On Jun 13, 2011, at 1:09 AM, Thaddeus Kind wrote:

> Lyle:
> 
> I can return to your unanswered posting on Monday night.
> Thank you very much for the stonestructures.org page. It was,
> indeed, excellent and I look forward to digesting it whole,
> given the contributions it offers for our discussion.
> 
> My intermediary surmise accords with the evidence on the indicated
> web site: you are looking at period manual work.
Very definitely.

> Before adding what I have preliminarily drafted in response to your questions--and now anticipating that we may already have informative partial understandings to deduce from the website offering--it might facilitate our process to add some interrogatories of my own.
> 
> Can you give a measured, geometric description of your feathers and
> wedges? 
The holes are about 3/4" in diameter, and up to 5" deep, set at about 5" apart in rows. The feather and wedges that are in unsplit rock are all more or less similar, as shown on the stonestructures site. What we also have are fish trap anchor holes that superficially resemble rock splitting holes, but which are not in straight lines and which also conform to the edges of channels worn or faulted into the rock. These have eyebolts in them that sometimes survive. Some of these are seated in lead to keep them in place.
> 
> When you say in one of your postings that you found trapezoidal
> holes on "our one specimen", does that mean you have found holes of
> another configuration on "other specimens"? If so, can you describe them
> and the sizes and geometries of their blocks?
The one with the trapezoidal holes was the only one thus far noticed. It had 5" deep round drill holes along one face, set at about 5" apart to make the first split. The trapezoidal holes were cut into two faces, at about the same depth below the top for a total of 3 holes on each face. I am surmising that there will be more but having just noticed them, I will not be able to spot others. 

All of the other remnant blocks have more or less the same set of feather and wedge holes used to make the split, those being the 3/4" diameter, set at about 5" apart in rows and about 5" deep.
> 
> What depths have you seen reliably broken by 5" deep holes in your
> granitic rock in differing patterns and emplacement numbers?
Up to about 2' deep. There may be deeper depths and I will scout these when the water goes down over the summer. The length of the blocks that remain varies from about 2' up to 10' long. These are around 12" wide and about the same deep. One of the problems in interpreting them is that we are looking at probably discarded material that for one reason or another was not hauled away for further processing. I may later this year have the opportunity to snorkel into the larger pit quarries to see what's on the bottom to better understand how they're laid out.

> Do any of your in situ feather and wedge combinations bottom out
> in their holes?
Not that I have seen. The stonestructures site has the best fit for the type of quarrying in the James River bed and that is the surface ledge type.

> 
> For your exploitation, I have conducted a search that gives all the
> sites which have cited stonestructures.org on their pages, which you
> may duplicate by entering   links:www.stonestructures.org    on
> the Google inteface.
Thanks, and I will check those.
> 
> The results will need
> to be winnowed for dross references but your assiduity in that task
> may yield other online finds. To paraphrase a great line "One good
> thing is often connected to another." Should you hit on another
> worthy site, you can use the given Google command to find links to it,
> to exemplify:   links:www.worthysite.com 
> 
> Apart, are you conducting this investigation from a particular vantage
> point, e.g. archeology, rescue archeology, governmental entity, etc. ?
I noted these holes while conducting a state entity survey in the 1980's and have only in 2009 obtained a transit wherein I could measure them accurately. This survey is for my own edification and will be published. My vantage point is that of a process oriented archaeologist. I find that if I understand how something is done, then I'm farther along the road to the bigger picture.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Edward Hennessey
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --- On Sun, 6/12/11, Lyle E. Browning <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> From: Lyle E. Browning <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Re: Rock Holes
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Date: Sunday, June 12, 2011, 8:44 PM
>> I completely forgot to add that the
>> original question about the odd holes in the rock seem to be
>> the result of using a flat wedge, resulting in a trapezoidal
>> hole with them spaced about 4 inches apart, as we found on
>> our one specimen. In the US, the method dates from 1803 and
>> was out of use by the 1870's.
>> 
>> Lyle Browning