“Taxonomy and Nomenclature for the Stone Domain in New England”, 2023-09-21 ():
The European settlement of rural New England created an agro-ecosystem of fenced fields and pastures linked to human settlements and hydropowered village industry. The most salient archaeological result was the “stone domain”, a massive, sprawling constellation of stone features surviving as mainly undocumented ruins within reforested, closed-canopy woodlands.
We present a rigorous taxonomy for this stone domain based on objective field criteria that is rendered user-friendly by correlating it to vernacular typologies and functional interpretations. The domain’s most salient class of features are dry stone walls, here defined as objects meeting 5 inclusive criteria: material, granularity, elongation, continuity, and height. We also offer a nomenclature and descriptive protocol for archaeological field documentation of wall stones (size, shape, arrangement, lithology) and wall structures (courses, lines, tiers, segments, contacts, terminations, and junctions).
Our methodological tools complement recent computationally intensive mapping tools of light ranging and detection (LiDAR), drone-imaging, and machine learning.