Another mystery at Canonchet.

This is located all by itself on a level rocky area at the base of a small outcrop. A few feet away to the east, there's a ledge and the land drops again.

 It's about 7 feet square with a south facing entrance.

 There are 2 split boulders with a single wedged rock, one on the east side and one on the west side.

 This is located about a mile and a half north of the  Canonchet chambers.

As usual, there are rock piles and cairns all over, but oddly, none right in the area of this enclosure.

Below is a video taken in the rain .

This site will keep Bob and I busy for a long time.  It has it all. Chambers with a zig zag wall in front of them, stone walls that don't serve any agricultural purposes, stone fill between boulders, split and filled or wedged boulders,  rock piles and cairns everywhere you look with a high percentage of them with quartz on top.  Mixed in with all of this are stone walls built by early farmers and a cellar and barn foundations. It's easy to see the different styles and constructions from different time frames and cultures. 75% of the land is not suitable for farming with rocks and boulders, streams, springs and swampy land. Yet it's littered with stone walls, cairns and other stone work.

Last week we started to notice a feature that we don't see to often or with frequency. Nicely built cairns constructed in and as part of stone walls.  Below are 5 examples.

 

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The next cairn is pyramid shaped with a hole built into the bottom  right hand corner and comes out on top.

The cairn pictured below is 50 feet from  the pyramid cairn  and is in the same wall.

The picture below shows a stone wall with an unusual section. This isn't a true cairn but worth showing. The section is wider then the stone wall that it's in. The niche doesn't go all the way through and looks to have been made intentionally. 

 

Norman Muller sent this in today,

In the Summer 2008 ESRARA Newsletter, there is a notice on page 16 of upcoming conferences, one of which is the Eastern States Rock Art Conference (ESRAC) March 27-29, 2009.  Tommy Hudson, the organizer of the conference writes: "There is also a call for papers.  Rock art, stone piles and constructions, geoglyphs, iconography, and all subjects related are welcome.  As an example, I will give a presentation on serpentine stone walls in North Georgia and their relationship to the tri-level cosmos."  Hudson can be reached at myrockart@yahoo.com or by phone at 678-983-5333.

Norman added,

In the same issue of the newsletter there is a very interesting short article by Tommy Hudson titled "Dick's Ridge Serpentine Stone Wall," a 300 foot long wall on a ridge in northwest Georgia.  Hudson writes: "Walls that incorporate bedrock an boulders are a recurring theme in the southeast" (as they also are in the Northeast!).  He also adds the following observation:  "Some of the large stones used in the construction of the wall have been shimmed to bring them into level plane.  Why shim a rock that would have to be moved by several people to its final location in the wall and then picked up again to add a 2" shim?"  Interesting point.

Yesterday, Bob and I set out to explore an area north of the chambers. (See the previous post)

In this area, you don't have to hike long before you find interesting stone work.

We hiked from the chambers for less then a tenth of a mile, passing rock piles and cairns along the way until we came to this outcrop. 

The stone work on the face of the outcrop reminded me of the stone work at the chambers. 

On top of the outcrop is this split and filled boulder with quartz on top.

At the end of the stone row coming out from the outcrop, (see the first image above)there is another stone row with a circular cairn built into it and  leads to another outcrop. 

We followed this row to the outcrop. On top of this outcrop, we found another split and filled boulder with stone rows leading to and from it.

Following the row from the left side of the boulder above, we saw

a cairn and a hill in back.

You can see the hill to the left of the cairn above. I could see

something on top that turned out to be a nice cairn with a lot of quartz on top.

On the other end, coming of of the hill, I could see more stone work. (below)

But I wasn't prepared for the beautiful stone work that I saw

when I went over to investigate.

You have a better chance convincing me that the world is flat then

convincing me that this was built by a farmer.

 

The picture below shows the fill from the other side. There are 

several pieces of quartz including the rock behind the half meter stick.

Continued from the last blog post.

A couple of new pictures showing both chambers.

(click on the images to enlarge them)