“No farmer in New England would’ve done something like this"

It seems we'll always end up frustrated in our attempts to unravel mysteries of past cultures if we confine ourselves to explanations that fit neatly into cultural and societal contexts that we're familiar with. Our prejudices tend to get in the way of discovering the capabilities and motives of peoples who lived by different sets of values and beliefs.

This is especially true when it comes to indigenous communities that many consider to be "primitive" or "backwards" by our standards. Curious how some experts look past indigenous peoples and assume Europeans must be behind the construction of the so-called "America's Stonehenge". (GW)

America’s Stonehenge: A Classic Whodunit and Whydunit

By Jay Atkinson
New York Times
December 11, 2009

Salem, N.H. — At this leafless and gloomy time of year I traveled, in the spirit of the symbologist Robert Langdon of “The Da Vinci Code,” to America’s Stonehenge, in this town five miles from the Massachusetts border. Scholars have debated whether the stone cairns and chambers here were built by early American Indians, enterprising colonial settlers or, more controversially, a migrant European culture that visited these woods nearly 4,000 years ago.

Determined to plumb these mysteries, I arrived at a rustic information center and gift shop on a cold and gray Sunday morning. Inside I was greeted by the aptly named Dennis Stone, 55, a commercial airline pilot who along with his wife, Pat, 59, owns this unusual roadside attraction. (Dennis’s father, Robert E. Stone, 80, began leasing the site in 1958 and bought all 105 acres in 1965, saving it from possible development.)

A charming mix of prehistoric wonders, alpaca farming and kitsch, America’s Stonehenge is an oasis of eccentricity in an ever-growing world of carefully managed and manicured tourist spots.

“We don’t think it was a ‘habitat’ site,” said the stocky, bespectacled Mr. Stone. “Perhaps a shaman once stayed here, but primarily it’s a religious and astronomical site, a gathering place, like Stonehenge in England.”

The main site is a half-mile past the gift shop at the top of a small round hill. On the path leading up through a stand of ragged oak trees I’d arranged to meet Alan Hill, 68, a professor of astronomy at New Hampshire Technical Institute.

“I don’t know of any other group of people besides the Celts who celebrate the ‘cross quarter’ holidays marked up here,” said Mr. Hill, an agile, sparely built man with a neatly trimmed beard. “You’ll find the same type of construction in Scotland, Ireland and England,” as well as other North American sites stretching from eastern Canada down to the Hudson River Valley, he said as we walked along. Cross-quarter days fall halfway between solstices and equinoxes.

Partway up the slope is the Watch House, a small chamber of hand-hewn stones piled to one side of a boulder and covered with earth, forming a space where a sentry could have crouched. “No farmer in New England would’ve done something like this,” Mr. Hill said, dismissing the notion that the chambers were built as root cellars in the 1700s. For one thing, he said, the openings are not wide enough to accommodate a wheelbarrow.

As we passed a low-lying brook, he said: “A lot of these megalithic sites have a water source nearby. My theory is, the people who built the sites quarried the stones, waited until winter and then threw water down and slid the stones over the ice. They didn’t have machines.”

The sun was tracking its low arc across the sky, illuminating the stone structures embedded in the earth. At the top of the rise Mr. Hill and I ducked our heads to enter the L-shaped Oracle Chamber. Dark and damp inside, the carefully constructed warren is half buried underground, and includes the sacrificial table, a four-and-a-half ton grooved slab of granite thought to be 4,000 years old. What ancient rituals were performed here, and by whom, remains a subject of debate.

“I’ve never visited a site — anywhere — that combines standing stones with stone chambers,” Mr. Hill said. “That’s a certainly a large part of my fascination.”

Two days later I returned to America’s Stonehenge for a consultation with David Brody, a local lawyer and mystery novelist who shares Mr. Hill’s belief that European visitors built this place. Mr. Brody pointed out that the complex of cairns, walls, chambers and huts was encircled, at a distance of approximately 100 yards, by notched “sighting stones” that lined up with the sunrise and sunset on important dates like the summer and winter solstices.

“There were no calendars or almanacs” 4,000 years ago, said Mr. Brody, 47, a hearty, goateed man in hiking boots and a flannel shirt. By marking the rising and setting sun on certain days, the people who built the structures “knew when to plant and harvest crops, when to launch their ships and when to pray,” he said.

Ground mists are fuming up from the lowlands as we ascend the hill. “The colonial argument never made sense to me,” Mr. Brody said, squatting beside one of the chambers to indicate how the rising sun would strike a certain stone on the inner wall. Noting that colonial settlers would not have been dependent on astronomical events to track the days of the year, he said: “There’s too many of these to write off as coincidence. Sure, there’s evidence that the Native Americans used them as sweat lodges. But when you have elaborate stone structures like these, there’s a lot of reuse when a new civilization comes along.”

Departing the raw New Hampshire woods, I encountered a honeymooning couple, Mike and Georgia Sasso, both 23 and history lovers from West Point, Miss. “It makes you feel what it must’ve been like, living way back then,” Mr. Sasso said.

With a giggle, Ms. Sasso said: “It was a little scary. What I saw was — it felt ancient.”

Driving home in the rain, I recalled something that Mr. Hill told me. “So many things in the world today, we have to figure out exactly what it is. Here’s something that’s three, four thousand years old, and we don’t know who constructed it and how they used it. More than that we’re never going to know.”

IF YOU GO

America’s Stonehenge (105 Haverhill Road, Salem, N.H.; 603-893-8300, stonehengeusa.com) is open year round. Admission prices are $9.50 for adults, $8.50 for 65 and older, $6.50 for children ages 6 to 12 and free under 5.