 |
 
  |
|
|
|
|
 By Peter Waksman, a Concord resident with a passion for prehistory, tramping through the woods, and wondering who used them before recorded history.Sometimes when walking in the woods in Eastern Massachusetts, you come up to a rock with a split in it and notice that someone jammed a rock or two down into the split. At first I noticed this without giving it much thought - probably having jammed a rock down in a split myself, one time or another. If you had asked me about it, I would have said it is not surprising to find these rocks in the woods, since there has been plenty of time for people to walk by and casually jam a rock down into a split.    No doubt plenty of split-wedged rocks could have been created by casual passersby. Maybe wedging rocks was a popular fad at some point. Maybe it was done for a practical reason. But even when split-wedged rocks could have been made without much effort, I look at some and wonder: what kind of impulse led a person to do that? Sometimes they are quite aesthetic:  Other times they seem like distinct structures with a specific purpose.   Split-wedged rocks do not appear everywhere in the woods. There are places where the rocks have lots of splits and no wedges (for example in Falmouth on the Cape) and other places where there are lots of splits and lots of wedges. Sometimes they seem to be done compulsively in a certain area, following a principle like "no split goes un-wedged". For example, if you are driving north on Rt 3, as you pass under Rangeway Road in Billerica there are a half-dozen or so split-wedged rocks in the woods on either side. Somehow, there, most of the split rocks got wedged - as if it was important to someone.    One thing is certain: the wedging of rocks is widespread in the woods north of the Concord River. I have looked and found very few of them south of the Concord river. This could be a matter of not looking hard enough, though I have tried to explore conservation lands, state, and some private property, in all the towns surrounding Concord Mass. Split-wedged rocks are common in Acton, Carlisle, and Billerica, and in northern Concord, but they are rare in southern Concord, Bedford, Lincoln, Lexington, Sudbury, Weston, etc. I have looked but only found one on the Cape, and did not see any on a visit to western Mass. Looking further afield: there are some split-wedged rocks at Madison Springs in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, between Mount Adams and Mount Madison. When it comes to a split-wedged rock above tree-line in the mountains, we have something which is neither casual nor practical. So what is it?  It is worth entertaining the possibility that these are not casual items but, at least sometimes, were built with effort and for a reason at specific locations. I cannot imagine a colonial farmer, or anyone else leading a purely practical life, taking the time to go wandering systematically though the woods wedging rocks. Nor would casual creation of split-wedged rocks have resulted in them being concentrated in certain locations and not in others - why are there more of them north of the river than south of the river? Why, in some places, does there seem to be something compulsive going on, something almost ceremonial? And this leads to speculating about the Indians. The Indians did live around here, they did work with stone, and they did pursue ceremonial activities involving the natural landscape. Also they might have been limited by natural territorial boundaries such as rivers. The Indians are good candidates for who, besides casual walkers or practical landworkers, could have created these "works of man."    If split-wedged rocks were made by Indians, what could have been the reason for it? The article I mentioned provides a clue but one speculates in different directions. Several people have come up with this explanation: that the wedge represents an insemination of mother earth, as represented by the split. The association with springs, water, and fertility makes this plausible; and some examples certainly provoke that thought. 
 In any case, split-wedged rocks are a real phenomenon, possibly with multiple "causes". They are not all ancient, and a lot of time the split is not natural and is, itself, the "works of man". Here is an example where the split was made using a steel drill, and then a thin wedge of rock was inserted. Perhaps it was not the same person who split the rock and who wedged the split. The drill work on the rock looks like standard colonial rock splitting. A large fragment has already been split off and a nice piece of granite has been removed. But then someone took the time to insert a thin wedge. In this case maybe there was a practical function for the wedge and they just left off work before it was completed.  Like detectives who try to reconstruct the details of an event, it is fun to look at a split-wedged rock and try to imagine a scenario. Is the split natural? Was any rock removed? Could the wedge have been used as part of a process for splitting the rock? Is the wedge a different kind of rock? How much strength would have been required? Could it have occurred naturally? Next time you go walking in the woods, keep an eye out for split rocks. When I see a split rock, I always go up to it and look inside - will it have a wedge? Ah! Peekaboo! There it is.  Art Credits: All photos ©Peter Waksman; background by Word of Mouth Web Design.
|
