Approaches to studying rock piles

I am posting this here because I am slightly critical of people I consider my friends and allies. But I don't agree with them.

I see three trends. 

• The Manitou - archaeo astronomy approach.
• The Rock Piles - observational descriptive and statistical approach
• The Waking Up on Turtle Island - projecting shapes approach

I see the Manitou approach as being difficult to practice and most of the people who make casual "alignment" claims are not doing the heavy lifting of surveying correctly. It is an approach limited to people with training. 

I see the Rock Piles approach as natural: you do a lot of looking and comparing, before you theorize about the function and topography. You let statistical realities determine categories.

The Waking Up... approach is to see turtle and snake shapes in rocks. My friend Tim MacSweeney has gotten more and more extreme about this - most recently looking at a stack of 5 rocks and insisting that it was snake heads on top of snake heads. 

As far as I can tell, the Native Americans are using ideas that combine Manitou and Waking Up. But they are, I believe, informed by the Rock Piles approach.

Update: I observe that the "Waking up" approach dominates popular discussions. Here is why it sort-of is a sad thing: There are numerous YouTube videos where the author is totally pre-occupied with spotting turtle shapes in the stone wall. They pay zero attention to things like topography or site layout. Their attention is captured, consumed even, with a visual recognition task  -spotting reptiles - that has almost no intellectual depth. For them, the stonework is an opportunity to exercise their perceptions. Same for me, but it is a different set of perceptions and ideas. I find their approach shallow. It tells nothing about people or distributions of style across the countryside or time. It gives no insight into the past. Funny thing is, I never really heard anyone explain what it means to look like a turtle. Its significance is not communicated by folks who most want to practice this methodology.