by Alison Mitchell, Co-Executive Director, New Jersey Conservation Foundation
If you’ve never been to an indigenous ceremonial stone landscape, think of it as an outdoor church. But don’t expect a steeple or pews. And don’t think of those who worship there as parishioners.
Ceremonial stone landscapes are not cairns, exactly. Nor are they sculptures or effigies, stone rows or rock shelters. But they often have elements of all of those things. They can also be overlooked, easily, by those who don’t know they exist.
Walls and rock piles of unusual construction were sometimes built by Native Americans centuries ago generally for one of two reasons, according to Michaeline Picaro Mann, a member of the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, who goes by Mikie. Some formations were built for practicality – as trail markers for people to follow on searches for medicinal plants or water or fish, she said. Those built purely for spiritual reasons have roots in Native Americans’ reverence for nature.
Mann and her tribe consider trees and rocks keepers of wisdom.
“Basically we view the stones as our grandmothers and grandfathers,” she said. “They have been here before us, so we treat them with great respect. We believe they hold knowledge and information they’ve absorbed over the years.”
“When we’re walking through the woods of northern New Jersey hiking and exploring, we see all sorts of things like stone walls that appear to be in the middle of the forest or piles of rocks that seem to be oddly placed,” said Martin Rapp, a stewardship team member at New Jersey Conservation Foundation.
Rapp took an interest in ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs) in the mid-2010s. He has made a passion of identifying them using LiDar mapping for tribes, including Mann’s, so they can be protected. Most people would not know that unusual rock features may have been intentionally placed by Native Americans.
“We’ll likely say to ourselves, well, some farmer did that a long time ago when there were no trees here,” Rapp explained.
Mann notes that drawing attention to specific sacred stone features can be problematic.
“When we educate people, we’re also bringing awareness,” she said. Awareness leads to curiosity, which often leads to investigation. And investigation, in her experience, has been harmful for the formations wherever they are found, from Sussex County, where she lives, to Lambertville, in Hunterdon County.
According to Mann, Native Americans view stone as a vehicle for receiving and transmitting prayer, and every stone in CSLs small and large was added by someone with sacred intention.
Visitors who mistake the formations for historic walls built by colonists — a common misconception, according to Mann— or, worse, random piles, may interfere with those sacred intentions. According to Mann, activities that might seem innocuous, like moving stones or even photographing them, can break the continuity of prayers made generations ago. “The web gets broken,” Mann said. She sometimes asks social media accounts that post photos of CSLs to confer with local Native Americans about the discovery. And she urges people not to publicly reveal the locations.
“The stones are there for the welfare of our planet, for the soil, the trees, the water, the animals,” she said. “When people disrupt them, they don’t realize how detrimental it is to us and to our ancestors.”
Sometimes, the damage is intentional. Spray paint and broken beer bottles have desecrated Split Rock, a formation considered to be a CSL by the Turtle Clan, in Mahwah, Mann said. Other sites, in strongholds like Warren County, have been changed or demolished by agriculture and development. But a few formations identified as CSLs by the Ramapough Lenape Nation are protected. Tripod Rock in the Pyramid Mountain Natural Historic Area in Morris County, for example, is on land New Jersey Conservation Foundation helped to preserve.
Because it is a widely visited site, that protection matters. Tripod Rock presents as a truck-sized boulder perched on three smaller rocks about the size of car tires. Within a few dozen feet are two smaller boulders, side by side, both also perched on three smaller rocks. On the summer solstice, according to the New England Antiquities Research Association, the setting sun is said to align directly between these two smaller perched boulders. Not everyone ascribes spiritual significance to the structure, or any CSL. Tripod Rock, for example, is more generally considered to be the result of glacial deposition during the last ice age. But to those who do, this alignment is no coincidence.
Ceremonial stone landscapes have gotten more attention in national and local press in recent years, an outgrowth of a still developing sense of acceptance that indigenous people created stone formations and that they are distinct from the fences made by early white inhabitants.
“Few people are aware of, or trained to look for, CSLs,” Rapp said. “Because we don’t recognize their importance, they’re still being threatened and lost.”
Modern society does a lot of rearranging of the landscape and we often don’t stop to think if we are changing a cultural feature through that disruption — or alternatively disrupting an interesting geological feature that traces our natural history.
The next time you come upon stone features in the landscape when out walking in the woods, consider that there may be more than meets the eye. You may be looking at an historic farm fence, but you could be gazing upon a unique natural formation or a ceremonial stone landscape. Regardless, resist the temptation to leave a mark!
To find out more about the Ramapough Culture and Land Foundation, go to https://ramapough.org/.
To contact Martin Rapp about potential CSL sightings in New Jersey, email him at martin.rapp@njconservation.org,
To learn more about preserving New Jersey’s land and natural resources, visit the New Jersey Conservation Foundation website at https://www.njconservation.org or contact me at info@njconservation.org.
