From: Steve Wingate  (by way of Steve Wingate
)
Subject: Arrangement of Boulders Suggests Indian 'Stonehenge' (fwd)
Message-ID: <9511040011.AA21786@linex.com>
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 1995 16:11:57 -0800

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Arrangement of boulders suggests Indian 'Stonehenge'

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(c) 1995 Copyright Nando.net
(c) 1995 The Boston Globe


STERLING, Conn. (Nov 3, 1995 - 15:24 EST) -- The recent discovery here
of what may be a Native American Stonehenge -- an arrangement of
mysteriously carved boulders -- could revolutionize historians'
understanding of the people who lived in southern New England
thousands of years ago.

Unearthed through the efforts of a curious dairy farmer who lives
nearby, the three boulders -- two on a north-south axis and a third
about 200 feet to the west -- plot an almost perfect corn planting and
harvesting calendar.

A person at the western rock looking east would see the sun rise over
one rock on April 26 and the second rock on Septeber 6. Those dates
mark, within a week, the optimum times to plant and harvest corn to
avoid frost danger while allowing the 120-day growing season corn
needs here.

Each of the boulders appears to weigh several tons, so it is not clear
how they were brought into alignment. The copious carvings, including
several oval and circular shapes, also indicate the rocks are no
random occurrence.

"It's compelling, but not conclusive," said David Wagner of Thompson,
Conn., an amateur historian and artist who has investigated the site.
"A lot more work needs to be done."

Other historians and archeologists and who this month began
intensively investigating the site, located in the Pachaug State
Forest, are equally reluctant to jump to conclusions. They do not rule
out the possibility the rocks are the creation of Vikings, pre-
Columbus explorers, more sophisticated Indians who visited from the
Midwest or even a Colonial-era hoax artist.

And representatives of the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes, although
elated by the evidencethat suggests their forebears knew far more
astronony and mathematics than historians had thought, fear that
publicity about the find could lead to vandalism or desecration of a
potentially sacred site.

Connecticut state archeologist Nick Bellantoni, affiliated with the
University of Connecticut, said he hopes to get funding for a detailed
review.

"I'm rather confident that they are probably Native American in
origin, but I have nothing to compare it to," Bellantoni said. "I
think it is very much worth investigating. We just want to make sure
that people respect the site."

Although some Native Americans have said the site could be 10,000 or
more years old, Bellantoni said he strongly doubts it is that ancient.
The earliest evidence of corn planting in Connecticut dates from the
year 700, when traveling tribes from the Ohio Valley probably
introduced corn to the area, he said.

For more than 80 years, some residents of the rolling countryside
nearby have know about the mysterious carvings on the largest of the
three granite rocks. Those include figures that appear to represent
the heads of a deer and a mountain lion, with a prominent quartz
outcropping for teeth.

But it was not until last spring that farmer George Molodich, whose
family runs a 600-Holstein dairy farm nearby, went exploring near the
carved rock, and a second with smaller carvings, and cleared away a
pile of decomposing leaves to reveal a third rock with similar
carvings and iron-oxide stripes.

Wagner, who teaches at Quinebague Community College, made several
sunrise trips to the remote site and began speculating that the three
rocks formed some sort of celestial calendar.

He wrote to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, and director Neil Tyson sent him back on Oct. 2 a
specially calculated, seven-page chart listing sunrise locations at
the site.

 > From his own azimuth calculations and the chart, Wagner determined
that the three rocks would plot a corn-season calendar. Wagner has
been visiting every few days for months to take solar readings and
study the carvings, and he recently finished a 20-page report with
charts and maps about the site.

Molodich, the dairy farmer, has since found another 26 boulders, many
with similar carving and still-visible lines seemingly painted on them
with a crude kind of iron oxide called bog ore. Together, the boulders
describe a shape close to a circle. Some site visitors wonder if the
stones could mark solstices and other solar events like eclipses.

"The more you look, the more you find," said Molodich.

John Brown, tribal history preservation officer for the Narragansetts,
said he is certain the rocks indicate deep celestial knowledge and
were used in ceremonies.

But Brown and Mohegan tribal historian Melissa Fawcett are leery of
allowing uncontrolled public exploration. "There is direct concern
about the safety of these rocks," Brown said. "The destruction of such
a thing would be  terrible loss."

Native Americans recall a similarly carved boulder on Mohegan Hill in
Montville that was destroyed when the state constructed Route 32.
Native American leaders have also been reluctant to share too much
knowledge about the possible meaning of the boulder carvings,
apparently to preserve the sanctity of what may have been a deeply
holy site for their ancestors.

The Connecticut site is far less elaborate than another site in Salem,
N.H., once called Mystery Hill and renamed in 1982 America's
Stonehenge, that some scholars think Indians or Celts built millennia
ago but whose origins have never been determined. The 110-acre site,
developed as a tourist attraction, features a series of stone walls
and boulders that mark solar and lunar events.

The earliest evidence of Native American life in southern New England
dates back about 12,000 years, soon after the last glacier covering
the region receded.

The Pachaug Forest site appears to have been occupied at various times
by members of four different tribes that were all Algonquian-speaking,
the Mohegans, Narragansetts, Nipmucs and Pequots. The site is close to
what was once an Indian path that led from Narragansett Bay inland and
also to an abundant spring the Molodich family now uses for its farm.

Most historical accounts hold that there were never more than a few
thousand Indians at a time living in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and
Connecticut, subsisting on beans, squash, wild nuts and berries and
fish caught in rock dams and wooden-stake weirs.

Most of the region's Indians appear to have died in the 17th century
from smallpox brought over by European colonists and in wars, such as
the 1637 burning of a Pequot fort on the Mystic River and King
Philip's uprising in 1675 through 1678. A number fled the area, some
to New York and Wisconsin, or became converts to Christianity and
intermarried with colonists.

Although Indian communities still exist in the region -- including the
600-member Mashantucket Pequot trie, who run the Foxwoods Casino in
Ledyard -- few traces of their past remain. That makes the apparent
corn-planting calendar all the more important to scholars and tribal
leaders.

"If we could verify that this is in fact Native American in origin"
and somehow establish its age, Bellantoni said, "it could be very
significant. We just do not have anything else like this."



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