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One attraction in New Hampshire is "Stonehenge USA" AKA "Mystery Hill", near Salem, NH. It is a megalithic site covering many acres.
Stonehenge, USA
In fact, there are numerous megalithic sites in New England, including dolmens (boulders standing on several rocks) and underground stone chambers. However, it's questionable whether the boulders randomly fell in place or the chambers were colonial era root cellars. My main question here is whether reliable archaeologists have looked at "Stonehenge USA" and been able to use carbon dating or other tools to prove confidently when it was made?
One theory occasionally put forth is that it was made by bronze age people like Phoenicians or Celts. But I think that this is unlikely, because basically Bronze Age-specific tools (eg. bronze shields) have not been found at these sites.
Another theory is that Paleolithic stone age Europeans crossed the North Atlantic to Northeastern North America using the lower sea level in that era (30,000-10,000 BC) and following the edge of the glacial ice cap.
Some traces in favor of this theory are the distant relationship of X and R1 DNA found in both West Eurasians and Northeast Amerindians, similarities between stone age "Solutrean" tools of Europeans and Clovis and "pre-Clovis" Amerindian tools, the presence of North American "pre-clovis" artefacts and sites predating the common date for migration from Siberia to Alaska through the Bering Strait (c. 11,500 BC), the fact that both in the modern era and in medieval accounts crossings have been made of the North Atlantic in primitive vessels (besides the vikings), showing that such crossings are possible.
A map of R1 DNA
A map of X DNA
But I think that this is also unlikely. Before the time of Columbus and besides the vikings, for over 3000 years of recorded history we don't have clear records of transatlantic crossings. It's a difficult feat for a small group, let alone a large group in rafts or canoes. Maybe things are different in the Pacific Ocean, where prehistoric peoples made it to Easter Island and Hawaii and settled them in the middle of the ocean.
Supposing that the Amerindians were the only ones in New England who could build the structures before the English colonists arrived, findings around the sites include:
ceramics and tools like we know Amerindians could make;
charcoal and other remains dated to 5000-100 BC and later;
megalithic structures like slab walls, roofs, and underground chambers aligned astronomically;
dolmens or boulders set standing on a few small rocks.
Paul Angel lists several such sites in New England:
Quote:
Mystery Hill, the Upton Cave, Calendar I and Calendar II, Gungywamp and Druid’s Hill are just several of the names given some incredibly important historical sites... Sometime in the late 1600s or early 1700s, early American colonists began discovering and utilizing underground “root cellars” made of large but manageable pieces of dressed stone as storage houses for food stuffs. The colonial newcomers were convinced that these so-called root cellars had been constructed by the former Amerind inhabitants of the area—irrespective of the fact that their Indian neighbors showed little hint of an ability to work in large stone or the desire to do so. The Mysterious Megaliths of New England
He shows a photo of the well-known Dighton Rock discovered in the late 17th c. by Cotton Mather and other Puritan colonists:
Next he describes Mystery Hill, N.H.:
Quote:
The Mystery Hill complex, the largest and most sophisticated of its kind in North America, covers over 30 acres and is composed of monolithic standing stones, stone walls and underground chambers, most of which are aligned to obvious astronomical points. Even now the site can be used as an accurate yearly calendar utilizing the stones set up over two thousand (perhaps as long as 5,000) years ago. The lack of household artifacts and grave goods leads us to believe that the site was a ceremonial center and neither living quarters nor a “city.”
...The “Watch House” is the name given to a chamber structure located outside the main complex at Mystery Hill. The roof is a massive, quarried slab of granite of several tons. On the back wall of the chamber the stones contain a high percentage of white quartz, a stone found in its pure form in many of the neolithic structures over the world and treasured by ancient peoples for its reflective qualities. This particular chamber is aligned to the February first sunrise and lunar minor south. At sunrise on this date the sunlight enters the entrance of the chamber and slowly moves along one wall until it illuminates the quartz crystals at the back wall, making the semi-precious gems sparkle noticeably.
it was carbon dating, carried out under the supervision of respected scientists from Geochron Laboratories in 1971 that supported t... that Mystery Hill was a site of extreme antiquity. Carbon tests conducted on charcoal found alongside a stone pick and a hammer stone unearthed at an excavation near one of the underground chambers reveal a date of 2,000 B.C. The artifacts were clearly related to Neolithic pieces of the same era in the British Isles and Iberia. The excavation pit carbon tested had been undisturbed before digging and layers of strata above were perfectly intact.
The Science Frontiers website proposes that there was cultural exchange across the North Atlantic based on findings of red paint in graves:
Quote:
Public TV recently aired a program on North America's Red Paint People, so-called because they added brilliant red iron oxide to their graves. It also seems they knew how to sail the deep ocean, as G.F. Carter now relates.
"Decades ago, Gutorn Gjessing pointed out that the identical [Red Paint] culture was found in Norway. No one paid much attention to that, but more recent carbon-14 dating has shown that the identical cultures had identical dates, and people began to pay more attention. It is now admitted that this is a high latitude culture that obviously sailed the stormy north Atlantic and stretched from northwest Europe over to America. It seemingly extends from along the Atlantic coast of Europe to America and in America from the high latitudes of Labrador down into New York state. The dates are mind-boggling: 7,000 years ago both in Europe and America.
But just because two different cultures use red paint in graves doesn't make it clear to me that they shared this common traits via the North Atlantic as opposed to, say, carrying it from a common Eurasian source that passed through the Bering Strait. America b.c. and even earlier
The website also mentions dolmens and "passage graves" in New England and claims:
Quote:
some of these structures yield radiocarbon dates 3000-4000 B.P. ... But now European archeologists are beginning to look at these structures. In 1990, the Belgian journal Kadath devoted an entire issue to the subject.
rooms with megalithic roof slabs weighing six tons, eight tons and more. The building stones themselves are intriguing; many have an odd swirled surface as though they had been stirred when liquid, then allowed to harden.
The Chicago Tribune repeats the same thing about radiocarbon testing I remember hearing years ago when I visited:
Quote:
...the guide map explains. Radiocarbon dating confirms many of the pagan structures--the dolmens (horizontal stone slabs resting on stone uprights), cromlechs (circles of standing stones) and barrows (stone-lined or earthen tombs)--were built as long as 4,000 years ago.
...
The visitors tour guide includes a detailed astronomical alignment map, an astronomer's dream, with at least 15 alignments that were laid out, archeologists believe, about 1500 B.C. (A map of the 20 rugged hilltop acres where it lies could have been lifted from a geometry textbook, as it shows dozens of angles and dotted lines. Alignments cut across the point where perpendicular lines between the equinox sunset and sunrise, and the "true north stone" and "true south wall" intersect.)
I have some skepticism though - some of the stones matching astronomical alignments were I think moved into place by the property owners in the past based on how they imagined them to line up astronomically.
The Augusta Chronicle repeats the theories about its creation:
Quote:
Investigators don't know who built the elaborate stone complex or why, but one theory holds that "Mystery Hill," as the ruins are often called, was erected by European outcasts who sailed to America thousands of years ago. Mysterious markings on some of the stones hint at Mediterranean origins, but at least one scholar suspects that the sprawling, remote complex has Middle Eastern ties. ...
Some skeptics say the stone construction was the work of an Indian clan. But radiocarbon dating indicates the site was built some 4,000 years ago, more than 3,000 years before the arrival of the Pattee tribe. Dennis Stone, a local landowner and amateur archaeologist who occasionally gives interpretive tours of the complex, said that many of the rocks on the site were quarried using stone-on-stone percussion techniques typical of cultures working thousands of years ago without the benefit of drills or other metal tools. The centerpiece of Mystery Hill is the "sacrificial table," a 4[1/2]-ton, bell-shaped slab of granite set on four stone legs with a deep gutter delineating its perimeter. According to Dr. Stone and other experts, the table appeared to have been used for "bloody" sacrificial rituals similar to those practiced by ancient Mediterranean cultures. Theories abound on origin of New Hampshire stones | chronicle.augusta.com
Mediterranean pagans did not necessarily kill humans, by the way, as sacrifices, they could use animals instead.
The article concludes that Richard Boisvert, deputy state archaeologist, agreed with another scholar that the "stone" looked like a colonial lye stone and that there is no evidence of a European (as opposed to Amerindian) culture at the site, although it resembles "old-world megalithic structures."
I think this is an amazing thread that could work a bit better in the History forum, you're getting very specific and I doubt we have many experts here (or anywhere else outside of History, for that matter) that could share an informed opinion on the reliability of said archeologists and their dating methods.
Yac.
I think this is an amazing thread that could work a bit better in the History forum, you're getting very specific and I doubt we have many experts here (or anywhere else outside of History, for that matter) that could share an informed opinion on the reliability of said archeologists and their dating methods.
Yac.
I found an article claiming pyramids in Algonquin Park, Canada, but it sounds easily spurious. I don't know if the photo below is supposed to be the pyramid, but it doesn't look like one, just a big natural rock of some kind:
Spoiler
The 9 Pyramids of Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada
I was told, from multiple sources, that deep in Algonquin Park in Ontario Canada, a Pyramid or Pyramids existed in a now fenced off area of the park. ... The origins for some of this story lies within a book by Harvard Professor, Barry Fell. Barry wrote many books, .... such as vikings and other peoples visiting Americas before Columbus
The image featured above is not the pyramids, but is a pyramid shaped rock in a lake in Algonquin Park.
If it's based on Fell's book i think it's unreliable.
I also heard about megaliths in Schunnemunk Mountain State Park in the Catskills on NY.
Spoiler
at a little over two hours into the hike, you reach a large open area where white paint blazes mark a spur trail to the right (west), and the site of the Megaliths ....You look across the shallow valley of Barton Swamp at the Western Ridge Trail outcroppings, where you will soon be headed. The Megaliths themselves are large blocks of fissured bedrock, split away from the ridge and separated by deep crevices. Be careful-you can fall into them.
While we may not presently know the dates of these structures, there seems to be some speculation that they were built by European settlers predating known Viking expeditions to North America. What we usually call Native Americans, i.e. indians built stone structures in the Americas going way back thousands of years ago, some of them far more impressive than these pictured.
While we may not presently know the dates of these structures, there seems to be some speculation that they were built by European settlers predating known Viking expeditions to North America. What we usually call Native Americans, i.e. indians built stone structures in the Americas going way back thousands of years ago, some of them far more impressive than these pictured.
The consensus is that the owner of the land moved the rocks.
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