Stone Walls - An Investigation Part One

I love old walls. No matter where I see them, I always look at them and wonder who built them and why. I never thought there’d be so much controversy over them. 

When I first started studying them (very informally), it wasn’t long before I realized there are two schools of thought regarding their origins. The first group consists of scientists, archaeologists, historians, etc, who believe that all walls were built by European settlers who lived here post 1620, most of them being built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were built by farmers who used stones plowed out of the ground when fields were cultivated. Just be sure you don’t share any other theories about who or when they were built with this group. 

The other group consists of the rest of us who believe that not all walls were built by European farmers after they arrived. We keep an open mind about the walls, their origins, purpose, and builders. We like to think out of the box. Many of us are amateurs who do this because we love the outdoors, history, and learning. We also believe science is all about learning and proving or disproving theories, not just dismissing alternative theories because they don’t fit the official narrative. 

When I first started exploring in the woods, I didn’t know a lot about walls and other stone structures, so I decided to educate myself. The first thing I learned was that for many years (about 300), we've been taught certain things about history that have been proven to be untrue. In the case of stone structures, it’s that Native Americans never built anything from stone. In addition, there are all the other lies we’ve been told about Native Americans that we won’t get into here. 

I’ve been looking at these walls, and they are all quite interesting. Although similar, no two are exactly the same. In the next few posts, I’ll examine some of them in more detail and see what we can learn about them.