Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Have serious archaeologists excavated New England's megalithic sites? It seems that there is a lot of "mystery" about the origins of the main sites, but a skilled archaeologist team should be able to run carbon dating, test soil layers, measure the age of trees, test erosion on the megaliths, and dig for artifacts.
The Algonquins have been living in New England and the Great Lakes region for thousands of years going back to the Ice Age when they hunted mammoths. And they placed cairns as markers or could have even set up hunting blind with stone piles to trap/corner animals they hunted. It's understandable then that Amerindian artifacts have been found at these megalithic sites going back thousands of years. However, simply finding their ancient charcoal at the site doesn't prove whether they placed the stones located elsewhere on the site.
Stonehenge USA / Mystery Hill , NH has a website saying:
Quote:
4
Built by a Native American Culture or a migrant European population? ... A maze of man-made chambers, walls and ceremonial meeting places, America's Stonehenge is most likely the oldest man-made construction in the United States (over 4000 years old).
Like Stonehenge in England, America's Stonehenge was built by ancient people well versed in astronomy and stone construction. It has been determined that the site is an accurate astronomical calendar. It was, and still can be, used to determine specific solar and lunar events of the year.
America's Stonehenge is an archaeological site consisting of a number of large rocks and stone structures scattered around roughly 30 acres (120,000 m2) within the town of Salem, New Hampshire
Claims that the site has pre-Columbian European origins are regarded as controversial, possibly even pseudoarchaeological, or as the result of an early-20th century hoax.
No unequivocal pre-Columbian European artifacts have been found at the site. ... Carbon dating of charcoal pits at the site provided dates from 2000 BC to 173 BC, when the area was populated by ancestors of current Native Americans. In archaeological chronology, this places indigenous use of the site into either the Late Archaic or the Early Woodland time periods. ... In 1982, David Stewart-Smith, director of restoration at Mystery Hill, conducted an excavation of a megalith found in situ in a stone quarry to the north of the main site. His research team, under the supervision of the New Hampshire state archaeologist, excavated the quarry site, discovering hundreds of chips and flakes from the stone. Both the state archaeologist and Dr. Stewart-Smith concurred that this was evidence of indigenous tool manufacture, consistent with Native American lithic techniques... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Stonehenge
What I read elsewhere was that the quarrying at the site was done with stone tools rather than modern ones and so it is thought that 18th c. English colonists did not make it, as they would have metal tools. The Native Americans on the other hand did have stone tools like quartz hammers. Here is a hammer from the site:
Wikipedia also lists these carbon dating results:
Spoiler
6530 ± 40 BP Excavation in wall east of north stone by David Stewart-Smith, Patricia Hume & W.E.J. Hinton Jr. in 1995. Lab Report 8923 (PDF)
3470 ± 30 BP Fire pit at North Stone excavated by David Stewart-Smith, Patricia Hume & W.E.J. Hinton Jr. in 1995. Lab Report 8924 (PDF)
3475 ± 210 BP Flecks of charcoal were found lodged between the exterior stones of the north wall of the Collapse Chamber 2 to 4 inches above the bedrock during a 1971 excavation. The charcoal was most likely in backfill disturbed during the construction of the chamber and therefore does not date the chamber.[10] Lab Report GX2310 (PDF)
2995 ± 180 BP James Whittall Jr. excavated several units outside the north wall of Collapsed Chamber in 1969. At the 24 inch level charcoal was found in association with fire-burnt stone spalls, hammer stone, broken pick, and scraper.[11] Lab Report GX1608 (PDF)
2120 ± 95 BP James Whittall Jr. excavated a unit near the earthen ditch on the summit of the hill near the main complex of structures. Charcoal was found on and in a seam of quarried bedrock.[12] Lab Report GX2029 (PDF)
1910 ± 190 BP Excavation in 1995 by David Stewart-Smith, Patricia Hume & W.E.J. Hinton Jr. in the parking lot for the visitors center uncovered the remains a Native American lodge and multiple hearth features. Charcoal from the different hearths produced three C-14 dates.
1640 ± 135 BP Native American lodge hearth feature
These carbon dating results seem persuasive, along with finding stone tools, and is a reason why I think modern mainstream archaeologists should be able to make a serious study of the site, and then put it in a peer-reviewed journal.
Another major site is Gungywamp, Conn.:
Quote:
Gungywamp /ˈɡʌndʒiwɒmp/ is an archaeological site in Groton, Connecticut, United States, consisting of artifacts dating from 2000-770 BC, a stone circle, and the remains of both Native American and colonial structures.[1] Among multiple structural remains, of note is a stone chamber featuring an astronomical alignment during the equinoxes. Besides containing beehive chambers and petroglyphs, the Gungywamp site has a double circle of stones near its center, just north of two stone chambers.
The article describes the chambers, saying that one, a
Quote:
"calendar chamber", has an astronomical feature where an inner alcove is illuminated during the equinoxes by the alignment of a hole in the west wall, through which the sun shines upon a lighter stone on the opposite side, radiating illumination within the smaller, beehive shaped chamber. Somewhat removed from the structures, there is a stone circle, actually consisting of two circles of stones, one within the other, over ten feet in diameter. The outermost ring is made up of twelve stones worked to be curved. Archaeologists who have studied it consider it to have been a mill.... Other researchers have hypothesized it is a Native American built structure...
Just looking at the rings, they don't look like a very good track for a mill. But then, I don't know that Amerindians typically built fire pits to look like that either.
It describes more findings at the site:
Spoiler
Even farther away there is a row of low standing stones, lined up in a north-south facing, one of which features an etched image of a bird with outstretched wings....
Native American artifacts include arrowheads, stone flakes and pottery fragments. ... The specific function and temporal origin of the stone chambers has yet to be definitively established. ... Other possibilities include construction ... by Native Americans such as the Pequot or Mohegan tribes.[1] It has been suggested that the site could be one of the ceremonial stone landscapes described by USET, United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc., in their resolution on sacred ceremonial stone landscapes.
North Complex
This area lacks stone chambers but it contains some interesting structures. One is a low earthen berm with a rectangular shape. When James Whittall, Jr. excavated the berm, he found stumps of posts on three sides indicating a Native American lodge built of saplings. Associated with the lodge were two hearths. Nearby is an elongated cairn in the shape of a boat (narrow at the tips and wide in the middle). On top of this cairn were three short standing stones. In the same general area there is a group of nineteen cairns built on the ground. More cairns were built on top of boulders scattered about the area. There were also three standing stones in the area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gungywamp
The Connecticut Newspaper The Day ran a story called "Gungywamp keeps its mysteries", saying that some people
Quote:
wonder whether the first inhabitants were Arctic peoples during the time of the glaciers. Still others credit pagan mystics who knew how to tap the “ley lines” of energy flowing through the site. A small window in one of the chambers is oriented to capture the azimuth of the sun at the fall and spring equinoxes, so a shaft of light shines into the underground room.
...
The earliest reference to the name, he noted, is found in a 1654 letter to John Winthrop, governor of colonial Connecticut, about a “newly discovered” stone wall and fort located at Gungywamp. The Pequot tribe that lived in the area at the time did not erect stone structures, [a tour guide named] Brown said, so the fort, chambers and other architectural ruins must have been built by other hands.
Actually I've read an excerpt of the letter, which is interesting because it was written during the earliest period of English colonization and it talks about the site as a fort and curiosity.
The Day article continues:
Quote:
[There] is a small stone enclosure beside the trail, not large enough for a house or pen for animals.
“It could have been a hunting blind, or a guard post, anything you can suppose,” Brown said.
Further [in the walk] come the underground chambers, then the line of stones planted in the ground like fence posts, oriented to the North Star. On one of the stone faces is carved a curvaceous figure some say resembles a raven.
A third site is the "Upton Chamber" with an underground "beehive" shaped cave lined with rocks for walls. There are many root cellars in New England, so I think it wouldn't be a surprise if this was one of them. Still, there is no record for it, and I think archaeologists should be able to date it, eg. using the size of the roots of the tree growing into the side of its entrance.
Boston.com reported about it in an article called "Chamber of mystery". They wrote that the town hired an archaeologist to survey it. But this was in 2012, so I don't know why they haven't released results. It says:
Quote:
The cave is designed like an igloo, with a long entrance, a round central chamber, and a stone roof that was intricately engineered, without mortar, into a stable dome.
...
Upton’s chamber is one of the largest, with a 14-foot entrance tunnel and a dome that rises about 12 feet, topped by a large capstone. Inside the dome, the chamber is completely dark. “It’s one of the best examples of its type in the United States because it’s got a corbelled roof, like a beehive shape,” said George Patterson, a member of the town’s Historical Commission. “And the transition from that tunnel into that domed shape, that technology is very advanced.”
Acton is home to another mysterious stone chamber, known as the “Potato Cave,” protected in the Nashoba Brook Conservation Land. It got its name from an early assumption that it was built in Colonial times as a root cellar. ... The Mashpee, Narragansett, and Wampanoag Aquinnah tribes surveyed Pratt Hill and found astronomical links between the chamber and cairns on top of the hill.
Claims about astronomical links are the kind of thing I have learned to be wary of. Sometimes a researcher claims that a stone is aligned to a star, but then he asserts that to find the alignment we have to look back in time (eg. 1500 BC). And we don't even know whether the stone was put in place then, so how do we know the stone was intended to align with a given star?
The article continues:
Spoiler
In the article, published in the New England Antiquities Research Association Journal, they hypothesized that Native Americans built the chamber around 710 AD as an observation area to study the changing skies, which guided Native Americans through time, including celebrations and corn planting.
The researchers used a strobe light to make a direct path from the stone chamber to the cairns, and found the line pointed directly to the Pleiades constellation. “When they came to visit the chamber, they said based on the orientation of the chamber, you should find something up on the horizon, on a hill,” Patterson said. “So the volunteers left here, hopped in their cars, went to the top of Pratt Hill, and found stone cairns.” When the sun sets on the horizon during the summer solstice, it can be seen from inside the stone chamber, Anick said. Since the field of view through the tunnel is narrow, “that’s a pretty amazing coincidence, if it’s a coincidence,” he said.
Based on this account, it sounds like there really could be an alignment of objects at the site, but it's hard to say how exactly it matched the stars at some as-yet-unknown point in the past.
Another essay on the stone cavern says:
Quote:
Although the Algonquin tribes living in New England at the time of European contact didn't build with stone, it's quite possible that their ancestors in this area did. New England has been inhabited by humans for more than 10,000 years, so it's not unreasonable to think some past Native American society made these structures. Native American groups in other parts of North and South America made cities and ceremonial centers with stone, so the technology could have easily made it to this part of the continent.
According to [another] theory [Ancient European ceremonial structures], ancient Druids, Norsemen, Irish monks, Phoenician sailors, and others made their way to New England before Columbus and built the chambers. Some chambers (but not all) align with the summer and winter solstices, much like ancient Celtic structures, and some (but not all) appear similar to megalithic European sites like Newgrange, although on a much smaller scale. NEW ENGLAND FOLKLORE: A Visit to the Upton Chamber
I think we should be able to rule out Vikings, Irish monks, and probably Phoenicians since we haven't found bronze age equipment, viking artifacts, or crosses.
Here is the tree I mentioned before:
The essay adds:
Quote:
it opens into a beehive shaped domed chamber that is about 10 feet wide and maybe 12 feet high.
(The chamber's ceiling, which is made from massive stone slabs.)
The view from the top. This seems to be a wall of stones, it looks to me.
A possible vent shaft:
"Druid's Hill" MA, and "Calendar I" and Calendar II" as well as a chamber in Montville, Conn. the Goshen Chamber MA, danville beehive; Burnt Hill stone circle
Thanks for this post. I grew up in New England and have been fascinated with this subject for many years. Are you familiar with Celtic Mysteries in New England by Philip J. Imbrogno? I read the book fifteen years ago and corresponded with the author about some of my personal observations of evidence of inhabitants of New England who were apparently neither aboriginal or colonial settlers. It's a worth checking out if you're interested in this topic.
It's quite interesting.
The Stonehenge USA site is massive as far as Amerindian sites go. And they found the stones were dug out with stone tools, and they found clay making and Amerindian charcoal from 2000 BC. So it looks like a major Amerindian site. I'd really like to see a good team of mainstream university archaeologists do a full excavation.
The Gungywamp site is interesting too, because back in the mid-17th century the new colonists were already writing about the complex as an unexpected fortress or major Indian site that they found there.
As to the beehive chambers such as the Upton Chamber that are like Newgrange, I also want to see the mainstream teams check them out, but my guess is that they are in truth actually big colonial root cellars, since colonists did build those kinds of things often and in that model.
Thanks for this post. I grew up in New England and have been fascinated with this subject for many years. Are you familiar with Celtic Mysteries in New England by Philip J. Imbrogno? I read the book fifteen years ago and corresponded with the author about some of my personal observations of evidence of inhabitants of New England who were apparently neither aboriginal or colonial settlers. It's a worth checking out if you're interested in this topic.
Irish Cooper,
Thanks for writing back. If Stonehenge USA and Gungywamp resembled anything before Columbus compared to what they do today, I could reasonably entertain some other group, be they Celts or Mayans making the sites, because of how different they are from other Algonquin ones. Plus, I could envision Celts journeying to their West just like the Vikings.
The normal barrier to connecting the sites to the Celts is that we haven't found Celtic or Bronze Age artifacts at the sites. Some authors claim to find ogham writing at these kinds of sites or otherwise in New England, but sometimes what they consider to be "ogham" looks like natural lines and it just hurts the writers' credibility. And then there is the possibility of fraudulent "ogham" writing meant to look real. It's why for me it's much more helpful to have a mainstream team of scientists doing the work.
It's nice that you had a good talk with Imbrogno. A description for Imbrogno's book Celtic Mysteries Windows to Another Dimension in America's Northeast says:
Quote:
The paranormal and UFO phenomena associated with these stone chambers suggest they may indeed be windows to another reality. "The book is a must read for anyone who is interested in the paranormal, UFOs, and ancient archeology. If you like a real life mystery, then this book will keep you enthralled from cover to cover." Philip Imbrogno has been investigating and researching paranormal phenomena for more than thirty years. He is has been a science educator for the past 31 years. Marianne Horrigan is a paranormal researcher whose articles have appeared in Fate and UFO Universe. https://www.amazon.com/Mysteries-Win.../dp/1596052252
It sounds like an urban legends-type book, not actually something reliable. When an archaeologist mixes UFOs into what is already a controversial area, it really hurts the credibility.
One book review said:
Spoiler
Imbrogno apparently has not only been "padding his resume" all these years, but also seems to have been lying about a lot of other life experiences as well - including having served in Vietnam as a member of an elite Special Forces unit.
Imbrogno claims no less that this:
Holds an undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics, astronomy and chemistry from the University of Texas and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2010, awarded a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from MIT. Staff member of the McCarthy Observatory in New Milford, Connecticut, and is a founder and former director of the Astronomical Society of Greenwich, and former director of the Bowman Observatory.
But then well-known skeptic Lance Moody decided one day - apparently just for the heck of it - to see if he could verify Imbrogno's credentials with MIT. The folks at MIT professed to have never heard of him. They said they never graduated any Philip Imbrogno from anything. To make a long story short, Imbrogno's credibility has been destroyed. He announced he is "leaving the paranormal field." The co-author of his latest book, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, announced on her web site that she has cut ties with Imbrogno, and also stated she was "blindsided" by the recent revelations.
Thanks for this post. I grew up in New England and have been fascinated with this subject for many years. Are you familiar with Celtic Mysteries in New England by Philip J. Imbrogno? I read the book fifteen years ago and corresponded with the author about some of my personal observations of evidence of inhabitants of New England who were apparently neither aboriginal or colonial settlers. It's a worth checking out if you're interested in this topic.
People should not write books when they eat magic mushrooms.
slightly off topic but we have the Judaculla stone in Western North Carolina. 4000-10000 years old with petroglyphs that are not yet interpreted. Scholars are working on the glyphs, some seem to be Mayan, some Creek Indian, and some seem to be direction of the river and valley like a map. Also there seems to be an astrological alignment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JudaCulla_Rock.JPG
Back in the early '80s when I visited Mystery Hill in Salem NH, archaeologists were excavating it and they were thinking more on the line that it was a colonial root cellar. I think they were also thinking that someone wanting to make money a long time ago, expanded it and tried to pass it off as being much older than it really was.
Out of interest I joined some society but it turned out to be a lot of craziness.
Still, if there's new information about Mystery Hill I'd love to know. Ever try taking any of those old stone walls apart? The ones that used to surround people's fields in colonial days but are now out in the middle of woods? Some people claim that there are odd markings on some of them.
I think the above article may pertain to rock mounds that are located in the woods off rte 202 near the Quabbin Reservoir in MA. Back in the 1980s a high school teacher was very interested and would take classes there to have a look around. He believed that they were very early but back in those days no one was studying them--except him!
But don't the stone walls in Mystery Hill look exactly like the stone walls you can see anywhere in New England? You can see them in Old England too, stones fitted together with no mortar. An old art in which a trench is dug first to lay the bottom layer into. It could just be the traditional method of building stone walls--something I could see if I took a walk down the road right now.
I'd like to think that there's more to it than this but it's something we never hear about anymore.
Another thing that intrigued me even more was the Mound Builders in the mid west. Who were THEY and where did they come from?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
4
