Introduction
Stonewalls of New England are rich with history and archeologists are still trying to determine who may have built the first stonewalls or if our concept of when North America was first settled is wrong. Items of stone and metal lead archeologists to believe that the archaic period is when the Northern New England portion of America was first inhabited.
There have been many different types of fences built in New England, natural debris, wood, and stone included. Stemming from these different fence types American ingenuity flourished and inventions arose. Agriculture was a big part of the fencing of America; the cultural differences of the colonists and the Indians also played a big role in the ideas of fencing and laws. Stonewalls are important to our culture as not only North Americans but also as humankind in general.
Overview of the ancient history of New England
The Wisconsin continental ice sheet retreated about 15,000 BC, causing the climate to warm, sea level to rise, and the habitat was changed from tundra to spruce-lichen. The Pleistocene mammals (mastodons, mammoths, and caribou) were attracted to the new habitat, this caused the Paleo-Indians or Big Game hunters to arrive armed with Clovis fluted point projectiles (Salisbury, 1982).
Many sites have been found in New England that shows evidence of tool-making, ritualized inter-band exchanges and other non-hunting activities. By around 8,000 BC, the spruce-lichen forest was mostly replaced by pine and hardwoods, this evolved into other types of food causing the Paleo-Indian era to give way to the early archaic. In New England, early Archaic projectile points were found, these differ from the Paleo-Indian points because the archaic points are generally stemmed and notched for more effective specialized hunting (Salisbury, 1982).
Salvatore Trento tells of one point found in Monhegan, Maine:
A tiny arrowhead or possibly a small dagger was recovered from an excavation of a rubbish heap by the island archeologist. A C14 test of the organic material associated with the deposited metal artifact gave an approximate date of 1800 BC. During the summer of 1975, William Nisbet of the Early Sites Research Society submitted a tiny fragment of the artifact to a laboratory for analysis. The results were shocking. The seemingly insignificant arrowhead was composed of copper in tin. There are no tin deposits in either the eastern of middle states of America. The closest mines are in Bolivia, but these were not worked in 1500 BC.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Print.
Claimed land boundaries could only be distinguished from open range by the people that owned the claimed land for quite a while. This would obviously become controversial when one person claimed that they owned this land for so many years, and then another settler decides that they claimed the land first. The invention of barbed wire helped to end the disputes over land by defining claimed land boundaries with fences topped with the sharp, twisted wire. While the invention of fencing brought an end to the idea of an open range for cattle drivers and the romanticized cowboys of the West, it also helped farmers and ranchers define the area of their land. Before the invention of barbed wire, people were forced to use shrubs and other types of plants that could define their land—with the lack of trees on the open plains, it was hard to find raw material to create an actual fence to claim their land. Ba...
August Wilson’s Fences was centered on the life of Troy Maxson, an African American man full of bitterness towards the world because of the cards he was dealt in life amidst the 1950’s. In the play Troy was raised by an unloving and abusive father, when he wanted to become a Major League Baseball player he was rejected because of his race. Troy even served time in prison because he was impoverished and needed money so he robbed a bank and ended up killing a man. Troy’s life was anything but easy. In the play Troy and his son Cory were told to build a fence around their home by Rose. It is common knowledge that fences are used in one of two ways: to keep things outside or to keep things inside. In the same way that fences are used to keep things inside or outside Troy used the fence he was building to keep out death, his family, and his disappointments in life while Rose used the fence to keep those she cared about inside and help them bond.
When the Europeans first migrated to America, they didn’t know much about the ancestral background of the different types of the Indian tribes that were settled in Virginia and along the East Coast. Many of the Indian tribes became hostile towards the colonist because the colonists were interfering with their way of life. This lead the natives to attempt to destroy the frontier settlements. Many forts in this area were erected to protect the settlers and their families. One the historical land...
There are three parts in West’s book; the first part focuses on the sociological, ecological and economic relationships of the plains Indians, starting with the first establish culture of North America, the Clovis peoples. Going into extensive detail pertaining to early geology and ecology, West gives us a glimpse into what life on the early plains must have looked to early peoples. With vastly differing flora and fauna to what we know today, the early plains at the end of the first ice age, were a different place and lent itself to a diverse way of life. The Clovis peoples were accomplished hunters, focusing on the abundance of Pleistocene megafauna such as earlier, larger forms of bison. Though, little human remains were found, evidence of their s...
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Print.
The Kennewick man was a monumental find to further our understanding of the history of the migration patterns of the people that culture sees today. The Kennewick man being a 9200 to 9600 year old skeleton made him one of the oldest nearly whole skeletons found in North or South America. The Kennewick man was found on July 28th 1996 by two college students whose names were Will Thomas and Dave Deacy while they were walking along the Columbia River near Kennewick Washington trying to get a better view into the local hydroplane races (Chatters, 23). These college students stumbled upon something that has caused a series of serious debates that have lasted for over ten years. After the students fell upon “the rock with teeth” (Powell 2005:6) they took it to the local police forces that were in the area.
Although New England and the Chesapeake region were both settled largely by the people of English origin, by 1700 the regions had evolved into two distinct societies. The reasons for this distinct development were mostly based on the type on people from England who chose to settle in the two areas, and on the manner in which the areas were settled.
In 1753, the future first president of the United States, George Washington, was dispatched to Western Pennsylvania to deliver a message to the French soldiers stationed near Presque Isle. Only twenty-one years old, young Washington traveled north from Fort Duquesne through modern day Butler County. Although aware of the critical and dangerous nature of the mission, it is unlikely that that the young explorer was aware that he was traversing a land of physical features shaped by a 100,000 years of geological history (WTA, 2013).
5 Narratives of the Indian Wars 1675-1699, edited by Charles H. Lincoln, Ph.D: A World Wide Web Site Containing Information About the Biology, History, and Geology of New England's Largest River (http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/conn.river/), University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Wyden, Adrian. “The History of Wolves in Wisconsin.” State of Wisconsin/Department of Natural Resources. n.d. Web. 1 Mar. 2012.
In his essay, “The Indians’ Old World,” Neal Salisbury examined a recent shift in the telling of Native American history in North America. Until recently, much of American history, as it pertains to Native Americans; either focused on the decimation of their societies or excluded them completely from the discussion (Salisbury 25). Salisbury also contends that American history did not simply begin with the arrival of Europeans. This event was an episode of a long path towards America’s development (Salisbury 25). In pre-colonial America, Native Americans were not primitive savages, rather a developing people that possessed extraordinary skill in agriculture, hunting, and building and exhibited elaborate cultural and religious structures.
At the time when humans were learning to use spears constructed out of sticks and stones and the
Native Americans chose to live off the land such as animals and the trees for houses from the time of early civilization in the Americas to when Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic. In Thomas Morton’s writing he said “they gather poles in the woods and put eh great end of them in the ground, placing them in form of a circle.”
Back in the ice age there were no trees to go climbing in there were not two by fours to go make a deer stand with heck there was barely any wood to start and fire to get warm so there was none of our hunting. Back then they were nomads they would follow the herds of animals and would kill them and follow they never settled down they never learned about animals being in season like we do they didn’t know that during the winter birds would be gone and that deer would be around and that turkey were hibernating. So they would be following the birds as they left and would be making sure that they followed them enough that they could get food they would follow mammoths and get fur and food off of them. Then they wouldn’t have to move for a while so you see that everything that they wanted they had to go get, but they did have some weapons that we have today like back then they had the spear and other weapons that or tools that they mad...