{"id":208264,"date":"2024-01-03T07:15:59","date_gmt":"2024-01-03T12:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=208264"},"modified":"2023-12-27T11:32:14","modified_gmt":"2023-12-27T16:32:14","slug":"new-england-stone-walls-deserve-a-science-of-their-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2024\/01\/new-england-stone-walls-deserve-a-science-of-their-own\/","title":{"rendered":"New England Stone Walls Deserve a Science of Their Own"},"content":{"rendered":"

The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as\u00a0iconic to the region<\/a>\u00a0as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere \u2013 a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges separating a patchwork of otherwise moist soils.<\/p>\n

Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That\u2019s due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels.<\/p>\n

Nearly all were built by European settlers and their draft animals, who scuttled glacial stones from agricultural fields and pastures outward to fencelines and boundaries, then tossed or stacked them as lines. Though the\u00a0oldest walls<\/a>\u00a0date to 1607, most were built in the agrarian century between the American Revolution and the cultural shift toward cities and industry after the Civil War.<\/p>\n

The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the mind \u2013 an estimated\u00a0240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers)<\/a>\u00a0of barricades, most stacked thigh-high and similarly wide. That\u2019s long enough to wrap our planet 10 times at the equator, or to reach the Moon on its closest approach to Earth<\/p>\n

Natural scientists have been working to quantify this phenomenon, which is larger in volume than the Great Wall of China, Hadrian\u2019s Wall in Britain and the Egyptian pyramids at Giza combined. This work began in 1870 and generated the U.S. government\u2019s 1872\u00a0Census of Fences<\/a>. Today, scientists are using\u00a0a technique called LiDAR<\/a>, or light detection and ranging, to\u00a0measure and map<\/a>\u00a0stone walls across New England.<\/p>\n

Being\u00a0a geologist<\/a>, I\u2019m interested in walls as landforms that are distinctive to the region, created during the lead-up to the\u00a0Anthropocene<\/a>\u00a0epoch \u2013 a time when human agency dominates all others. I\u2019ve written about the\u00a0history of stone walls<\/a>\u00a0and how to\u00a0interpret them in the field<\/a>, and developed the\u00a0Stone Wall Initiative<\/a>\u00a0to draw public attention to their importance in New England. Now, I\u2019m working with students and colleagues to develop a formal interdisciplinary science of stone walls that will help researchers understand and preserve them.<\/p>\n

Dens and pathways<\/strong><\/p>\n

My brother-in-law enjoys his backyard wall in Lee, New Hampshire, mainly for its aesthetic, historic and literary ambiance. The wild things living in his neighborhood depend on it as unique habitat.<\/p>\n

To lichens and moss, the wall\u2019s dry stones are surfaces where plants can\u2019t compete. For plants, such walls are edges that separate patches of ground into zones that are sunny or shady, windward or leeward, uphill or downhill, wetter or drier. Stone walls offer small mammals porous volumes in which to live their furtive lives. Predators use the walls as hunting blinds and travel corridors.<\/p>\n

Just for fun, my brother-in-law installed a motion-activated, infrared video camera on his backyard wall to see who was using the wall and how. On June 21, 2023, the summer solstice, he\u00a0filmed a bobcat (Lynx rufus<\/em>)<\/a>\u00a0hiding behind it and then using it as an elevated pathway.<\/p>\n

The more we researchers learn about New England\u2019s abandoned stone walls, the more we realize that they transcend and obliterate the narrow treatments of our scholarly disciplines. These archaeological artifacts are so ubiquitous that they have become a geological landform that in turn creates a novel ecological habitat. These walls also are literary icons, historic sites and spiritual oracles, as Robert Frost recognized when he penned \u201cMending Wall<\/a>,\u201d on an\u00a0old farm<\/a>\u00a0in Derry, New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

But despite their importance, never have the stone walls of New England been technically defined, classified and given a common terminology in a peer-reviewed journal. They fell, it seems, through disciplinary cracks.<\/p>\n

My initial step toward changing this situation was writing a mini-monograph in 2003 for the journal Historical Archaeology on the \u201cTaxonomy and Nomenclature for the Stone Domain in New England<\/a>.\u201d Its goal is to coalesce the study of these stone walls into an interdisciplinary science by following the precedents of other disciplines \u2013 most notably, the 18th-century\u00a0Linnaean taxonomy<\/a>\u00a0that biologists still use today. Here\u2019s how that approach works:<\/p>\n

Defining and classifying<\/strong><\/p>\n

Understanding the stone walls of greater New England scientifically requires starting with a technical definition that is based on field criteria rather than tradition or inference. There are many kinds of historical stone features \u2013 waste piles, cairns, scatters, lines, kilns, gravestones, cobbles, patios and more. The goal is to isolate walls as a set of objects within this larger domain.<\/p>\n

For example, a definition can require that each wall be composed of stone; composed of particles, rather than one enormous slab; continuous; elongated; and sufficiently high. Without such explicit criteria, one person\u2019s wall is another\u2019s elongated pile, and one person\u2019s waste heap is another\u2019s\u00a0sacred site<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s nice when descriptions and classifications can be loose and flexible, as with genres of music, styles of fashion, and disciplines within academia. These are typologies, bins, pigeonholes. But to make scientific sense of the world, researchers need to convert descriptions into precise definitions and use them in binary, rule-driven classifications.\u00a0These are taxonomies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Every field of science requires its own language. Chemists group\u00a0elements with similar properties<\/a>, like halogens and noble gases. Biologists divide life forms into\u00a0domains, kingdoms, phyla and smaller groups<\/a>\u00a0with shared characteristics.<\/p>\n

Terms in stone wall science involve the size, shape, composition, source and arrangement of stones; the vertical and horizontal structures of tiers, courses and terminations; and their topographic settings on the landscape.<\/p>\n

Stone wall classification begins with the stone domain \u2013 the entire constellation of historical stone objects. From there, we carve out a distinct class of stone walls that\u2019s separate from other rock assemblies, like concentrations and lines, as well as notable individual stones, like\u00a0Plymouth Rock<\/a>. Then, using diagnostic criteria, we divide the class walls into five families \u2013 free-standing, flanking, supporting, enclosing and blocking \u2013 and break them down further into types, subtypes and variants within\u00a0a new taxonomy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What stone walls can tell us<\/strong><\/p>\n

At this stage, my students, colleagues and I are just beginning to pair stone wall science with LiDAR techniques at the scale of villages. Tantalizing spatial patterns are emerging.<\/p>\n

Different types of walls occur in predictable arrangements. For example, we commonly find well-built double walls near cellar holes, with simpler single walls at further distance and waste piles beyond those. Such patterns provide an independent source of primary documentary evidence that researchers can use to interpret past cultural behaviors, above and beyond the written documents of history and the\u00a0much smaller artifacts<\/a>\u00a0of excavation-based archaeology.<\/p>\n

Such spatial patterns can also be used for ecological interpretations. For example, a bobcat is more likely to hunt along a normal single wall than other subtypes because it has the required stability and height to support the cat and sufficient void space for prey to live in.<\/p>\n

These structures \u2013 these elevated drylands \u2013 are in some ways analogous to the region\u2019s wetlands, which also are landforms that farmers created or\u00a0significantly modified<\/a>\u00a0as they settled the land in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, since the 1990s, wetlands have earned a\u00a0robust science<\/a>, a solid\u00a0legal framework<\/a>\u00a0and excellent\u00a0management protocols<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In my view, the time has come to do the same for New England\u2019s stone walls. These dryland structures are so ubiquitous, massive and unique relative to other habitats that it\u2019s high time for natural scientists to give them the respect they deserve.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Originally published in The Conversation.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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