I got interested in those old farm roads as there's a bridge over a stream made of a single slab of stone 6' x 10' or 12'. I had a real case of "how the heck did this get here?". That land had been further changed by the civilian conservation corps in the 30s (looked to be mostly for flood control).

That structure in Acton is improbably small for ice storage. (The larger block of ice you have, the longer it will keep - and then you need to pack something like sawdust or straw around it. As a kid, I was part of one of the very last ice harvests in northwestern Maine, got a real notion of the volume of ice.

As an even-younger kid, I used to go into our woodlot with my brother and find the occasional arrowhead - which we'd bring to the museum in South Natick. There were also a lot of old-time marbles (major reason we were looking so carefully) alongside an old stage road that once went through the property. There was also an old small junkyard, complete with rusted-out vehicles from the 20s, and wide low cairns of rocks (maybe 20' in diameter) that we thought probably had something to do with the Native Americans - might even mark graves - but who knew? We were pretty wild, but we weren't going to mess with someone's final resting place.

What I'm getting at is the absurd amount of churn, marbles mixed in with arrowheads, mixed with model-Ts. It's clear, though, that Native Americans had a impact on the land. I'd suggest William Cronon's "Changes in the Land".