In the early 70s it was common to use dynamite for all manner of stuff like this.

I'm not gonna say it would have been routine at a small county highway department but in some lines of work it absolutely would have been. It wasn't cheap but it was cheap enough that a typical rural land owner would rather just dynamite stumps or boulders rather than tackle them with any machine small enough that you'd have to dig out around it rather than rip it from the earth in one go.

You don't realize how much you miss it until you start out pricing the options for clearing rocky forest.