09/17/2026
The Great Stone Mound of Holliston
Standing beside the 17th hole at Pinecrest Golf Course in Holliston, Massachusetts, is an enormous stone mound that raises a deceptively simple question:
Who built it—and why?
The mound rises roughly 17 feet above the surrounding landscape, and the amount of stone is difficult to comprehend. One explanation is relatively straightforward. The Holliston landscape is notoriously rocky, and local accounts have long suggested that farmers cleared stones from fields and accumulated them into massive piles like this one—including one eyewitness account describing this happening more than 100 years ago.
But the Great Mound isn't an isolated feature. Holliston and the surrounding towns are loaded with stone features of all kinds. Around Miller Hill and throughout the broader landscape are reports of additional large stone piles, walls, platforms, cairn-like structures, and other unusual arrangements of stone.
And this isn't limited to Holliston. The landscape stretching through Ashland, Upton, central Massachusetts, Rutland, Littleton, and the surrounding communities contains a remarkable concentration of archaeological sites and stone features—many of which deserve far more attention and documentation.
Researchers and amateur archaeologists have been documenting and discussing the Holliston features as far back as the 1960s and 1970s. There have also been comparisons made between some New England stone structures and prehistoric cairns found in Ireland and Scotland. Those similarities are certainly interesting—but resemblance alone cannot establish a common origin, and there is currently no established archaeological evidence demonstrating that the Holliston mound was constructed by a pre-Columbian European culture.
That distinction matters.
Because if convincing evidence were ever found demonstrating that a particular New England site represented a genuine pre-contact European settlement or structure, the implications for our understanding of American history would be enormous.
But that's a very different statement from saying that such evidence has already been established. And that's exactly why preservation matters.
New England is developing every day. Forests are cleared, properties are subdivided, roads are widened, and landscapes that have existed for centuries can disappear in a matter of months. Once a site is destroyed, much of the information it contained can be lost with it.
And archaeological evidence doesn't have to be spectacular to be important. A stone wall, unusual arrangement, foundation, depression, mound, or artifact can potentially tell us something about how people used a landscape. Sometimes the significance of a site only becomes apparent when it is considered alongside other sites in the surrounding area.
Understanding that bigger picture isn't something one person can accomplish.
It takes local communities, archaeologists, historians, landowners, preservation organizations, and curious people who are willing to document what they find and bring it to the attention of people who can investigate it properly.
If you know of a potentially significant archaeological feature on private property, document it, do NOT disturb it, and consider reaching out to the appropriate historical or archaeological organizations. The same is true of unusual sites on public land: document them responsibly, don't remove artifacts or alter the site, and let the appropriate people know they exist.
Because if there really is something significant hiding in these landscapes, we may never understand it if the evidence disappears first. The goal isn't to prove an exciting theory. The goal is to preserve the evidence long enough to find out what the truth actually is.
And in a region as densely layered with stone features as Holliston and the surrounding communities, there is still an enormous amount left to discover.
