Tuesday, May 16, 2006

MHC Revisited

By JimP

I saw this nasty little tidbit in the archives of the blog, but I couldn't find the source. I finally found it. I thought I'd repost it with the source URL.

And what's up with them pointing to that very unprofessional webpage where the background wallpaper is so annoying you can't even read anything on it -- as if it has any credibility whatsoever! I'm actually outraged by this. Ignorance and bigotry is alive and well for the sake of money and development in the Commonwealth.

Next I expected to see an explanation of how the, "Indians weren't capable of working in stone." Unbelievable!

http://www.sec.state.ma.us/mhc/mhcrevcom/revcomidx.htm#faq(scroll all the way down and it is the 4th question up from the bottom)

I’m concerned that stone piles in a project area may be Native American grave markers. What should I do?

Piles or continuous walls of fieldstones are common in rural Massachusetts wherever there are rocky soils. When historians and archaeologists have conducted thorough, professional research into such stone piles, they have invariably shown that these features are not associated with the Native American settlement of Massachusetts. When it is possible to determine their origin, stone piles prove to be related to agricultural activities such as clearing of fields for pasture or cultivation, and/or marking property bounds during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pursuits that were once much more common in what may now be residential suburbs. Because stone piles or walls often marked property lines or boundaries between different land uses such as pasture and woodlot, they are often in a linear row or other geometric pattern, some of which may be consistent with cardinal compass points, solstice sunrises or sunsets, or other celestial phenomena. http://www.anthropology.ccsu.edu/fraudsweb/frauds.htm

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