Indians 201: Sacred places in New England

The cultural landscape of American Indians is filled with sacred sites which are described in their oral traditions. There are two basic kinds of sacred sites: (1) those which are sacred because of human acts of consecration, dedication, and ritual practice, and (2) those which are intrinsically holy, places which are endowed with great spiritual power. Very little is known about places which were sacred to the native people of the New England tribes prior to the arrival of the Europeans. What is known comes in part from the fragments of oral tradition which have been recorded, from the early European journals, and from the archaeological record.

Sacrifice Rocks

The European journals talk about “sacrifice rocks” which held spiritual importance for the Indians. Two of these were on the side of the road between Plymouth and Sandwich in Massachusetts. One of them is described as being six feet high while the other is about four feet high and both are ten to twelve feet in length. The stones were traditionally covered with offerings of wood and stone. Writing in 1762, Ezra Stiles reports:

“The Indians being asked the reason of their Custom & Practice, say they know nothing about it, only that their Fathers & their Grandfathers & their Great Grandfathers did so, and charged all their Children to do so; and that if they did not cast a Stone or piece of Wood on that Stone as often as they passed by it, they would not prosper, & particularly should not be lucky in hunting deer.”

Mounds of brush and stone were built to mark scenes of tragedy and/or places where warriors were killed. As people passed by these mounds, they would add stones and branches to them. There are several thousand of these mounds in New England.

An arrangement of rocks, called hobbomak, was done in an area which was felt to have particularly strong spiritual power. In her book Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat, Paula Gunn Allen writes:

“These fields, or vortexes (or vortices), as they are sometimes referred to, enabled a seeker who was properly instructed to gain information in ways that some might call paranormal.”

These appear to have been similar to the vision quest sites in other areas. Paula Gunn Allen also writes:

“Hobbomaks, many of which still exist today, were scattered all along the Atlantic seaboard from Nova Scotia to South Carolina and were so potent that Oral Tradition cautioned avoidance except under certain conditions; it was believed that a misguided visit to a hobbomak could cause harm to the untrained seeker and to the flow of the magnetic currents that held the environment in balance.”

Stone Circles and Chambers

Part of the sacred Native American landscape in New England is formed with stones: single standing stones, rows of stones, stone circles, and stone chambers. These are often invisible to non-Indians as many are convinced that Indians were not advanced enough to work with stone. With a stereotype of Indians as nomads firmly implanted in their minds by education and the mass media, many non-Indians do not realize that Indians in New England lived in permanent villages and often built their sacred landscape out of stone.

We know relatively little today about the use and meaning of specific sites, and we are just beginning to understand that there may be a connection between the various sites. Some of the sites appear to have been observatories, oriented toward solar events (such as the solstices), lunar events (full moons and lunar maximums), and stellar events.

Of particular interest are the Native American chambers in New England. These chambers were built from stone using a corbelling system for the roof. They were often covered with earth and thus, several centuries later, appear to be natural caves. We don’t know what kinds of ceremonies were performed in these, but several have an orientation toward the summer solstice and thus may have had an astronomical function. More than 300 stone chambers have been identified in New England and of these 105 have been determined to have astronomical orientations.

The Morse Hill Chamber in Worcester County, Massachusetts has an eight-foot passageway. The chamber is interesting in that it is built off at an angle from the passageway.

The chamber at Upton, Massachusetts has a passageway about twenty feet long which leads into a circular chamber with a corbelled vault which is about twelve feet in diameter and eleven feet high. A single large stone weighing several tons caps the roof. Recent renovations at the chamber have shown that no metal tools were used in working the stones. The lintel stone over the entrance was very carefully fitted to the stones on either side.

Another feature in the sacred landscape of New England are the standing stones which often have a shape resembling the upper human torso and head. In their book Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England’s Native Civilizations, James Mavor, Jr., and Byron Dix describe these features:

“Some are tall obelisks, others slabs in stone rows that are wider than high called orthostates, anthropomorphized stones called god or manitou stones, and memorial stones of all shapes.”

The standing stones are set upright in the ground or they are supported by other stones. These standing stones are often found near other features, such as stone rows, mounds, and chambers.

Queen’s Fort in Rhode Island is a site composed of stone rows laid out in a solar alignment which appears to have been used for solar observation and communication with the manitous.

There are sacred enclosures of earth and stone at many New England sites:

New Hampshire: Sanbornton, Shantok, Gungywamp, North Salem
Connecticut: Uncas, East Thompson
Vermont: Turnbridge, Peperell, South Woodstock, Putney
Massachusetts: Franklin, Heath, Upton, Harvard, Boxborough, Freetown, Falmouth
Rhode Island: Ninigret

Natural Features

There are many natural features which are considered sacred because they are important in tribal mythologies or because they were the site of historic events.

Katahdin, a mountain in Maine, is the greatest and most sacred mountain of the Wabanaki. It is from this site that the Penobscot culture hero Glooskap dispensed the deer and the moose which made it possible for the people to make it through the winter.

Mount Tom, Connecticut, is known to the Indians as Machemoodus. This was a sacred area to the Pequot, Mohegan, and Narragansett. Crackling and rumbling noises characterize the area and thus it is felt to be the home of Hobbomock.

East Rock, Connecticut, known as Wappintumpsc, is the home of Hobbomock, the Quinnipiac Culture Hero and Stone-Giant, where he and his twin Maushop dwelled until the fatal flood that took Maushop’s life.

West Rock, Connecticut, known as Mautumpsc, is where Maushop was buried.

Sleeping Giant, known as Koueonk Mogosketemp, is considered to be the sleeping body of Hobbomock.

Rock Art

The powwows (spiritual leaders) would often record their visions in pictographic form on rocks. The sites chosen for these pictographs—rocky cliffs, boulders, outcroppings—were places which had sacred significance. These were often places associated with specific spiritual beings and their emergence from either the sky world or the underworld. The rock art includes both pictographs (paintings on rock) and petroglyphs (images carved, etched, or pecked into the rock).

Many of the rock art images at Solon, Maine have sexual connotations, including ithyphallic males, sexually receptive females, and images of both male and female genitalia. One of the phalli has wings. Native Americans tended to view sex, sexuality, and nudity as natural and therefore these were not excluded from their spirituality. There are also many non-sexual images, including 15 birds.

The petroglyphs at Dighton Rock, Massachusetts, were noted by the early English settlers and illustrations of them were sent to the British Museum. Some seventeenth-century scholars were convinced that the markings were actually Phoenician writing. The images on the rock feature meandering lines, round-headed anthropomorphs, turkey and animal tracks, and footprints.