[LINK] "America’s Stonehenge: A Classic Whodunit and Whydunit"

[rfmcdonald]

Wikipedia classifies America's Stonehenge, "a number of large rocks and stone structures scattered around roughly 30 acres (120,000 m2) within the town of Salem, New Hampshire in the northeast United States" that might be an astronomical observatory of some kind or alternatively a hoax, under the categories of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact and pseudoarcheology among others. Be that as it may, as the New York Times's Jay Atkinson notes, there's an understandable thrill to visiting the site regardless.

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.”