Excavating the local libraries:

     About nine years ago, I began to suspect that many stone constructions I had been looking at might be of Native American origin. Looking in the local libraries for references to anything that even remotely suggested stone constructions made by Native People along the Housatonic River system, I long ago came across this paragraph by the Reverend Samuel Orcutt. He quotes Mr. J.H. Trumbull in "Indian Names," and inserts it into his chapter "History of Stratford," contained in "A History of Bridgeport" written in 1889:
    "In June, 1727, a highway was recorded as lying " upon Pissepunk hill; and about 1710, John Pickett had laid to him 'lying on the southwesterly side of Pissepunk brook.' " Pissepunk is an Indian name. " It doubtless came from an Indian 'hot house,' somewhere on or near this hill. 'This hot house is a kind of little cell or cave, six or eight feet over, round, made on the side of a hill, commonly by some rivulet or brook; into this frequently the men enter after they have exceedingly heated it with store of wood, laid upon an heap of stones in the middle."
       To me, it sounded like a description of a stone construction buried somewhere under all those quotation marks. I wondered if I could find something similar thirty miles upriver in the area of my town my family lives in, still known by it's Native Place Name, "The Fresh Water Fishing Place in the Middle." I knew the term "Indian hot house" was interchangeable with "Sweat Lodge," and I was pretty certain that the People who lived at the Fresh Water Fishing Place used sweat lodges to keep clean and healthy in the colder months of the year. Of course, there's a great assumption that the only type of sweat lodge used in Native America north of Mexico was a wigwam-like structure covered with hides or mats. I wondered if that assumption was correct.
      I have a few of my brother's old Anthropology textbooks. In one of them, Driver's "Indian's of North America," under the heading of Sweathouses, in chapter eight on "Housing and Architecture," the author describes two types of such constructions, as well as two methods of "sweating inducement:" direct fire and water vapor produced by pouring water on hot stones.
     Direct-fire sweathouses in Alaska were subterranean earth covered log houses with a tunnel entrance, much like dwellings were constructed. He then states that the "direct-fire sweathouses of California are surprisingly similar." He details a daily sweat as a group affair, to "feel good."
      Water Vapor sweathouses, although sometimes of a permanent nature, were usually the small, domed pole and hide, bark or mat covered structures, used for sacred purposes of healing and purification. However, he ends the section by saying, "Among the Delaware, each village apparently had an earth-covered sweathouse entered through a hole in the roof, and a crier invited the entire populace to come and sweat." Driver never says whether or not he finds that similarity much of a surprise.
     To some people this invites a mental picture of a kiva-like structure. Mavor and Dix in "Manitou: the Sacred Landscape of New England's Native Civilization," compare photographs of New England's numerous mysterious "stone chambers" to (multi-purpose) Hopi Kivas and Hopewellian burial chambers, as well as a brief mention of chambers built by Archaic Maritime People of Labrador. They go into detail about the similarities in construction methods through out the book. Photos of some of these chambers can be found in the Neara on-line photo gallery, as well in "Manitou." (click here to go to NEARA photos)

     Looking for the earliest of New England observations on Native American People, I came across "What Cheer, Netop?" It is a booklet of selections from the 1643 book entitled "A Key into the Language of America" by Roger Williams, translated and edited by Hadassah Davis in 1986 for the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. On pg. 35, under the heading "The Sweatlodge," I found Williams wrote of the "Pe'suponck / sweatlodge." Once again it is described as "a kind of cave or cell, built on the side of a hill. It is six or eight feet across, and usually situated near a stream. It is prepared for use by building a fire on top of a pile of stones. When the stones are heated through, they put the fire out, while the stones continue to hold their heat. At this point between ten and twenty men enter the lodge, having left all their clothes at the door, with one person to guard them. They then sit around these hot stones for an hour or more, taking tobacco, talking and sweating together. Their sweating has two benefits; it cleanses the skin and it cures some diseases. When they come out of the sweathouse, summer or winter, they plunge into the stream to cool off. Though it seems amazing, they do not seem to suffer from the sharp change in temperature."
     Davis adds below the translation: "Sweat lodges were used by several groups of Indians, among them the Nipmucks of Massachusettts. They built ceremonial stone sweat lodges, called pesu-poncks, that were used for purification rituals: and many of these chambers can be found near Nipmuck villages (Nipmuck Indian Council of Chaubunagunamaug)."

Besides those references from what became Rhode Island and Massachusetts, Schagticoke Elder Trudie Lamb Richmond makes many references to the use of sweat lodges in her lectures and writings about the surviving Native American People at her reservation on the Housatonic River near Kent, CT. She makes it clear that the sweat lodge was and continues to be to be a very important part of Native American Culture in Western Connecticut. In "Enduring Traditions," edited by Laurie Weinstein in 1994, she writes of the clan leader Mauwe or Hungry Bear's skills at canoe making and the building of sweat lodges. From detailed Moravian diaries kept at Schagticoke, she adds "that although many Schagticokes converted to the Moravian faith, periodically they announced they would be absent from vespers on a given evening because they would be going to the sweat lodge."
     Elsewhere in CT, Mohegan Elder Gladys Tantaquidgeon, in "Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related Algonkian Indians," also writes of the familiar sapling and hide or mat covered sweatlodge. As a footnote, she adds Moravian missionary John Heckewelder's observations of a "sweat-oven.... generally at some great distance from an Indian village...the women have their separate oven in a different direction.... The Men generally sweat themselves once and sometimes twice a week... the publick cryer going his rounds, calls out Pimook! 'Go to sweat!'"
      Heckewelder's choice of the word "oven"- the same word that Orcutt and Williams used - is interesting to me. Europeans used concepts familiar to them to describe the new and different things they found in the "New World." Caves, cells, and ovens all bring to mind stone (or bricks as in a Dutch Oven) rather than a wood and hide construction. "Rude huts," "hide tents," and "domed bark houses" are usually the descriptions applied to the dwelling structures we know as "wigwams." With that in mind I include these two definitions:
ov·en (ùv¹en) noun
A chamber or enclosed compartment for heating, baking, or roasting food, as in a stove, or for firing, baking, hardening, or drying objects, as in a kiln. [Middle English, from Old English ofen.]
Dutch oven noun
1. A large, heavy pot or kettle, usually of cast iron and with a tight lid, used for slow cooking.
2. 2. A metal utensil open on one side and equipped with shelves, placed before an open fire for
baking or roasting food.
3. A wall oven in which food is baked by means of preheated brick walls.

Observations at "The Indian Cave"

In the spring of 1996, I was shown what is known locally as the "Indian Cave." It's a little over two miles up river from the floodplains that were the cornfields used by a band of local Native Americans whom local history documents as living there between 1659 and the early 1700's. A tributary branch of the river that flows through the floodplain cuts through a large outcrop of bedrock creating a zigzag ravine shadowed by hemlocks. Boulders in the stream create many pools, the largest of which was right below "Indian Cave," before an intense summer thunderstorm caused flooding that filled the pool with stones and debris. I tended to think of it as "Plunge Pool" since I could easily imagine people leaving the Pissepunk and jumping into this pool. The "cave" is on the west bank, about six feet above the brook. It bears some resemblance to an overhanging glacial cave, perhaps a very small "rockshelter" in the approximately forty-foot almost vertical rock face. There are no marks of any metal stone cutting tools or drills but I think it possible that it may have been quarried to its present size. From the brook to the floor of the "cave" there appears to be rows of stone piled and chinked with clay deep within this sort of "retaining wall" just beyond the drip line of the overhang. The deep pool below the "cave" seems filled with stones that fell from the wall over time, as if the "cave" itself was walled at one time.(xxx: caveside)
    I don't think the cave was a direct fire sweatlodge. I can imagine that up in these "sheltered vallies" were lots of people who didn't travel too far in the winter from the Fresh Water Fishing Place in the Middle (There's a modern earth-sheltered house very close by, cliff dwelling inspired). I can imagine a Sacred Path from Pissepunk to a fire, kept going all winter perhaps, to keep the chamber hot. I think it would take a long time to heat up the whole stone thing, but it would also hold the heat along time too.

Comparison Diagram

    A small sapling and whatever you use for a cover Lakota Inipi gets hot quickly. The first time water is poured on the first eight red-hot stones to create steam it certainly feels hot. But it's nothing compared to when the Fire-keeper walks the Path from Fire to lodge, adds the last four stones, and water is poured on those. Imagine that process being repeated over and over as the stone "cover" of the sweatlodge absorbs and retains that heat.

     Mention of the use of clay in the materials covering a sweatlodge is made in "Native American Sweat Lodge" by Joseph Bruchac. He quotes Pieter De Vries writing in early 1600's:
    "When they wish to cleanse themselves of their foulness, they go in the autumn, when it begins to get cold, to make, away off, near a running brook, a small oven, large enough for three or four men to lie in it. In making it they first take twigs of trees, and then cover them tight with clay, so that smoke cannot escape. This being done, they take a parcel of stones, which they heat in a fire, and then put in the oven, and when they think it is sufficiently hot, take the stones out again and go and lie in it, men and women, boys and girls, and come out perspiring, that every hair has a drop of sweat on it. In this state they plunge into the cold water; saying that it is healthy, but I let it's healthfulness pass; then they become entirely clean, and are more attractive than before."

More Pissepunks & Ovens

     I found a few more mentions of the word "Pissepunk" in different sorts of  "CT Place Names," such as this definition: "Pissepunk-Indian - i.e. Hothouse Swamp. Pishponk. (from the) Narra. pesuppau-og, "they are sweating." (Huden). Huden also writes of a place name in Old Lyme, listing it as "Pissepunk, East of Smith Neck; (Eastern Conn.), i.e. Hothouse Swamp.
      Anglicization of the word "Pissepunk" can sometimes change it to something entirely different, like this one I saw documented somewhere: "Once known as Pissepunk Brook, it is now called Skunk Brook," which you can see is a quite different smelling - I mean spelling - of the word.
Here are a couple more words in different Algonkian based dialects that I came across in various places and found interesting:

ahquanahaganoc: sweatbath (Abnaki)
Asnacancomic (-comet): at the long stone house (Nipmuck)
 Also: Assinek, Assunoc (hussunek): "Stone place" cave overhang ledges
Assameekq "a cave" or "stone roof" (Narragansett)

     Besides those, I found another reference to an "Oven" in a copy of an article given to me by a very active member (and a heck of a nice guy) of the Watertown CT Historical Society, Mr. Jeffery Grenier. The article mentions "Crump's Oven" in Canton Center CT. that I'd like to locate. It's not much of a mention, just a photo and a poem. I include it here since it's shape reminds me of the large boulder pictured as figures 4 and 5 in Norman Muller's "Stone Rows and Boulders" in an issue of the On-line Magazine.http://www.neara.org/MULLER/oley.html

     The most recent account of a possible sweat lodge I came across was in "The Pequots in Southern New England; the Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation," edited by Laurence Hauptman and James Wherry (1990). Director of Research Kevin McBride's contribution to the book is entitled "Archaeology of the Mashantucket Pequots." Beginning on page 109, he writes:
     "The Ethnohistory Project survey began with a walk over the existing 1400 acre Reservation to locate above ground structural remains such as stone piles, walls, and foundations. Such structures are difficult to locate archaeologically unless they are associated with stone walls, wells, or other obvious features…Use of stone became increasingly common throughout the 18th century for walls, foundations, and gardens…
Within a typical farmstead one – possibly two out buildings or structures can be identified. They usually consist of circular enclosures ranging in size from 10 to 15 feet in diameter. These outbuildings were made by using one or more glacial erratics as walls, and then forming the enclosures by using smaller fieldstones. The function of these structures is unclear but some may have been used as animal pens, storage facilities or possibly sweathouses."

      Looking at all the photos in the Neara Gallery, there certainly seems to be a lot of stone chambers in New England. Reading the earliest of written documentation from the "New World," the use of sweat lodges or "Ovens" seems pretty widespread. It's how Native People took baths in the winter, as well as kept healthy. There are many accounts of "Sweat Doctors" whose powers revolved around the use of the sweat lodge in their cures.

 Conclusion

     I'll suggest that a very likely use of some Stone Chambers some of the time might be as sweat lodges. It seems to be the simplest explanation of the only Stone Chamber I am familiar with. Of course I'd be foolish to ignore astronomical alignments on Solstice and/or Equinox in some other chambers nowhere near habitation sites in many different places across Turtle Island. Phenomena like a shaft of sunlight entering a doorway or "window" and touching perhaps a certain stone or mark only on a certain date like Winter Solstice certainly suggests that there's more to it than the simple explanation.
     Perhaps a sweating ceremony proceeded the witnessing of such an event to achieve the purity of body necessary in Native minds to witness such a thing. Frank Speck in a 1931 account of "The Delaware Indian Big House Ceremony," based on conversations with a Delaware man named Witapanoxwe (Walking with Daylight) wrote some thing that alludes to that:
 "…And it is said, long ago in the beginning at the Gamwing, inside the Big House, they built a great sweat-house. They heated rock and put it inside that sweat-house. There the shamans crawled in…."
      I can easily picture in my mind the fasting and sweating going on before the witnessing of a Winter Solstice solar event. Especially when it takes place up on a high lonely mountain top when it's nine degrees below zero. Hypothermia existed then as it still does now. Becoming pure in body, while also raising the core temperature of that body, as well as rolling in the snow rather than plunging into a pool, all seem to me to make sense to me. Absence of signs of a direct fire (or a "smoke hole") in most chambers, combined with the thoughts of the complete darkness necessary for a sweating ceremony, all lead me to think of a Water Vapor Sweathouse as a factor in, but not the sole use of some chambers.
      Of course everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion.

October, 1999