Just a neat fossil and a question

[B.D.]

I went hunting on some new land not far from Center Hill the other day and stumbled across a few things that were interesting to me. The first was the first trilobite I've found around here in a while. I should have put something in the picture to give it some scale, because it's bigger than it looks in the photo. It was several inches long.

It's also a lot more streamlined than the trilobites I've found in the past. I'm not sure what variety it is.

But anyway, the real reason I posted this was to ask a question. In addition to the trilobite, I came across an area with a bunch of big rock piles. There were about a dozen spread out in the woods that all looked kind of like this:

At first glance, they looked like remnants of an old stone wall like you see around these parts from time to time. However, the piles were not in anything close to a straight line. In a few places there were two or three that were almost parallel to one another. Any idea what they could have been?

bd

 

[cecil30-30]

Maybe the area used to be a field long ago and the farmers just piled the rocks up instead of hauling them out.???

 

[Baxter83]

That or an old Indian burial ground.

 

[Flintlock Hunter]

Family property has a lot of those rock piles similar to your photo. Ours are from my grandmother's father picking rocks out of his fields and piling them up.

 

[RUGER]

 

[jessebelk]

Piling rocks up from a field is a viable answer, and it's a pretty neat find. I've seen this in other parts of the country and world also. My brother is a surveyor and says that a lot of land owners would pile the rocks up along property boundaries to indicate the boundary. It would also get the rocks out of the usable parts of the land and put it on the part where the other land owner wasn't using it either. As for them not being in a straight line that's more common west of the Mississippi river where the Government with other input decided to try and use straight lines for boundaries. Naturally the land owners new their property line and placed the rocks along them, so out there they are in a straight line. East of the MS they could run many directions and may be a boundary from a deed that's changed 20-30 times in the past 200yrs. Just my opinion though.

 

[TennesseeRains]

Those are both neat finds!

I have no idea on the rock piles though.

 

[Team Browning]

Id go with stacking to get out of the way/ mark boundary versus burials.

 

[Yeti]

the rocks are a very cool find