Wampatuk hill, one of the many that make up the ridges of the Blue Hills, is made entirely out of a material called rhyolite. Essentially this hill represents a portion of the lava column located within the volcano that solidified so quickly that it’s silica (or glass)- rich magma turned into a crystalline fine grained blue rock with tiny flecks of quartz. It is the natural blue color of the stones of the Blue Hills that gave the area its name, and it is this one particular type of blue stone that brought Native people from the surrounding area to Wampatuk to mine and work its natural stone. The entire area surrounding the hill consists of massive boulders and outcrops of blue hills rhyolite, each one slightly different, and each one a type of stone that I have found turned into tools that we excavate on archaeological sites throughout the area. These range from the deep blue-black stones east and south of Wampatuk to the oddly speckled material you find on Wampatuk itself. This hill was a Mecca of stone tool production.
As you walk the Sawcut Notch path along the northern boundary of the park, you will pass great dome and little dome. These two small hills are made out of Braintree slate and Massachusett hornfels. Keep an eye open for scoop-like marks in the stone where thousands of years before a Massachusett Native person was standing exactly where you are striking the slate to remove portions of it to turn into tools. Turn around and behind you will be small mounds of stone fragments.
These mounds are not natural deposits, but heaps of stone waste, each the result of stone striking stone working raw slate down to a spear preform or perhaps a stone adz. These are all viewable from the path and artifacts lie within the path itself. ...
... The natural hillside was not in fact natural, it was, and IS, a quarry of truly monumental proportions. The terraces I had walked were not simply erosional, but were in fact carved into the raw rock by Massachusett Native people quarrying stone from the hillside for thousands of years, and the mounds and pathways I had been climbing over were mountains of stone debris consisting of Millions upon millions of stone flakes each individually struck by human hands.