The Stone Calendar
From the Farmer’s Almanac:
March 20, 1999 - Vernal Equinox, 8:46 P.M., EST. The word equinox is
derived from the Latin words meaning "equal night." The vernal, or spring,
Equinox refers to the point at which the Sun appears to cross the celestial
equator from south to north, signaling the beginning of nature's renewal in
the Northern Hemisphere.


Like almost everyone else in New England, I look forward to the first day of Spring. If it's not printed right on the calendar, I'll check an almanac and write it in myself, probably encircle it with a colored marker.

For the past few years, I've also been "checking" the date with what I think is a solar calendar. I'll watch the sun set over a triangular arraignment of boulders, just above what's left of a Native American Burial Ground at the edge of a floodplain in Western CT. From local history, I know that a Late Woodland Village existed there from at least 1659 and into the early 1700's. From reading about villages of that time, I find that it's thought that those riverene villages were occupied for three seasons of the year. Wintering else where, Spring brought People back to the horticultural fields and fish weirs, back to friends and relatives to begin the "seasonal round" once again. "From the thick warme vallies, where they winter, they remove a little neerer to their Summer fields; when ‘tis warme Spring, then they remove to their fields where they plant Corne." (Roger Williams in A Key into the Language of America 1643)

The Stone Calendar seems to mark those three seasons. The drawing shows two lines of small stones visually connecting one large stone with two others. From about March 20 to about September 20, the sun always seems to set between two large stones when seen from a third stone, the Red or View Stone, at the bottom of the "V" in the drawings, which is to the east of the others. I remember this boulder being pushed out of the pathway in the mid-1980’s when a Fox Hunting Club cleared the old roads and trails in the area.

The only event I can observe due to trees is the Vernal Equinox sunset. The reading is not true west, but the apparent sunset on a distant hillside is directly over the White Boulder on the Equinox. Plotting by compass, I find the third stone seems to mark Summer Solstice, the farthest north the sun sets. At 304 degrees true, it seems to be about one degree off from the 303 on the azimuth chart, but I think it’s close enough after 300 years.

The sun set on the Autumnal Equinox occurs in the same place (same azimuth) as theVernal, of course. Sunsets south of that stone mark when the village may have been unoccupied.

I have no idea how old this calendar is. I can only guess as to what happened on those sunset dates it marked. Perhaps preparations were begun to begin the season as the first sunset occurred north of the first boulder, the opposite as the sunsets began to appear south of it later in the year. Perhaps Solstice, the "stand still" of the sun for several days, marked a mid-summer festival.
Tim MacSweeney
March 11, 1999