Spring 2025 Conference May 2 -4 in Fishkill NY. Click for details.
Observant visitors to America's northeastern forests have long encountered various stone structures. These include rock piles, stone chambers, unusual stone walls and circles, propped boulders, standing stones, petroglyphs, and stone or earthen mounds. NEARA was founded in 1964 to promote research into the origins and functions of these structures and sites, to document them and encourage their protection and preservation. Volunteers participate in the search for new sites and enjoy the challenge of better understanding them through the lenses of history, archaeology, anthropology and geology, as well as fields such as archaeoastronomy, deed research, and epigraphy.
Our semiannual meetings provide an opportunity for sharing research on a wide array of subjects, from the early peopling of the Americas, diffusion of cultural features across oceans in antiquity, Native American traditions, to the colonial period. Mythology, astronomy, comparative religion, agricultural practices, landscape studies and remote sensing are all areas we have explored. Our meetings and publications offer a forum for studying these diverse subjects, in an effort to better understand our region and its global context.
What do NEARA Members do? Find out here: NEARA Membership
The next NEARA conference will be May 2nd to May 4th in Fishkill New York. Details are on the 2025 Conference page.
A recent Facebook post by Mike Luoma implied that NEARA “tolerates Neo-Nazis”. This assertion was made in reaction to a field trip announcement that referenced a magazine article for the purpose of debunking the claims made in that article. Because the magazine cited was edited by someone known to be a Neo-Nazi, Mike Luoma accused NEARA of tolerating Neo-Nazis.
NEARA does not condone or tolerate behavior that is supportive of Neo-Nazi, white supremacist, or racist views. At no time did any member of the NEARA Board of Directors endorse the views of Francis Joseph Collin.
In fact the private email to NEARA members that referenced a decades-old article in Collin’s magazine was there for the explicit purpose of debunking the claim made there that a site was a 5th Century church. NEARA believes that it is important to examine the evidence behind claims made about old stone structures. In this case, the field trip will actually show the evidence contradicting those claims. We believe that the best way to counter false claims is to hold them up to the light.
The recorded presentations are now on our YouTube channel, and are listed on the Fall 2024 conference page.
Thanks go to Robin Hoffman for editing the videos and Matt McLoughlin for publishing them.
James Mavor in 1978 discovered a historically significant unpublished manuscript by a famous shipwright, William Sutherland. We have scanned his photocopy of the manuscript. Read the story at: William Sutherland ca. 1725 unpublished manuscript.
Margaret Osha interviewed Norman Muller for a two-part article in The Herald about Vermont's stone features.
The database at SiteDB.org has been refreshed with many photos from the archives of the Early Sites Research Society (ESRS) and by Ed Lenik, with his gracious cooperation.
Alas we have fallen behind recording many of the sites that have been reported. If you want to help and have a background in organizing digital records, contact us at sites@neara.org.
Last summer we added a feature to filter the list of search results that you get, so that you can easily see a list of documents or photos in a particular state or county or town or containing a particular word in their title or file name.
If you have logged in before but don't have the password remembered in your browser, search for your last email from "donotreply@neara.org". Be sure to check your spam folder for any emails from neara.org (if you find any -- mark them as "not spam"). Only if all else fails, request access anew on the sitedb.org site.
You might also want to keep a bookmark to the "home" page, so that you don't have to log in each time. However for security reasons you will need to login again after a week.
This issue of NEARA's newsletter includes these articles:
NEARA members can receive the latest NEARA Transit newsletters electronically or in printed form. They can also read all issues ever published on SiteDB.org.
The Fall 2024 NEARA Conference was held at The Falls Event Center, in Manchester, New Hampshire, on the first weekend of November, the 1st to the 3rd. Details are on the Fall 2024 conference page.
Jim Hammond led a trip through Lincoln Woods State Park on a wonderful day.
Devon Toland led us on a pleasant walk in Northwoods Meadows State Park.
To learn about field trips near you, follow our NEARA Calendar or become a member to get our email announcements.
Suzen Blackstone led us to carved footprints in Washington County, to Rocking Rock in Greensboro, and to other features in Vermont.
To learn about field trips near you, follow our NEARA Calendar or become a member to get our email announcements.
Are you curious what books many NEARA members read? We now have a virtual book table where you can see lists of interesting books that you can purchase. If you know of some good books that other NEARA members might like to read, share them with us with an email to the NEARA Librarian.
As a member of NEARA you can also borrow books through our online catalog.
Robyn Field led a Stone Chambers hike in Putnam County New York.
To learn about field trips near you, follow our NEARA Calendar or become a member to get our email announcements.
Long ago NEARA members were able to communicate with each other in a private Yahoo Group. We would like to revive such a forum, this time as a private Google Group. If you are interested, membership is open to all members of NEARA in good standing.
Read about the details at The NEARA Forum.
This is another in a sequence of initiatives to provide more services and information to NEARA members, following introduction of The NEARA Calendar.
Chuck Drayton has graciously allowed NEARA to host and update his stone sites website. You can see it now at: Foxboro State Forest stone sites.
This rehosting is part of our continuing effort to preserve interesting websites and collections of documents. If you have a specialized website pertaining to stone structures that you would like to modernize and preserve for the future, contact us at webmaster@neara.org.
Stephen Carney has a number of videos on YouTube about these same sites: Stones and Stories.
To learn about field trips near you, follow our NEARA Calendar or become a member to get our email announcements.
We are in the process of making some changes to how NEARA is structured.
The NEARA Member Communications Committee includes not only the old Membership Committee, but also many other roles/groups that have substantial interactions with members. Unlike the Publications Committee, Member Communications subcommittees and roles will primarily communicate via the internet.
The First Vice President's many roles are now more explicitly spelled out, in the hopes of encouraging more people to help stage our conferences.
You can see how NEARA is organized from the point of view of a typical NEARA member at: NEARA Organization
Part 1 with Robyn Field
Part 2 with Rob Buchanan
This issue of NEARA's journal includes these articles:
NEARA members can receive the latest NEARA Journals electronically or in printed form. They can also read all older issues on SiteDB.org.
This is a recording of Kitty O'Riordan's PhD Dissertation Presentation at the University of Connecticut on November 10th 2023.
The title is
There was a Zoom webinar on Thursday August 24th. View the video:
By Jim Wilson
NEARA helped sponsor four community events in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley in mid-March: at the Lehigh Valley Watershed Conference in Bethlehem PA, and the Nature Nurture Center in Easton PA. In addition to NEARA's $1500 sponsorship, NEARA volunteers from PA, NJ, CT and RI helped plan and deliver these public programs and engaged with the many folks who stopped by NEARA's sponsorship table at each of the two venues where the four events were held on March 11-14. In total, about 300 people attended these four events and had access to NEARA's sponsorship table at all of them. Dozens of email addresses were collected and lots of NEARA literature were freely taken, including our spring conference registration materials.
NEARA's sponsorship helped pay expenses for speakers to attend the events and address constructed cultural landscapes, the use of archaeology for land conservation with Indigenous tribes, and present a film screening and roundtable discussion about the award winning documentary, "The Water Gap: Return to the Homeland". The film screening and roundtable was led by the Choctaw filmmaker and three young Delaware women, who were teenagers when the film was made in 2016.
The land conservation talk and the cultural landscapes program were presented by Dr. Julia King, Anthropology Chair, St. Mary's College of Maryland.
Jim Wilson presented two illustrated programs on constructed stone landscapes during these events, which were sponsored as in-kind contributions by Jim's employer, Northampton County Parks and Recreation.
Jim Wilson contributed an article to the Pennsylvania SHPO's annual report on archaeological site reporting activities. The article starts on page 14. Other interesting articles are in the document, too.
Pennsylvania Archaeological Site Survey 2022
We are in the midst of hosting the contents of Larry Harrop's old web site showing examples of different kinds of stone structures. You can see what we have so far at: Larry Harrop's web site.
Norman Muller has graciously agreed to let NEARA host all of his articles. Read them all here at Norman Muller's articles.
Want to contribute photos for our Photo Gallery? Send us a few really good photos that you have taken. Email them to sites@neara.org. Please include a short caption, including the county and state in which you took the photo, the date you took the photo, and the name you would like to include in the caption.
NEARA has joined PayPal's Giving Fund so that any money that you donate to NEARA will get to us without any fees subtracted. NEARA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization incorporated in New Hampshire, founded in 1964.
Please help us fund our research projects and preservation efforts and library and archives at: Make a donation.
This web site is hosted on GitHub at NEARA-web. If you know HTML and CSS, you can help us -- contact us at webmaster@neara.org.