Organized stones in nature and architecture (puzzle stones)

A few days ago Richard Rhodes of Rhodes Architectural Stone visited and showed a draft of his intriguing book on architectural stone. The book is filled with excellent medium-format photographs of antique stone structures (some of the photographs can be seen at the link above).

His photographs suggest that some constructed stone patterns resemble natural stone patterns such as strata and organized fragmentation. Over the years of walking around our land, we have accumulated a big collection of “puzzle stones” (our household name for fragmented and sometimes slightly separated layers of stone scattered around a bit that then are discovered and fit together in a 3-dimensional puzzle.) There came a time when there were so many puzzle stones around the house that I banished the whole lot of them to a little screen house shack by the pond.

Below are some pictures of a big complex puzzle stone, which, had it been constructed, would appear to be perfectly fitted.

Architectural stone is often photographed straight on in order to reveal the flat geometric pattern in stone positions, the 2D surface map. But it also helpful to see fitted stones at an angle and under raking light so as to reveal the depth and darkness of the gaps, and to intensify the 3-dimensionality that makes old architectural stones so wonderful.

The indented path cut in the stone, visible in the second and fourth images, might be a pre-columbian map of a river or, more likely, a deliberate scratch made by a tooth of a backhoe bucket.The puzzle stone documented below turns into a happy sleeping turtle at the end.