Douglas Pike is a modern asphalt highway. Travelers drive up and down it in gasoline-powered vehicles, occasionally chatting on cellular phones. Telephone poles stand along its side, draped with fiber optic cables transmitting data at the speed of light. But walk off that road into the Nipsachuck woods for about 15 minutes and the hills hide the road and the trees muffle the sounds of modern technology. Then, on a rise in that oak forest, there is another sign of humankind - older, simpler and much less understood.
Over several acres, spread out through the woods, are more than 60 large piles of lichen-encrusted stones. They vary in size, but most are around 3 feet high and 4 feet around - all of them made of individual rocks about the size of basketballs. Most of the piles appear more or less intact. Some have collapsed and spread out on the ground. Others have thin oak trees trying to push their way through them.
Although a development has been proposed for an area near the stone mounds, the land where they are actually located is still privately held. The owners would like to work with preservationists to protect the stones.
"I've never seen anything like this," said William Simmons, a Brown University professor, chair of the anthropology department and expert in New England tribal folklore. "These are definitely human construction. Whoever built these built them carefully .... One thing you can say about it for sure is that it's old."
Frederick Meli, an adjunct professor in anthropology at the University of Rhode Island, has toured the area four times. He said he found more cairns in the surrounding woods. He said he is certain they mark a burial ground.
"That type of burial mound is consistent with peoples in this area," he said of the burial styles of New England's native tribes.
The academics were brought to the woodland site by Wilfred Greene, chief of the Seaconke Wampanoags, whose tribal name is Eagle Heart. Greene and his 250-member tribe have appointed themselves the spiritual caretakers of the site in hope that the rediscovered burial ground might help the rebirth of their tribe.
The stones are very heavy, Greene said, and when the whole of the landscape is considered, must number in the thousands.
"I do wonder, like a lot of people, what took place here," Greene said. "It makes me think. They went through a lot of pain to put all these rocks here."
The meaning of the word Nipsachuck has been lost to time, Greene said.
Over the centuries, landowners made their best money by selling timber rights to the land. The rocky base made it difficult to build on, so most of the area has been left alone.
Greene, who doesn't live in North Smithfield, said relatives had told him of the cairns before, but word of a 120-lot subdivision that is proposed to the southwest of the site prompted him to go look. North Smithfield Town Planner Michael Phillips said, as planned, the subdivision doesn't include the area where the piles were found. But Meli said he feared that once the houses are built nearby, residents and their children will begin exploring the woods, find the piles and take them apart.
The current owners of the property where the piles are located have not sold their land for development and are helping Greene and his group research them. They said they didn't want to be identified by name for fear people would figure out where the piles are and ruin them by souvenir hunting.
For Greene and his group, the piles could have meaning beyond the historical. They claim to be descendants of a subgroup of the Wampanoag nation that, before contact with the Europeans, lived in the Seekonk area. They use the old spelling of the place, Seaconke, in their name. They have been working for decades to obtain state and federal recognition of their tribe.
In 2003, Greene filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the tribe, saying a 1661 deed showed the Wampanoags had claim to 34 square miles along the Blackstone River in Cumberland and Woonsocket. A District Court judge in Providence threw that claim out, and an appeals court in Boston upheld the ruling.
Late last year, Greene acquired 50 acres at the old J. M. Mills site along the Blackstone River in Cumberland. He has said if his tribe gets recognition, he hoped it could open a bingo hall there.
(Original headline: Mysterious stones off a major highway draw interest )
