Enigmatic stone cairns sometimes defy utilitarian agricultural explanation

Evidence

Having figured out that the area holding the cairns had once been a crop field, I was ready to examine the stone structures themselves to see if they meshed with the site’s cultivated past. I turned from the wall to walk back toward the center of the site, where I encountered a cluster of cairns. I was immediately struck by their size and the quality of their stonework. These were clearly not merely stone piles. Most of them were rectangular in shape, running lengthwise up-and downslope. The largest ones measured about 7 meters wide by 10 meters long. The external walls were carefully built and then filled with rock in their interiors to create structures that had horizontal flat tops. The downslope walls of the cairns were sometimes close to 3 meters in height, while the upslope walls reached a height of 1 to 2 meters. The cairns’ frequency in this once cultivated site, the vast amount of rock that they held, and the nature of their construction made me think that they weren’t related to the parcel’s past cultivation. — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics, 22

Categorization

• QUESTION: Whether the cairns are Native American burial, calendar, or ritual structures is left genuinely open and worth chasing.
• XREF: connects to: Plowed fields generate surface rocks each spring while forests do not — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to…, 80

Related

• Plowed fields generate surface rocks each spring while forests do not (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Plowed fields generate surface rocks each spring while forests do not #exemplifies (0.78) — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics, 80