> Sadly, much of the information out there is incorrect. For example, there is not a henge associated with the site and the individual stones are relatively small when compared to what most people think of as European standing stones. It should be clearly understood that this is not a megalith site like Stonehenge.
That said, I can imagine that to a paleolithic hunter/gatherer it would be beneficial to use an arrangement of stones to "capture" a particular date. Dates of interest might be 'migration', 'planting', or 'harvesting' dates.
Setting up stones to cast a specific, and unique, shadow on a particular date is easy to do on that date. And I've done it on hiking trails for things like solstice dates for other hikers to discover later. Since the transformation of the shadow is predictable with motion of the Sun, I've also used it on trails where I experienced good conditions, so that when I come back to that trail, I can look at my 'date ducks' and they will tell me if it was earlier or later in the season when I set them up (assuming they haven't been moved of course).
> I can imagine that to a paleolithic hunter/gatherer it would be beneficial to use an arrangement of stones to "capture" a particular date. Dates of interest might be 'migration', 'planting', or 'harvesting' dates.
This is almost always done by observing the behavior of local plants and animals. For example, you might say that spring starts after the cherry trees have bloomed -- an event which is obvious -- and start your planting then. The precise date will wander around the year, from an astronomical point of view, but it will generally be better chosen each year than any fixed astronomical date would be.
Just food for thought - many people don't appreciate cairns because of their distinctly unnatural appearance. I used to build them until I learned this. In hindsight it makes sense, people ought to be able to enjoy the environment as close to its natural state as possible, with the somewhat necessary exception of the trail.
Everyone has an opinion. I'd encourage you not to just accept others. Cairns have a long tradition in hiking and at their most basic are a simple wave to a fellow wanderer in remote areas. Dark Souls has the same concept as a built-in game mechanic with it's tagging.
I don't build them myself because I don't have the patience (and dogs tend to make sitting still problematic :P), but I appreciate most every one I see for what it is: someone came to this same place I'm enjoying and did so in such a calm and focused manner, there are stacked rocks to show for it.
I can imagine that someone somewhere has built a massive cairn with disregard to the site and the other wanderers there. That person sucks.
You should be more hospitable in interpretation and use less passive wording. I agreed with someone else after hearing their point of view. Implying I'm a hapless sheep that agrees with whatever I'm told for that is going a bit far.
It is a fun surprise for people. The easiest one you can do is a pointed rock on top of the duck, and then a "signpost" rock at the shadow tip. If you're hiking trails in northern California and see a stack of rocks, and off to the side where the shadow is you see another rock that is distinctly different (in shade or composition) sitting in the arc that the shadow traces, that could very well be one of my "date ducks."
No contact information. No authors listed for the articles. The only links in the article go to the biography of a small town TV reporter, and Wikipedia. No links to the original source material.
Firstly, there hasn't actually been a significantly larger loss of planes and boats in the triangle compared to most other highly trafficked areas of the ocean. Secondly, geologists don't think any significant gas release from Methane Clathrate have occurred in that area for about 15,000 years.
In other words, there's nothing to be explained, and if there were, Methane Clathrate wouldn't be it.
As a non American we learn (just a little) about ancient civilizacions from all around the globe but nothing about North American ones, as if they never existed.
For the most part we don’t learn about them because we don’t know a lot about them. Many of the pre-Colombian civilizations either didn’t build permanent structures or built them from wood that’s long since rotted away. With a few exceptions they also didn’t congregate in large stationary cities where we can dig to find hundreds/thousands of years of artifacts in the same place . Again with a few exceptions, they also didn’t write down their history for us to read it.
As an American we only learn fairly superficial details about the people who were here before us, because we know they existed but there’s just not a lot of historical record. Look up Cahokia, which was a massive city (at Cahokia’s peak it likely had more residents than London did at the same time). And yet all that remains is some piles of dirt.
There is an additional complication too: North American archaeologists have to contend with modern descendants of indigenous cultures, who frequently insist that digs be halted and filled in, remains be reburied, and artifacts be repatriated to private owners.
The efforts by assorted tribes against archaeology culminated in NAGPRA, which has hamstrung researchers quite severely.
(Potential HN argument defuser: I'm not making a statement here on cultural values, merely observing that North American archaeology has an additional unique hurdle to understanding cultures of the past.)
That made me smile because it's a little the opposite of what happen in many places in Europe. When somebody try to build something new, they have to contend with the archaeologists, who frequently insist that the construction is halted and they start to dig there.
FWIW that's very close to California state law, one of my buddies is that guy who can tell the construction workers to drop everything (they hate him!)
As someone that's an archeologist in North America and has dealt with NAGPRA... Every country ought to have something similar. It's not ideal and I could go on for as long as anyone about its flaws, but giving people control over their heritage is a non-negotiable position for me.
The most succinct explanation is that it's simply professional ethics, with lots of good reasons behind it. In no particular order or comprehensiveness:
1. There's a long history of what is best described as stealing by archaeologists/anthropologists for museums and as a means of colonial control (e.g. looting the Benin bronzes). We want to stay far away from even the appearance of that.
2. Regardless of whether it's logical or not, people can have significant emotional identification with artifacts, sites, and remains. That's a big part of why we want to study them at all. For instance, you'd probably be offended by archaeologists walking into your yard and digging up a loved one's remains, or stealing the constitution of your country, dynamiting St. Paul's Cathedral, etc without at least asking the relevant authorities.
3. In almost all cases, we don't need any individual site or artifact. There are entire databases full of known sites we've never gotten around to excavating, due to time, budget, remoteness, or lack of research questions and people to answer them. The academic value of having one more site or artifact is typically small, while there's a huge potential for harm to an often nebulous "someone". There have been cases where this math is different because of the circumstances of a particular find(e.g. kennewick man), but these are the exception rather than the rule.
4. Artifacts are always part of a wider record, and we as a community are going to have to work with this group in the future. If people are continually feeling screwed over when we don't consider their input, they'll eventually stop helping us (providing cultural input, labor, access to other artifacts/records, land access, legal permissions, they may involve the legal system etc). There are communities where this has already happened and lack of access to them has severely limited later academic work.
5. People with a relationship to the artifacts or remains often have a valuable perspective to contribute. "Academics" (who are not a unified group either) often do better work when they consider local input, and it can help to resolve ambiguous or unclear situations. One famous example came up in what's called the Magician's tomb at Ridge Ruin, where there was an unusually rich grave that the leading archaeologist had difficulty interpreting. He brought in some Hopi (distant descendants), who were able to identify and share how some of the goods would have been used in modern times, which helped contextualize the grave and provided a starting point for future discussions.
6. It's generally considered a human rights violation if the "not asking" is egregious enough.
7. If you don't involve the locals and show them what's up, they get distrustful. This can manifest as petty thievery, destruction of excavations-in-progress, legal issues, and grave robbing.
There are probably a lot more good reasons, but this is what immediately came to mind. What NAGPRA did was establish that this basic respect was required of everyone touching native artifacts, and that while researchers could still do work that benefited scientific understanding, they had to either justify that need or consult with the affected parties. It also did some other good things like establish procedures for repatriation, which certain institutions had been notoriously slow to do for themselves.
Many remains of the mound building civilizations in the present-day US were plowed away, as they were in prime farming geography. You're right that many of the structures were made of wood and dirt that are less lasting than stone, but there were a large number of them that were lost through field preparation. The reasons for this are complex, including a disregard for Native American structures, but in many cases people just didn't know what they were.
The mound building civilizations of North America are fascinating to me, not the least of which is because of the pyramidal-mound structures of Central America.
There are several piles of dirt in Cahokia. Part of the trouble is there has never been a serious attempt to uncover and restore the site. But unlike say Machu Pichu or Chichen Itza, it's on the shore of the Missippi with a highway cutting through it and a few centuries of both flooding and human development on top of what could be there.
What's sad is that it's barely outside St. Louis and isn't a part of their tourist identity, despite basically being on top of one of the oldest settlements in North America.
Cahokia is actually among the newest settlements among North American civilization: it peaks around 1100, fully collapsing by around 1350. The earliest mound building site I'm aware of is Poverty Point, which begins to be built around 1800 BC. The Southwest cultures (e.g., Ancestral Pueblo) are developing clear settlements by around 750. Moving into Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan collapses sometime in the 500s, and dates back to perhaps 1-ish. Contemporary with them is the Classical Maya. San Lorenzo is the oldest Olmec center, dating back to 1200 BC-ish.
And what cultures that did survive the Colombian exchange were massively changed to the point where it’s very hard to determine what they looked like before. This means that a lot of the traditions that survived into the 1800s (when good written records start) are probably not terribly representative of what might have existed in the centuries prior.
The horse in particular changed everything, and created the archetypical Buffalo hunting nomad of the Great Plains, a cultural arrangement that did not exist in North America before the introduction of the horse.
We've infested our continent pretty comprehensively. My wife who grew up around Los Alamos remembers exploring mesa tops as a kid with other kids. The boys would look the ruins and toss everything over the side to see it smash - pots, stones, whatever. The structures got pushed over and scattered.
We've only fairly recently gotten to value antiquities I suppose. In the US anyway.
The Casa grande ruins aren't 2k years old. The main structure is a classic Hohokam pueblo, from around the 13th century as I recall with a few hundred years of earlier canal systems and villages nearby. You have to go a bit south to Tucson to see the 2-4k year old stuff.
I grew up in the southern US, and we didn’t learn a lot either beyond a couple chapters about local native populations. I learned much more in some classes in college — the American Southwest has been home to several very advanced civilizations and the archaeological record is astounding.
Imagine Europe during 6000-2000 BC. That is basically the equivalent of what colonizers came to. There wasn't enough to be discovered because the majority of them were still nomadic. Even the cahokia mounds showed that North American civilizations were short lived.
Part of what makes this difficult is a lack of written language for many of these. Also, humans existing in north america is a lot more recent than other ancient civilizations.
Not necessarily ancient, but if you’re interested in learning about American civilizations prior to European contact, I highly recommend the book 1491 by Charles Mann. It’s a fascinating read.
This seems as likely to be a prank as real. The great lakes were formed when the glaciers melted. Prior to that the area was under kilometers of ice. Nothing in the geological record seems to allow for humans walking about in that location at any time.
I was reading an article this summer about another possible find under the Great Lakes. The article talks about things submerged in the Great Lakes. From the article [1]...
> John O'Shea, professor and curator of the Great Lakes Archaeology at the University of Michigan in his laboratory on Oct. 14, 2020. In 2009, he published a research paper on discoveries of evidence of an ancient culture around the time of the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, submerged off the shore of Lake Huron around Alpena, Mich. in an area that would have been dry land at that time.
I realize the article is a mix of things. Unverified possible things along with more scientific details.
The video discusses the lake level dropping for a period of several thousand years. So there maybe is something in the geological record that allows for humans to be walking about there?
Lake Agassiz in present day Manitoba was larger then all the great lakes combined, after the last glacial period. Most of it is now livable land. Water moves around, it would be very presumptuous to think you know what the shorelines and lakes were like in the last 12000 years.
So how can modern global warming be attributed to pollution? I suppose not all, but it seems like a large % of the population acts as if this is something which has been happening over the past 200 years. This bitch been melting for thousands of years.
I think those elephant lines were supper-imposed on the image to highlight the possible outline of an elephant sculpture. Not the actual picture on the rock.
Mastodons disappeared from North America ~12,800 years ago, 10,800 BCE, coincident with extinction of 31 other large-animal genera, basically everything except bear, bison, and moose. (A bear much larger than the grizzly disappeared too.)
Unless you believe in people maintaining memories of mastodons for 1800 years, or pareidolia finding an image not really there, we are talking about a structure much older than 9000 years.
The photo in the article looks very murky. But Lake Michigan can look really Blue in the summer, and has places with great sand beaches. It feels almost tropical in the summer. Probably the zebra mussels filtering the lake have cleared it up.
The zebra mussels are what I always heard the clearing attributed to. I spent a lot of summers in the Grand Traverse Bay area in the 80s and 90s. The water got a lot clearer in the later 90s. It's spooky-clear now. (Beautiful area-- I wish there was work there to support my family. I'd move in a heartbeat...)
I've been to Traverse City two times, each time had a great time. So many fun things to do. And its a little less humid in the summer than Detroit, and has fresher air. But the water is still warm. You can just walk out on the sandy beach and go for a swim, like you're in the Bahamas or something. I used to live in Vancouver, and the local lakes were never warm enough to swim in in the Summer.
There's an event every year called the "whiting" of Lake Michigan.
Then the Spring sun warms the water, it reacts with the limestone at the bottom and causes large white swirls through the water. I've seen pictures on it on local TV newscasts taken from helicopters.
The photo of the stonehenge-like structure underwater is unrelated to the contents of the article. The actual structure is roughly a line of stones, not a circle.
This is not a Stonehenge-all like at all (the slightly more interesting bit is a possible mastodon 'painting'). IF it's anything it's most likely a small native American driving trail used for hunting game as the video mentions.
Where lining up small rocks is sufficient in a V like shape into a 'kill zone'.
Stonehenge on the otherhand is an amazing human achievement for the era it was made.
In tropical places they create monuments or statues and sink them to make it more interesting to go dive on. I'm not sure if its been done on the great lakes too.
I know Tobermory in Ontario is a famous dive spot for a near surface tanker ship that sank there. Its something I miss about Europe. So many interesting artifacts to look at.
"Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eon's worth of mud?"
This is a separate site that doesn't have rocks from the famous UK stonehenge. The idea is it might be independently created, as a natural thing people might make to track things like the sun or other astronomical movements (like the movement of the sun at the solstices). And if the age is about 9,000 years old, a little older than the uk stonehenge.
https://holleyarchaeology.com/wordpress/index.php/the-truth-...