A presentation from the North West Anthropological Conference 2014- Bellingham, Washington

1. A Classification System
for Rock Features
Stephen Todd Jankowski
USDA Forest Service
Malheur National Forest

2. 
According to existing literature,
rock features are…..?
Fire hearths or fire pits
Hunting blinds
Game drives
Rock walls
Trail markers
Resource area markers
Historic fencing cribs/rock jacks
Property boundary markers
Caches
Burials
Geoglyphs
House rings
Mining claims
Fake people/stone boys/petroforms
Ceremonial-Ritual markers
Visual topographic landmarks

3.  Rock Features are ubiquitous & receive casual treatment
during site assessments / recordation
 Created a basic framework of characteristics or attributes
 Helpful to determine function
 Secondary attributes (cracked rock, lithics, botanical
remains, ) or association can further classify for a
typology
White (1980)

4. 
White’s Data Form (Plan View)

5. 
 Expansion of rock feature morphological attributes
 Described 6-7 types of rock features
 Mostly ceremonial types or those associated with
ritual activities
 Potential to determine ages from outer surfaces
characteristics and associated artifacts
Chartkoff (1983)

6. 
Chartkoff (1983)

7. 
artko
Chartkoff (1983)

8.  Demonstrates rock feature types with more examples after Chartkoff and
White. There are similarities.
 Broken down into four generalized categories and then subcategorized
 Also recorded their class size as a feature and total amount of stones
creating the feature
 Measured distances to trails, other sites, watershed, and distances to
known lithic scatters, etc.
 Searched for unknown patterns in order to further identify and classify
features in order to categorize them.
 Know your landform!
Winthrop (1995)

9. 
Winthrop et al (1995)

10. 
Winthrop et al (1995)

11. 
Winthrop et al 1995

12. 

13. 
Winthrop continued;

14. Green (1987)

15. Green continued;

18. 
 Tomlin (2010) & Jankowski (2012) -measuring alignments to distant
landmarks
 Never previously demonstrated except larger monuments ( such as
Pyramids-Egypt/Maya, American Southwest, Stonehenge, et cet)
 Walls, rock stacks, & Tsektekls (prayers seats) have alignments in
Chartkoff’s research.
 Ethnographic and Traditional knowledge of Living Indigenous peoples
describe intentional alignments or placement of rocks as a practice that
continues today (Klamath, Paiute, Yakima)
 Independent conclusions of both Tomlin & Jankowski greater than
expected
Central Washington University-
REM Graduate Research

19. 

20. 

21. Plan View

23. Questions?
Photo by Author 2009