how long people have been here, but that 4000 year threshold really was something that was generated politically in order to justify the theft of the native people's lands. A critique of scientism from a scientist and astrophysicist argues that we cannot exclude from our consideration matters that relate to such things as religion and spirituality, simply because of that. So long as we use the scientific method, we should be able to use inquiry into any of these things without being hamstrung by scientific fundamentalism or scientific. So there's a little bit of that. Here are some examples of ideas that were once labeled as pseudo science. This is a pseudo Indian occupation of North America. All right, up until the discovery of the Folsom site in the Clovis site. It was widely believed that there had not been anyone here at the time that there were those large, I say, animals, but we now know that there were. The tectonic plate theory was widely debunked in 1930s and 40s and 50s, but now it is accepted science that, for example, Yeah, we're going to ask people to hold their questions until the end, or perhaps George will collect them on the chat. Okay, tectonic plate theory. Catastrophic collisions between extraterrestrial bodies in the earth. We know of Emmanuel Velikovsky's ideas which were widely debunked in the 1950s and 60s. But we now accept that at least at the end of the pretentious period. There was a major such collision which did in the dinosaurs and lots of other life forms. The Clovis occupations of North America. There's this group of archaeologists which were affectionately known as the Clovis police, who barred anyone who claimed that there were such occupations from getting grants scholarships jobs contracts and publications. We now, most of us accept that people have been here on the continent for at least 20,000 years, if not longer. Then there's this one free Colombian European explorations of North America. We know the Vikings were here for sure, whether there were others is debatable. And the point of this is that all of these ideas are open to dispute and refinement, but that should be the case with all of science. Most of them, however, are widely accepted by geologists and archaeologists today, which is not to say that there are not arguments that are indeed species. I mean, I've seen some stuff about giants in the earth who are being their skeletons are being hidden in the Smithsonian along with the unredacted version of the Mueller report. But generally speaking, if you apply the methods of science, you should be able to explore anything. So, in the publication of the Division of Conservation Resources here in Massachusetts, which is basically echoing language that also occurs. If you go on to the mass historical Commission's website to their Q&A section. There is this kind of idea, the last word. When historians and archaeologists and when mass historical says when responsible historians and archaeologists have researched stone walls piles and chambers. They have invariably demonstrated that these features are associated with the activities of European settlers and have no Native American or other origin to together archaeology and ethno history provide conclusive evidence that stone walls piles and chambers are not the work of ancient culture. Oh, yeah, I've highlighted this word invariably for a number of reasons. First of all, here is a set of radio carbon and optically stimulated luminescent dates associated with stone structures in the Eastern seaboard. There are 20 something of these, all of them are older than European contact, and all of them are directly associated with the structures. So, if you're going to claim that there is no such pre Colombian or pre European structure building, then how do you deal with these dates which go back as far as 4,000 some odd years ago. So that's part one. Then, when I did my initial research for this project and went to many state provincial archaeologists offices, most of them agree that at least some structures are considered to be of native origin. You notice which state is missing from this list. And the tragedy is that the largest number of sites and structures are in fact located in Massachusetts. We don't have the highest density Rhode Island does because they're smaller, but there are many, many of these sites here. And as far as historical documentation, there's quite a lot of it. Okay. The earliest I've been able to find is Captain John Smith you remember him he was the one who was taken prisoner had to deal with Elizabeth Warren. Okay, so he records that there were these stone altar stones called And this is in what we now call Virginia. He relates them to what he knew of biblical constructions and talks about how the Powhatans use these stones as places of offerings and indicated one at a location called Udomasek for which he actually provided a map from which I was able to geolocate this, this place, a solid crystal of great size upon its sacrifices were offered. And so that's our earliest reference. Roger Williams, the founder of the Rhode Island colony in his key to the languages of America talks about a stone construction called the Pesopok, or a hot house, which is a kind of a cave. It's used for sweat lodge purposes, and they have a heap of stones in the middle. And so this is a reference from Roger Williams, Thomas Mayhew, who was the first minister to the native people of Martha's vineyard. And he recounted that his converts were so delighted with what he was giving them by way of religious training that they built him a stone pile. Here it is. It's still there. All right. And he told them, Oh, no, no, no, don't build this for me build it for Jesus. Okay. Well, okay. He then brought a number of his converts on shipboard to go across the Atlantic so we can show them off to the Royal Court. His ship, founded in the North Atlantic and all hands were lost. And as a result, the native people when they learned that he wasn't coming back, continued to build the stone pile. And so this is a native American group, building a stone pile for a an Englishman. Then we have Daniel Gukin, who was the first Indian commissioner of Massachusetts, who was aware of the fact that indigenous people were very much involved and very expert in making stone fences. In his day, there was an arrogance it gentlemen by the name of Stonewall John, and the tradition of making stone walls was preserved continuously among the narrow gants it's up to the present day, the current historic preservation officer, John Brown, is himself a stone mason. And so this is a long lasting tradition among them, which was noted already in 1674. The governor of New York State in 1696, Governor Thomas Dangan, noted a location on the eastern side of the Hudson River, which he called Wawana Quasic, where heaps of stone are, and the term Wawana Quasic is actually an indigenous term for a particular type of stone option, which is a memorial stone, and he notes that people put more stones on it as they pass from an ancient custom among them. Governor Thomas Dudley, who was a Massachusetts governor and also at that time main was part of Massachusetts talks about this location in on the coast of Maine, where there were two pillars of stones at which a treaty was found and this is on a pair of islands off the coast of Maine in Casco Bay, and people would add stones to this. This is in the contact period that he observed. In the northeast, James Oglethorpe, the founder of the Georgia colony, became very friendly with the local native people, including a chief named Temachechi. And when Temachechi died, Oglethorpe ordered that a stone pile be erected for him. So here we have an Englishman making a stone pile for a native person. It's no longer there, it's been replaced by a monument, but still it was indeed a stone pile that was built. Then we have the Reverend Gideon Hawley in 1753, and he was out with a friend in what we now know of as the Skohari drainage in New York State with a native guide. And he was a Reverend. So one of the things that we find when native people in this period were asked why they were putting stones on top of stones in these places was more or less of an obfuscation. Because they had learned, the native people had learned that English people and especially religious figures like Hawley were intolerant of native beliefs and therefore would not allow these things to exist. They considered them to be the devil's work. And so they learned to give stories about these that didn't say anything. So they'd say, Oh, well, you know, my father always told me to do this, or it's our custom, or the ever popular. I don't know. All right, but these, this is not to say that they didn't know what they were doing. They were just protecting these things by claiming not to know what they were. The Reverend Ezra Styles, who was the founder of one of the founders of Yale College, was quite interested in these things by that time, most native people were no longer actively pursuing their own religions, but he noted several locations in the area both in Connecticut and Massachusetts. And the idea is, if they did not cast a stone or piece of wood on that stone, they would not prosper, particularly should not be lucky in hunting deer. And so this is one of the ideas that is out there already in the 18th century. James Adair, who was a tradesman in the southeast also noted this going on every Indian travelers he passes that way throws a stone on the place. This is among the Cherokee. But he was also aware of the same custom in all parts of the continent of North America, including among the Iroquois. And so this is further evidence of that. Edward Bourne, who was a historian in Maine, notes this and I've not seen any other evidence that backs this up of the idea that they would build a stone pile when they were at peace and deconstruct it when it was at war and reconstruct it when peace came back again. So that's an interesting idea but again it's it's certainly part of the historical record. And then we have Henry Franklin Norton who is the historian of Martha's Vineyard, who was aware of the Mayhew stone pile, and the fact that native people of Martha's Vineyard, still to his day were making offerings on that stone pile. The anthropologist Frank Speck noted that these things were very common in the Middle Atlantic states and talks about abundant references to records of such sites. But he did note that the listing of them would prove cumbersome. Well, the deal is that Frank Speck did not have a computer, because they were not around in his day. But indeed, it is possible to make listings of this sort. But then we get a group of other people involved in all of this, who are convinced that these things were built by transatlantic voyagers. Not to say that none of them were, but this is a well known structure at the site known as Mystery Hill or America's Stonehenge. William Goodwin, who was himself Irish, was convinced that the Irish had built all of these things and reconstructed the site at Mystery Hill, so as to make it look like a Calde monastery. Unfortunately, he moved so much stuff around that it's impossible to know what was originally there. But I can tell you that this site rests within a cluster of smaller, but still interesting sites. And then in 1989, Jim Mayvore and Byron Dix published their book Manitou, in which finally they began to recognize that these things were native, and that the ideas were still in place in some locations. Despite that, we do have pushback on the part of the professional historical and archaeological community. This rather dramatic pile with a little bunny rabbit in front of it, for scale, is located somewhere in Connecticut, and is said to have been built by a hired hand. And you will very frequently find citations of this book and this illustration in the writings of professional archaeologists who wish to claim that these are all colonial, that they were built by farmers. But the problem is, we don't know anything about the ethnicity of the fellow who built it. He might have been native, and a hired hand is not a farmer. In fact, I see James Gage's on the list. James and Mary Gage have collected a rather interesting historical account of a new London farmer for over 50 years documenting all of the activities he did with stone, and it's very clear that what he was doing with it was mostly piling up to sell it, and that was not remaining in place. And native voices have now gotten involved in the south and east tribes, which includes all of the tribes from Texas to Maine, that are federally recognized, have issued a number of resolutions. And I realize you may not be able to read this, but you can certainly find it online, in which they are claiming that these are sacred ceremonial stone landscapes of their peoples, and arguing that they should be preserved, and that steps should be taken to recognize and preserve them. So, as the introduction stated, there are four hypotheses out here to be tested. First of all, that the structures are the result of colonial farmers clearing agricultural fields, or for pastureage, or for the construction of stone walls. And secondly, that they are the natural features of a glaciated landscape, or the result of downslope erosion. I love this one, you know, there's a geoarchaeologist in Pennsylvania, who claimed of a lot of these stone structures that the stones had rolled downhill and self organized into piles. Yeah. What I want to know is how they also can try to roll uphill and organize into pile that's pretty smart rocks. They also present the work of pre-Columbian non-native peoples, either as navigational markers, or archaeoastronomical placements. This is the nearer position up until maybe 20 years ago. And finally, the structure is the result of repetitive ritual usage by Native Americans, either pre or post contact. So those are the tests, those are the things that are going to be tested here. The ways in which I did this. First of all, an examination of the historical records, which we've just been through the association of structures with absolute dates, which you've also seen a study of the general geographic distribution of the monuments and examination of the environmental parameters, which were favored and examination of the different structure types and their distribution and occurrence. And finally the cultivation of indigenous informants who have been able to supply me with traditional information about them. So I chose as a study area, all those river drainages that flow into the Atlantic Ocean from the St. John's River in Florida to the St. Lawrence River in New York and Canada. I did not go beyond the St. Lawrence, and it turns out the St. John's River, there are no rocks in Florida. So my southernmost sites are in Georgia. Okay. And here is a GIS map showing the distribution of sites. And what you can see is that there are two major clusters. There's a cluster down here in the southeast in Georgia and South Carolina, spilling over a little bit in North Carolina. There's kind of a gap. There's some stuff here in the Shenandoah and Potomac valleys, a little bit scattered here and there in Pennsylvania. And then once we hit New Jersey and the southern here in New York, it really goes wild. And in New England, Southern New England particularly, it's extremely dense. And by the way, when I represent sites in order to protect them from vandalism, they are represented by circles. They are represented by circles that are one kilometer in diameter or squares that are one kilometer in diameter. This will protect them from vandalism. But this represents 5,550 sites distributed throughout the region. Once we get into Northern Vermont and New Hampshire and into Maine they begin to peter out as we move further into the Maritimes fewer and fewer, but they're still there. So that's the distribution that we've got. Okay. And we begin to look at environmental parameters. Elevation above sea level average is 624.3 feet. This is done in feet because that's how the USGS maps are organized. Ordinarily, habitation sites would be at a lower elevation. And some of these are pretty high up into, you know, high, maybe over 2,000 feet here. I see this part of it is blanked out. Okay. Stream rank. Okay. A headwater stream is a rank one stream where two rank one streams join. They form a rank two stream and so forth until you get down to the ocean which is considered rank eight. All right. And you see the overwhelming majority of these sites are at headwater streams, which is not what you would necessarily expect of colonial sites. Okay, this is distance to water. And again, they're somewhat further away from water than you would ordinarily expect soil types and this is very telling I think if this was agricultural, you would expect to find these things in areas with productively fertile soils. This is based on the United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resource Conservation Service data, and indeed about a third of them are but most of that one third are located in the southeast, where there are more such soils anyway. And most of the rest of them are either in soils that have rather low fertility, or are actually naturally infertile, such as rock out crops and swamps, and in the actual swamp in the water. And so this suggests that whatever is going on here it doesn't have to do with agriculture. Well, I've defined 18 types of these structures. And here are the frequencies of them associated with the most common are stone piles, simply sometimes on top of a base folder sometimes on the ground. Then we have stone rows, which are different from stone walls in that they don't seem to go anywhere. And in some cases, they do this with this one doesn't. Well built cairns chambers, balanced rocks. Mark stones this one is a manatee with the shoulders hacked out split filled boulders effigies this is a turtle can everyone see that. Here's the head of the turtle here's one of its flippers. And by the way, the orientation of this turtle it is pointing directly towards winter solstice sunrise. And it's dead on to that. And it's on a hillside where you can actually see out over Long Island sound this isn't telling worth Connecticut, all the way to Montauk point where there is another such a structure standing stones. You shaped structures. Petroglyphs this is bellows falls enclosures stone circles, niches mounds often with depressions in them. Tatch all for unique structures and others like this one platforms, and then a very small number of inscriptions 18 all together, which I threw into the mix to see if there was any relationship between them and the rest. And indeed, what happens to be the case is that a large percentage of these structured types are found in combinations with other structure types. And this chart summarizes that information. So you can see that rock piles the most frequent are also the most frequently combined anything in red here is more than two standard deviations above the mean. The blue is more than one standard deviation, yellow and green are around the mean blue is more than one standard deviation below, and you see that the inscriptions are really not often associated with anything else. But this is how we do the quantitative stuff. And with a two way combination, we can also go to three way and four way combination, and see that certain kinds of structures tends to be grouped together in threes, or in fours. I've done the five way but the numbers are so small that it isn't statistically relevant. Then there is the fact that these sites are located in discrete clusters or at least something like 58% of them are these clusters are located in areas similar to the main distribution. So you see a cluster of clusters in the Georgia, South Carolina area, we want to walk here. A solitary one up here in Fairfax, Virginia, a couple of solidaries out here in Pennsylvania and Western New York. And then when we get into eastern New York Putnam County, in particular in Westchester County, and then through Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, oops, and in three of them up in Vermont, none of them beyond that in Maine, or in the Maritimes. So these clusters can be examined from a different number of different methods. And this, I guess you're not seeing that shows you the number of clusters per state. An example of what a cluster might look like. Each square here represents one kilometer. And the numbers represent the number of sites not structures but sites within that one kilometer block. And I've surrounded them with zeros to be on the safe side. Okay, in other words, conservatively. And that's what a cluster might look like. And as it happens, five of these clusters overlap state boundaries. So here is a cluster in central northern Massachusetts around Fitchburg and lemonster. And not what to sit and notice that it spills out over into New Hampshire, which is suggestive that the border between New Hampshire and Massachusetts was not drawn at the time that this cluster was established. Okay. Here's another cluster on the Rhode Island Connecticut border. And technically, all of these are part of the same cluster but you could argue that there are some clusters within but look at this group over here. Some on this side of the border some on that side of the border. Again, it's pretty clear that these things are not paying attention to where the border is. And here's a schematic of that cluster and you can see large numbers of sites as many as 2021 and some of these one kilometer blocks. So these are densely there. Here's one in New York, Putnam County, which overlaps into Dutchess County to the northwestchester County to the south in New York and over into Fairfield County in Connecticut. And here's another one that has overlapping. You would not expect to find that if these were farmers because farmers generally are paying taxes on their property to one jurisdiction, and not to several. This is a kind of a diffuse cluster on the New York Pennsylvania border, which also spills over. And here's one of my favorites. This one is on the border between South Carolina and Georgia. And what's happened here is that as a result of damming of the Savannah River, a large lake has formed like linear. And some of these sites, for example, this one over here are now submerged. And who knows but that there might not be more sites underwater now that had been part of the landscape at the time, and the cluster just overlaps between the two states. However, here is a cluster which does not overlap state boundaries. This is in northeastern Connecticut. Almost all of it in Wyndham County. And notice that the structures come right up to the Connecticut, Massachusetts border and not beyond. However, we happen to know something about this cluster. And that is that it is the location of a 18th century Native American reservation. The Wabakwasit Reservation. This was established after the Revolutionary War, because the Wabakwasits had come in on the side of the colonists, and in gratitude for that, they let them keep their lands. However, around that time, the border between Massachusetts and Connecticut was finally stabilized. And what's going on here is that this is a post contact cluster, a rather tight one as you see here, which was being used by Native people after the time of the European contact, and yet it goes up to the border and no further, which indicates that it is more recent, but still native. And one of the ways of dealing with this, mathematically, is a statistic known as the variance mean ratio, and here is the way in which that's calculated. It doesn't bother you with the math, but so much as to say that if you calculate this, it is the way in which the dispersal is, if it is dispersed widely or randomly, it's going to give you a different result when you run a chi square on it. But in this case, and in all of the cases of the 56 clusters I have, except for one that I'll show you in a moment, the probability that this is random is zero. So these clusters are statistically demonstrable. They're real. Here's the only one that doesn't quite work. The probability of this being random is 0.011, which is very, very low, but it's not zero for all the rest of them at zero. So these are real clusters, and we can play around with average nearest neighbor within the clusters. Another way of doing this is by calculating the nearest neighbor to a particular site, and here's the formula for doing that. And the deal here is that if the material is evenly dispersed, as you see in this here, it will give you a result over here. And if it is random, it will give you a result like that, and if it is clustered, it will give you a result like that. Well, in this case, the Z score, which is what you wind up with by doing this formula, is such that it falls over here on the extreme clustered tail of the distribution. So this is another way of demonstrating quantitatively that these clusters are real, that they were intentional, and they obviously have nothing to do with farming activity. Some of these clusters are enormous. This is the Metro West mega cluster. It is the largest has 535 sites in it. And by the way, when I say sites, a site is a location that has anywhere from one to maybe thousands of these structures added. And notice that this has a kind of funnel shape to it. And the southern edge of it over here points rather nicely towards the straight summer solstice sunrise, winter solstice sunset. Here are a couple of large Georgia clusters. A couple of large Massachusetts clusters. This one is in my town of Ashland and since been quite enhanced beyond this. All right. So this is a large cluster in Vermont begin to get the idea. This is one of the more interesting ones. This is known as the Hammond asset line it's in southern Connecticut. And notice that the sites are located in a very linear fashion. Now I've talked with Tom Paul who's the founder of this and asked him, well how many sites are located on either side of this. Very few. He is a member of the water board in his town and he's walked all the lands and found very few things that are outside of the line. I've actually had to make this into two clusters because my definition for cluster membership is that you've got to be within two kilometers of the last one last site. And there's more than a two kilometer gap between this one and these. But still, the line holds true. And this line also has solstice implications. That is, and the turtle which I showed you before is right over here. And this line points towards winter solstice sunrise summer solstice sunset. Tom has played traced it yet further west. I'm dealing with a gentleman in Watertown Connecticut now Joe Struckus, who has a number of sites along the line further west. Thomas trade placed it all the way into the cat skills. I'm a little skeptical of that because one of the issues that you're going to get into it that distance is the curvature of the earth. It is not, I assure you, flat. And so you might not get line of sight at that distance. But still it's a remarkable finding of something that is that linear. So we return to our hypotheses. Remember that they are these result of farmers hypothesis a natural erosion or glaciation hypothesis be pre Colombian non native peoples hypothesis see and ritual usage by Native Americans. In my book, I have provided a whole series of corollaries to each of these hypotheses that is quantitatively testable. And I'm not going to bother you with me because I want you to get my book. But here are the results. Okay, hypothesis a. And I've broken this down into a series of conclusions. So something is disconfirmed if there are zero cases of it. Largely disconfirmed if there are only a few cases of it. And then disconfirmed if there are a minority of cases, neither confirmed or disconfirmed if there are equal numbers of yes and no, partially confirmed if there are a minority of cases in favor, largely if there's a majority and confirmed if and only if every case is of that. And so of the different tests that I have, you see that hypothesis a fares rather badly. The, this is the hypothesis that it's built by farmers, only one case, which had to do with the sizes of the stones in these which I didn't get to measure that much is on the neither disconfirmed nor confirmed, and everything else is disconfirmed. The stones rolling downhill and organizing themselves into pile hypothesis. Even worse. I'm part of the idea here is, well, if that is true, then you would not find the south of the glacial margin. South Carolina and Georgia. Last time I checked we're very far south of the glacial margin. All right. The transatlantic voyagers hypothesis back here does not fare very well. Again, only one that is neither confirmed or disconfirmed. But and again I don't know if you can see this. Let's see if you can get rid of most of that. Yeah. Okay. Fares very well. Indeed. That is that native people are the constructors of these and most of the hypotheses in favor of that are confirmed or indeed, in some cases completely confirmed, and only this one hanging fire out here. So, that's what I have in the book. And since that time data has continued to come into me, indeed, even up until last week I've still been collecting data. And so I'm adding more information to this. First of all, let me say that in reviewing this material, I decided that there were about 700 sites, mostly chambers, where I didn't have any association with other types of structures, and where I could not confirm that they were native. So I took those 700 sites out of the database because they didn't really suggest what was going on. But since that time, I have more than recouped that number with new sites. And so here you see their distribution, and this includes, okay, includes a number of additional clusters that I didn't know about before. Four of them in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut, one in New York, one in a new one in West Virginia, which I hadn't known anything about. One in Rhode Island, two in Rhode Island. And so the data is still coming in. And here's where the new sites are. And you see they're pretty much where the old sites were, with the exception, I haven't gotten anything new from the extreme southeast lately. Okay. And I was asked by one of the researchers in this, well, how do we know that these things are not just random. And so I did a test of that. And I took 500 random locations and compared them with these 500 sites at the time I had 500, not 700. And these are the random points within one of the UTM zones on 18. And I did a comparison between, first of all, the original set of data, the new data, and the random points. And that's going to be easy for you to see, but certain of the parameters, these are the environmental parameters, are very different. So take a look at the distance to watershed. The green are the random, and they do not correspond at all to the red and the blue, which are the two sets of data from the actual sites. Similarly, the soil types, a lot more of the random ones are in productively fertile soils. Okay. The nearest neighbor. Again, the random ones are much more distant from one another, as compared to the actual data. And so they're statistically, I can show that the random. The random data does not correspond to this distribution. So that's that. So our conclusions. First of all, most of these strong structures are the result of indigenous ceremonial activities. Secondly, and this was something that was a surprise to me, the activities appear to have continued after European contact. And from my contacts with indigenous people, I learned that some of them are still being practiced today. And the other three hypotheses are disconfirmed. They should no longer be promoted as factual, in spite of the fact that we've got state archeologists in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, now claiming, still claiming that this is all a hidden, known colonial activity, which is not documented in any records. And, nevertheless, we like that idea better. Well, I'm sorry. The facts are the facts. And when you do science, you have to rely on the fact there is no factual evidence for this mysterious hidden colonial activity of building rocks on top of rocks. That's better things to do with their time. And so we have to go back to the idea that these things are as our native friends claim they are ceremonial stone landscapes. So all of this is now available in my book. And I'll take orders. I'll even autograph copies and mail them to you for an additional $5. I mean, when I've given these presentations in the past. In person pre pandemic I brought a box of books with me. We can't do that nowadays, though we may be able to maybe by this fall. But in any event, I will be happy to send out copies for anyone who wants to contact me at this email address. So that's my presentation. And I will welcome questions that people may have, I can figure out how to get this back. Oh yeah, we'll just do a stop share. Yeah, we will. Okay, there we are. Yes. Thank you very much. And I just want to interject that we had a couple of questions on the chat. Yes, this talk has been recorded with Dr Curtis permission, and it will be slightly edited and then versions will be available online. The Amherst media puts them up on their website, and they're also on like archive.org or YouTube. And once, once the version is edited, then Amherst history will also link to those versions. Amherst history, Amherst history dot org does have links to many of our past history bites lectures, if you want a very diverse set of lectures on history related topics you can go and look at our past lectures tab. But those of you who came in a little late. Those who have friends who missed this lecture. It is being recorded and the recording will be available online. So, are there other questions I see something going on in chat. If you want to field me the questions I'll try to answer them. And we go over the, the one o'clock at all or are we stuck with that. I think we can. Okay. So, there's a question first and suggested is improbable that all stone walls into we put our colonial. Do you have any data about this. Yes. When you see stone rows as I'm calling them. When you see that they don't go anywhere, or bound anything. And especially when they do not meet at right angles, you begin to suspect that you might not be colonial stone walls. So, as an example of this the site that I've been excavating my next book. Okay, the site that I've been excavating for the last 20 years. We discovered a stone row that actually did link up with a stone wall, but not at a 90 degree angle at a 97 degree angle. It was a fairly low stone wall it had quartz rock embedded within it, which is another little hint of what's going on, and it petered out after about 30 meters and didn't go any further. But when I took the azimuth on it I found that it was pointed toward winter solstice sunset. So, summer solstice sunrise so okay, those are a couple of ways of looking at it. Another way of doing this is to stand on the wall and look along it. And if it runs straight, then it's likely a colonial boundary. But if it curves, especially if it does kind of a sinuous kind of a curve. That's probably a serpent. Because there are a lot of serpent effigies out there. The most common effigies are serpents and turtles. And the question is, what can we do to turn the Massachusetts historical around. The only thing I can think of to do is to wait until the current state archaeologist retired, because she is dead set on her position. And I've, I've probed that from time to time. The study that I'm currently doing in the course of that site examination. I've also included sites within a 15 kilometer catchment radius catchment area. And there are about 50 of these kind of sites in that among the 639. All of the total. And when we were doing research at mass historical on those other sites for which they do record. They will not record these sites. They refuse to they'll trash them if you send them in. I asked if they wanted me to send in records on these sites that they could provide me with the site forms. So no, they are not interested in this. And as I said, the only way this is going to change is if the state archaeologist is no longer the current state archaeologist. And can you elaborate on the significance of the surface. Well, for sure they're not Christian symbols. Okay. But native people certainly have a great respect for them. And their relationship, often is with water, so that you'll find a serpent wall going down towards or coming back up from a stream or a swamp, or something like that. So that seems to be what's involved there. One of the things I want to make clear is that if these indeed are what our native friends are claiming that they are. Okay. It is their belief system. Into which I as a non native person do not feel I have the right to intrude. And so, from time to time people will drop interesting hints as to what might, what this might be about. But I'm not going to push that. And so it's up to them as to whether or not they want to come forward and say what these things why these things are important, rather than simply that they are important. So we use words like ceremonial which are very much catch all terms. Yep. Right. And there is this idea of a ceremonial stone landscape, the first of which is right in your area at Turner's Falls, which has been designated by the National Register of Historic Places as a ceremonial stone landscape, the first in the nation. Over the objections of the state archaeologists, by the way. So that's a term which is now used as a way of designating these things. But beyond that, it's up to the native people to come forward if they will to explain what these are for. And they may not because it's their beliefs and their beliefs have been trampled on for the past 350 years. So naturally, they're ready to say anything about this. But we do have a question as to whether there's a correlation between these and the European lay line concept. Possibly. Possibly. In other words, it may be the eye, the case that people who are living close to the land becomes sensitive to sometimes referred to as the genius loci, right, the spirit of place, and that they can read that. So if there is something to read there on either side of the pond, maybe people are reading it. Are any of these sites on Massachusetts conservation lands. Yes, and how might they impact stewardship and management practices. So there you would have to go to the stewards. And some of them. I mean, I know that DCR has come round over the last five years or so to the idea that these things are valuable to be preserved. Another kind of a thing that can be done and is being done in some towns. And what I think is to take a look at these things that are on public lands, for example, in town forests. So, acting has done a lot of work on this sort of thing. My town of Ashland, our town forest is absolutely chock a block with this stuff. And I have brought some native people out there to look at it, and they have confirmed that that's what it is. And so that's protected. Whereas in areas which are private land or corporate land. There are no protections for these in Massachusetts. There are in some states, you know, some of the the state of start preservation offices are very cognizant of these things, especially in the southeast, they have conferences about this all the time down there. And up here for whatever historical reasons, there is not an acceptance of these, and in fact a very active attempt to characterize anyone who is interested in it as being somewhere out in left field. Well, sometimes you catch some pretty good fly balls out in left field. So someone asks, do the turtle effigies relate to the name turtle island. Yeah, yes. The right front, the right front flipper of the turtle is Montauk point. So if you imagine that and if you imagine, let's say Baja California is the left rear flipper and so forth. I mean, yes, so there is there is the idea of the turtle as being the foundation upon which the world is based very commonly an Algonquian story. That's there. Someone asked, do you know of Rhode Island has a program for protection of the science. However, and they have for a long time. However, their current state archaeologists is on a campaign to debunk them and why he thinks he needs to do that in the face of narrow Gansett opposition, which is very active in Rhode Island. The narrow Gansetts have been forefront in protecting these sites, not just in Rhode Island, but up in your area also because they claim that they have traditional relationships with the people in the middle Connecticut Valley. So, yeah, I mean that's that's part of the controversy. I don't know if commercial and development interests have any impact on the debate that's going on that people want to do. Oh, sure. Where, where there's money involved. Fortune passes everywhere. Follow the money. Yep. That's right. In some cases you can find responsible corporations that are willing to avoid disturbing these monuments. It used to be the case that people were a little bit more enthusiastic about going out and digging them up. Nowadays, we generally refrain from doing that so for example the two that we have on my site. I have simply documented them photograph them there in my next book, but we have not excavated at them. And that is my preference of the indigenous people. Okay, I think I don't see any more questions here and we're past one o'clock at this point. So I think we can all thank you for a very informative presentation. Your use of statistics. I was impressed at mathematical analysis of all of these sites to to prove the non random nature. So thank you very much. Thank you.