A Modified Rockshelter in Northwood Meadows State Park in New Hampshire
On A Visit in November 2024
One Sunday in the Fall of 2024, I joined New Hampshire Stone Site Researcher Devon Toland for a visit to sites in New Hampshire’s Bear Brook State Park in Candia and Northwood Meadows State Park in Northwood, with a side trip to a Receiving Tomb Stone Chamber in Deerfield whose location Devon had tracked down. I’ve shared the Receiving Tomb Stone Chamber in prior posts:
Devon tracked down this Modified Rockshelter as well, based on old reports. Though silted in now and full of leaves, pinecones, and plenty of animal poop, this space would have once provided a person with a night’s shelter. A “window” gives a view of Saddleback Mountain.
Here’s a little uncut video to get a better idea of the space:
This clip takes you around the side we haven’t yet seen:
Humans have been using Rockshelters for as long as we’ve been human. We know Indigenous peoples in the northeast were modifying their Rockshelters with stone at least 4000 years ago, thanks to a 4000 year-old stone wall found in a Rockshelter in the Flagg Swamp in Marlborough, Massachusetts back in the late 1970’s. Further south, below the extent of the ice sheets of the Ice Age in Western Pennsylvania at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, they found evidence of human habitation going back 19,000 years. Rockhelters can date back a long way.
I don’t know if any serious research has yet been done to determine the age of this one. Devon didn’t know of any, either. It might make a good candidate for an archaeological dig — though I wouldn’t want to be the one digging through that stuff on the bottom of the shelter, to be honest.