http://www.stonehengeusa.com

anyone been here? its either a big hoax or it was believed to be constructed by celts or phoenicians nearly 4000 years ago due to the characters carved in the stone. something tells me its the former but i guess theyve found through carbon dating that there were biological materials dating back to then.

The wiki and this article are good background.

Looks like some dude moved around a bunch of the stones in the 19th century but others were part of native a North American tribe's site. The actual artifacts are apparently consistent with habitation from the 2nd millennia BCE, but not Bronze Age European.

I lived near that place as a kid. the only think i did was drive by the entrance and knew people that went there to drink.

Went there this past Saturday, hadn't been there in a number of years. Cool place.

It wouldn't surprise me if early European civilizations had visited. We know they were superior sailors.

(And not "that kind of" sailor, either...)

there is overwhelming evidence that European civilizations spent quite a bit of time in New England. Massachusetts alone is loaded with structures that have the exact same design as ancient Druid and Norse craftsmanship.

holy grail please

Dighton Rock, Dorchester Pot, the Norse coin they found in Maine..

Links to sources please.

Dwight Rock?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_colonization_of_the_Americas

Yes I am aware that the Scandinavians went to Newfoundland. There is nothing in that article and no credible evidence (that I am aware of) for settlement this far south.

"there is no evidence of enduring Norse settlements on mainland North America."

There are no documented settlements this far south. But dighton rock leans toward Norse origins. I also remember hearing they might have sailed as far south as new York but never settled there. I've got to dust off all the books I have on it

Their is clear and definitive evidence of Norse occupation of Newfoundland. There is no evidence of Norse settlements at all in Massachusetts.

it was aliens

check out the Upton Chamber. there is belief its Celtic in origin. everything i've found i've read in books, not online.

QFT.

I meant more: do you know any peer-reviewed articles published in journals? I am skeptical of books when the topic is this controversial and uncertain.

I've read stuff that the Phoenecians were the first Europeans on the East Coast; but I don't think there's any evidence to prove that. I think part of the problem is that we don't know if the Natives here defended their land and killed off anyone seeking the east coast.
Of course it wasn't too long ago when we killed half of them with small pox and then committed genocide against them.

I think its a really cool and interesting idea but I am extremely skeptical of anthropological theories with little to no evidence to support them. Especially when they require determined human undertakings like crossing the Atlantic.

I personally think that it speaks better for humans if we discover developments in nearly isolated cultures that parallel each other. IE: Pyramidal constructions in Africa, Central America, and Asia.

Ha, that ties into the Ancient Astronaut theory. Of course, everything is scoffed at by mainstream archeologists.
But there are certain areas in the world which are unexplainable. Puma Punku in Bolivia, for example. You ever read anything on that? The Wiki article is junk.

There are no semi-permanent settlements this far south. The Newfoundland site is well known and recently a site in Nunavut was found. There was minor trade activity with the natives at semi-permanent sites (they called them Skraelings) but they could not endure because eventually one side or the other became hostile. At least one small band of Norse explorers went as far as Southern Maine and possibly as far as Massachusetts looking for cranberries but it's unclear if they ever found them - this expedition didn't last long because of skirmishes with the natives. The summers of 1000 AD were far warmer and there would have been a lot more food to forage in the area. The Norse coin is definitely from that expedition.

I've heard of Norse runestones as far as Oklahoma but those were possibly moved by natives and I've also never seen a source on it.

^ Yes. I heard the Natives here weren't exactly nice to them. The Inuit up north were intially hostile, but I think eventually they started to trade with the Norse. Furs, blubber, food.
That's what makes Dighton Rock so interesting - the Natives had no idea what it was or who put it there, and it's been researched for over 150 years. No one really knows where it came from, but everything I've read leans more toward Norse origin.

I've not read any academic articles on it but I've read about it in other places. It seems to me that its entirely plausible for Stone Age peoples in South America to shape those blocks in the way they did.

Just because we we can't deduce how they did it doesn't mean they couldn't have on their own. The problem with all these Alien Astronaut theories is that they're really just conjecture when you come down to it.

Trust me, no one would be happier than I to learn that the universe does contain other intelligent and technologically advanced forms of life. But I endeavor to always be a skeptic.

Dighton Rock - look at the bottom towards the middle - there are at least four obvious Norse runes on it carved using the exact same method. I have no doubt that is from the same expeditions that the Norse coin originates from (there was at least one expedition and no more than two).

I'd really like to see this in person. It probably chronicles a hostile encounter with the natives.

I did some reading on this and found it interesting as well. Again my skeptical self always has problems ascribing anonymous petroglyphs to a particular people without associated sites that can be dated better. All it seems that is really known about Dighton Rock is that it was deposited more than 10000 years ago as a glacial erratic. Please correct me if I'm wrong. This is a cool imagine of how people have copied the petroglyphs over the years:

it is a conjecture, but a very interesting one at that.
Outside of being presumed to be over 14,000 years old, it's not the stones themselves that puzzle scientists in Puma Punku, it's the precise markings and holes in the stone. The stones are made of diorite, which is just below diamond on the the scale rocks and minerals. The markings, lines, and holes on the rocks seem to be done with machines. I wouldn't disclude that humans did it - it's just very odd how this site gets overlooked. I've also read stuff about the city near Puma Punku - Tiahuanaco. There are supposedly paintings on the walls of a cave near Lake Titicaca that depict animals that are no longer alive in South America.
It's just one of many unexplained areas around the world. there is simply not enough evidence to gahter a correct hypothesis on that site.

Do you know why they are presumed to be 14000 years old? Do they have carbon dating from associated digs?

I'm a beliver that there may have been more advanced cultures - before that last Ice Age - that we don't really know too much about.
It is kind of strange that just about every religion has a story about a massive flood. Obviously, something happened when a lot of religions from different continents claim the same thing.

That's why I'm intrigued by the Atlantis theory, among others. The fact remains that we DON'T know much about pre-Egyptian history. It's a common belief that most people were nomads (or druids in northern Europe).

But what if there's a discovery that will change the course of human thinking?

All the different impressions are so intriguing. The runic themes are so obvious, they are represented everywhere on the rock.



You can clearly see thurs, as, reid, gifu, hagal, odal, dagaz, bjarka, algiz...............

I think I remember reading that they used soil samples for the Carbon dating. Obviously you can't carbon-date stones, and that's all that's left there. It's one giant massive mess of a ruin.

Another thing that intrigues me in south america - The Nazca Lines

That would be wonderful if we discovered something that fundamentally changed our ideas about when and where complex sedentary societies first arose. Its not implausible that agriculture was discovered and abandoned elsewhere before its permanent adoption in Mesopotamia/Egypt/China. The natives of the American southwest did so as well as many of the peoples that had once made up the Mayan civilization.

Carbon dating is prone to contaminants
Not like I've ever done it myself. I've been on a regular date tho.

The Nazca lines are the coolest and most compelling example of all of these oddities I think. There is little to no dispute about their antiquity and they are just so fucking massive and specific its unbelievable.

The first high art started to appear ~40,000 years ago, agriculture must have existed somewhere in some form around then.

You mean the first monumental architecture/art or cave art?

You don't need an artisan class to produce some beautiful cave paintings, so you don't really need agriculture. Monumental architecture
is associated with almost every instance of agriculture so if its not there then there's got to be strong alternative evidence.

I would love to tour down to South America and then play some metal in some ruins

Well the Venus sculptures found in a German cave are a little bit more complicated than cave art, but not quite architectural. Still it's an image of fertility that's loosely related to agriculture. Could have been happening in a completely different part of the world.

I mean..it doesn't take much to figure out that if you see plants growing, you could probably group some together and get results through trial and error.

Yea, it doesn't. And in time - domestication of animals.
Because they relied on the stars and their primitive gods for everything, the problem would be predicting draughts. It also depends on the crop and where you're farming. Most farming communities were near rivers or other bodies of water. The more inland you got, the chances of the society being more of a hunter/gatherer society increased. Up in nothern Europe (Norway for example), I know one of their only crops they grew up there were cabbage. It wasn't until advanced trade routes were established that plants and agruculture technique spread throughout the land.
The societies that had more kinds of plants to cultivate obviously flourished in that aspect, whereas the Germanic tribes or most like it leaned more on hunting.

Very good point, you also have the issue of soil depletion. Lack of crop rotation limited the amount of food that could be produced by many ancient cultures. I think its pretty clear that Northern Europe didn't have the proper climate or terrain to foster meaningful forays into agriculture thousands of years ago.

I read a bout this place in Weird New England, seems pretty cool. Definitely wanna check it out.

i could probably punt a football to this from my house, never been though.

I thought this thread was about this:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/m...7-05/ff_guidestones?currentPage=all

Dude. You post the Guidestones for the NWO and don't believe my rants? OFF WITH YER HEAD!

NWO? That's a leap.

Honestly, I haven't read much into the connection, but supposedly there's numerous ones. I know the one they always mention is how it states to keep the WORLD's population below 500,000,000 people.
Who knows, that place is a mystery. Interested in reading more into it.

PS: Off with yer head -ArrowHeadNLI = ArrowNLI. LOL - not funny.

Nope I don't do that anon bullshit.

nah, i said off with yer head. then I realized that would change your name to ArrowNLI. Not funny at all. Pretty stupid for me to even post that.

Oh. I missed the joke. I fail.