Scattered throughout the wooded uplands of the Catskill Mountains are a large number of standing lithic structures that have mostly been ignored by conventional archaeologists. Often dismissed as colonial era stone walls and field clearing piles, these formations are increasingly emerging as part of a Native American tradition of ritual building practices that reflected a sophisticated world view and sociocultural belief system. This program. presented by author Glenn Kreisberg, focuses on presenting locational data of potential Native American sacred sites within the Catskills and surrounding regions, in order to discern patterns in their construction techniques, environmental positioning, and event-specific structural alignments related to sky observation. Utilizing GIS software, hundreds of sites and structures in the region have been geo-located, providing a basis for understanding these sites in their original context. This research is only the first step in a larger effort to rediscover the cultural heritage and knowledge Native Americans in our region have long practiced and represented as a living synthesis projected upon their physical landscape. 

Glenn Kreisberg is an author, outdoor guide, and radio engineer, who researches archeoastronomy and landscape archaeology in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains of New York. His books include Spirits in Stone, Mysteries of the Ancient Past and Lost Knowledge of the Ancients. He served two terms as vice president of the New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA) and studied archeoastronomy at SUNY and archaeoacoustics on Malta. He is co-founder of the non-profit Overlook Mountain Center (www.overlookmountain.org) in Woodstock, NY, where he lives with his wife and their two offspring.