There are at least a couple of sites in our odyssey that have been claimed to be, not just a written message or an isolated stone monument, but the remnants of entire villages of ancient European settlers to the New World. The very same problem I’ve addressed in reference to written messages and stone monuments is magnified further here. Ancient Celts or Phoenicians or Romans or Jews or whoever cannot possibly have built and then lived in a village and never dropped or lost or discarded or put away for safe keeping something that an archaeologist could find, identify, and then trace its cultural and geographic source. However, as we’ll see, at neither Gungywamp in Connecticut (Hitt 1998) or America’s Stonehenge/Mystery Hill in New Hampshire (Vescelius 1956) is there a single artifact—much less an entire assemblage of artifacts—that would be out of place at an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century New England farm or community. Without any thousand-year-old bronze tools traceable to Western Europe at these New England sites, lacking European ceramics or burials—in essence, without an archaeological context for these places—archaeologists will be highly skeptical.
There is an exception to this. There actually is an entire archaeological site in the New World left behind by settlers five centuries before the Columbus expeditions in the late fifteenth century. Archaeologists found the remnants of cooking features, trash pits, house remains, and tool-making areas that are not associated with Native People and representing a time and material culture not associated with nineteenth-century settlers. The L’anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland provides exactly what an archaeologist would expect at an eleventh-century AD Norse colony, wherever it was found, including North America (Ingstad 1977). The other sites included in this category of archaeological oddities simply don’t. L’anse aux Meadows is, in a sense, a model or template for what an archaeological site should look like when it represents the remains of a colony of people bearing a culture markedly different from that of local, Indigenous People; this is where the other two sites discussed in this section come up woefully short. Let’s take a look at these places and examine what archaeological research can tell us about their origin.
18. Gungywamp, Groton, Connecticut
Archaeological perspectives
Take a walk deep into the woods just about anywhere in southern New England and you might be surprised by what you’ll see. Despite its current appearance as an uninhabited wilderness, all around you’ll find abundant evidence of past human occupation. Sometimes along a hiking trail, but just as likely far off that beaten path, you will almost certainly encounter some of our seemingly ubiquitous, often finely made stone walls. But why would anyone construct all those walls in the middle of the woods? Within a complex grid of walls you might also see stone-lined cellar holes—the foundations of old houses—the footings for small outbuildings, and sometimes even isolated clusters of gravestones (figure 5.1). What are those signs of human activity doing deep in the forest? To the uninitiated, it might sound strange. After all, why are there signs of a human population effectively in the middle of nowhere?
Figure 5.1. The modern woodlands of New England are sprinkled with the remnants of abandoned nineteenth-century communities. House foundations, wells, roads, and cemeteries provide mute testimony to those once thriving villages.
Don’t be fooled by the current appearance of our southern New England forests. Today, about 60 percent of Connecticut is wooded. Massachusetts is about the same. But that number actually represents a substantial rebound from what it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century when it is estimated that only about 25 percent of Connecticut was wooded (https://www.fs.fed.us/ne/newtown_square/publications/resource_bulletins/pdfs/2004/ne_rb160.pdf). In fact, much of Connecticut’s woodlands had at one time been cleared for farming, for pasture lands, and for raw materials needed for construction and fuel. Areas that today are deep in our state forests were, in the past, cleared, settled, and heavily utilized. Those stone walls were built to mark property boundaries, keep cattle in their pastures, or just to clear glacial boulders from agricultural fields. House, barn, and other outbuilding foundations represent the archaeological evidence of often intensive previous human use.
Outside our river floodplains, Connecticut’s soil is rough, rocky, and acidic. Though people made a valiant effort to make agriculture economically viable, many farmsteads and even entire communities in our uplands were abandoned by the early twentieth century. The houses were burned or left to fall in on themselves, the barn boards were taken for reuse, and all that remains are the stone foundations and walls you can see during a walk in the woods. Those material remnants of cleared fields, houses, barns, and other outbuildings are the equivalent of ghost towns, with only their “bones” remaining to reflect what were once active and vibrant communities. Though deep in the woods today, they were not during their heyday.
One such place is Gungywamp located in the town of Groton in southeastern Connecticut. Much of the perceived strangeness associated with Gungywamp stems from that misunderstanding. It can’t just be a farmstead; why would a farmstead be located deep in the woods? The simple answer is, it wasn’t.
Here’s what we know
At least some of the stonework at Gungywamp, including walls, foundations, and stone-lined root cellars, may date back to the earliest European settlement of Connecticut. In AD 1654, colonist Thomas Pynchon wrote a letter to John Winthrop of New Haven mentioning stone walls and a fort (it’s impossible to determine what he meant precisely by that term) in the “Gungywamp range.” (I’ve left all of the original spellings, punctuation, and capitalization intact.)
Honored Sir;
Sir I heare a report of a stonewall and strong fort in it, made all of Stone, which is newly discovered at or neere Pequet, (presently known as the Gungywamp Range), I should be glad to know the truth of it from your selfe, here being many strange reports about it.
Remember, Pynchon isn’t saying that he himself witnessed the stone wall or fort; he’s merely inquiring about a report that he had heard. We don’t have Winthrop’s response, if he ever made one, and no one has ever found anything even vaguely resembling an actual fort, as we would define it anyway, anywhere in the area. But it is intriguing and suggests that perhaps some of the Gungywamp features may date to at least as far back as the mid-seventeenth century. That’s fascinating, but it lends no support to the claim made by some that Gungywamp is Pre-Columbian, and it doesn’t mean the site was built by ancient Druids or Celts, and it doesn’t mean the stonework is somehow related to an ancient solar calendar. Finally, it certainly doesn’t mean that Gungywamp is a freaky and paranormal place, as some claim.
Why are archaeologists skeptical?
Several years ago, the Archaeological Society of Connecticut held its fall meeting at the wonderful Peqoutsepos Nature Center. Following lunch, we carpooled to a parking area and then all hiked to the Gungywamp site. Among the attendees were a handful of people who genuinely believe that Gungywamp is weird, consisting of a series of out-of-place buildings that perhaps represents a ceremonial center of ancient European settlers who, apparently, worshipped the sun. Some of those same people—and you can’t make this up—also believe that Gungywamp is located at the confluence of a series of inexplicable paranormal streams. Seriously. They claim that some people become dizzy, lightheaded, and even nauseated when they walk through the site which, in actuality, is simply an old farmstead. Near the farmstead is a cliff, and apparently, some people spontaneously burst into tears (they even call the cliff the “Cliff of Tears”) when they get to the top. Others begin to bleed from their eyes, from their ears, or from their wherever (thank you Donald Trump; http://www.messagetoeagle.com/mysterious-ancient-gungywamp-could-be-a-gateway-to-a-parallel-reality/). The only reaction I’ve had to walking the trail to the top is an increased heart and respiration rate. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume this happens, not as a result of anything supernatural, but because it’s a pretty steep ascent and I don’t get enough exercise. But what do you expect from a skeptic?
Anyway, I was, in a sense, a tour guide during the aforementioned hike, and we had just walked by what was rather obviously the foundations of a dwelling and a barn (figure 5.2). Nothing weird about that. We continued on and, honestly, not more than about thirty seconds past those foundations, we came upon a fascinating feature, a double circle of shaped stones on the ground (figure 5.3). As cool as that was, there wasn’t anything particularly strange about it. In all likelihood those stones were the base of a bark mill, like the one pictured here (figure 5.4). Where water power wasn’t available—or where building an elaborate water-driven mill would have been overkill—a solid stone mill wheel could be placed upright within a concentric double circle of stones. A horizontal axle passed through the center of the mill wheel and connected to a vertical axle set into the ground in the center of the double circle. The outside of the horizontal axle was harnessed to a horse, mule, or oxen. When the animal(s) were induced to walk in a circle, the mill wheel would turn within the double stone circle, and anything placed therein—for example, bark to remove the chemical tannin for leather working or even apples for cider—would be crushed. It’s a pretty clever, decidedly low-tech way of crushing stuff. Nothing particularly paranormal about it.
Figure 5.2. Gungywamp is one of the abandoned communities mentioned in the introduction to this section. Here are the remnants of the stone foundation of a house and the adjacent barn in what is now an abandoned farmstead.
Figure 5.3. Though looking quite mysterious to the modern observer, this double ring of stones isn’t an ancient Celtic ceremonial monument. It’s a bark mill used in the production of tannin which, in turn, was used in hide working.
Figure 5.4. The remnants of a nineteenth-century bark mill with a double row of stones and the attendant vertical mill wheel still in place.
So, the double stone circle isn’t an oddity at all. What was odd for me as a tour guide was the fact that someone in the group questioned my interpretation, saying: “But why would a mill be placed here, in the middle of the woods, far away from anything else?” The implication was that the feature must really be something ceremonial, sacred, and strange and not just an ordinary bit of farm equipment because it was located in isolation, a lonely cluster of stones deep in the piney woods.
Wait, what? We encountered the double circle of stones literally thirty seconds after we walked by the foundations of the farmhouse and the barn (see figure 5.2). Had the questioner not been paying attention? I think the existence of the house and barn foundations might provide a tiny hint that, at one time, the location was not in the middle of nowhere. It was in the middle of a farm where a farmer might want to extract tannin or make cider.
Nearby the bark mill are two small chambers made of field stones (figure 5.5). Stone chambers like the ones at Gungywamp are interesting, of course, but as we’ve already seen in the example of the Acton, Upton, and Peach Pond stone chambers, they aren’t particularly mysterious to historians or archaeologists. Colonists built chambers like them for the cold storage of root crops and as ice houses. In fact, they’re often called “root cellars.” And as discussed previously, their orientations have to do with temperature control, not sun worship.
Figure 5.5. A storage chamber that was part of the farmstead at Gungywamp. Look at the chambers shown in figures 4.1, 4.4, and 4.7 for a comparison. Once again, no artifacts have been found in the chamber that would suggest a particularly ancient or alien (Celtic or Phoenician, for example) origin for the feature. It’s part of a farmstead and, therefore, likely was built and used in farming operations.
Finally, there simply are no artifacts, no bits and pieces of material culture, recovered at Gungywamp that can be traced to or associated with ancient Europeans. The only artifacts recovered at Gungywamp are of nineteenth-century European origin (Jackson, Jackson, and Linke 1981).
Whodunit?
We can’t always call out a single individual and bestow credit (or maybe blame) for an interpretation of a site that doesn’t match that of archaeologists or historians. Here we can. I met the gentleman in question, David Barron, more than thirty years ago. I didn’t spend very much time with him, but he certainly was an intelligent, interesting, energetic, and well-meaning guy. He believed that the structures at Gungywamp were built by Irish monks who had traveled to and settled in the New World about a thousand years before the Columbus voyages of exploration. To be sure, Barron wasn’t an archaeologist or historian, but he was a passionate believer in his interpretation of the site, and in 1979 he founded the Gungywamp Society whose purpose it was to further that view. In a fundamental way, Barron inspired many followers who were animated by his desire to paint what they perceived to be a more romantic history of their own southern New England backyards, a history that included ancient Irishmen coming here in their quest for a quiet place to worship God.
Why?
Writer Jack Hitt (1998) interviewed a bunch of “Gungywampers” some years ago for an article, participating in one of their hikes to the site. Hitt reports that among the believers there was a tremendous amount of resentment aimed at anyone with a degree in archaeology who questioned their interpretation. They expressed, according to Hitt, a special vitriol for people with degrees and training from Ivy League schools. Hitt also noted that the ethnicity of many of the Gungywampers matched that of the ancient Celts who they wanted very much to believe inhabited Connecticut in the distant past. Hitt noted the fact that at least the folks he encountered while writing the article were largely men of Irish descent intent on proving that Irishmen in antiquity were already living in Connecticut long before Columbus voyaged to the New World and also before those bloodthirsty Norsemen and Norsewomen explored and briefly settled in northeastern Canada.
I have no stomach for long-distance psychoanalysis, but we’ve already seen a strong current of ethnic pride running through the issue of which European group arrived in the New World first (for example, the Norse affection for the Kensington Runestone). I actually received a rather nasty letter from an Italian American woman in response to a mild op-ed piece I wrote pointing out that Columbus could not, in the true sense of the word, “discover” a land in which there were already millions of people living. A few years ago I met a very enthusiastic Jewish woman who was a passionate searcher for evidence that might support her strong belief that Jewish mariners had, in antiquity, plied the Atlantic and had landed upon the shores of America. So, if there is a component of ethnic pride here among the believers that yet another ethnic group beat Columbus to America, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Fake-o-meter
Five.
Getting there
The Gungywamp site is currently located on private land and not open to the general public, but it is in the process of being transferred to the State of Connecticut. It’s a fluid situation as I write this (in March 2018). Until that transfer is complete, the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center (DPNC) serves as the steward of the property, and they provide guided tours of the site. To read their sensible interpretation of the site and to arrange a tour, see: http://dpnc.org/gungywamp-structures/. You can also call them at (860) 536-1216. I have taken a couple of their tours, and the people are simply terrific. The nature center is located, conveniently enough, on Pequotsepos Road, Mystic Connecticut.
19. America’s Stonehenge/Mystery Hill, North Salem, Massachusetts
Archaeological perspectives
The original, historical name for the site that is the focus of this entry was Pattee’s Cave, named for Jonathan Pattee, the nineteenth-century landowner of the property located in the southern New Hampshire town of North Salem. Not really caves, the site consists of a series of dry-laid stone walls, more than a dozen chambers made from the same fieldstone used in the walls (I guess those are the “caves”), stone wall enclosures (figures 5.6 and 5.7), a stone-lined passageway, and a large, flat, grooved stone that I’ll discuss in detail.
Figure 5.6. America’s Stonehenge consists of a jumble of stone walls and a warren of stone chambers. It is an interesting site, to be sure, but nothing there is even vaguely reminiscent of the morphology of Stonehenge.
Figure 5.7. An example of the dry-laid stonework at America’s Stonehenge.
“Pattee’s Cave,” you will admit, isn’t a particularly romantic, poetic, or even accurate name for the site, but that’s how it started. The name applied to the place today by the current owners is America’s Stonehenge which, in all honesty, is overblown and flat-out inaccurate. I’ve been to Stonehenge in England and I’ve been to America’s Stonehenge in New Hampshire and, frankly, the latter is no Stonehenge (see figure 4.9).
Make no mistake, America’s Stonehenge is a fascinating place, and I do encourage you to visit it, but “Stonehenge”? Really? There’s no defining “henge” or stone circle at the New Hampshire site, which is kind of a deal killer. It can’t be Stonehenge without a henge. There are no impressive sarsen stones, each weighing in at about fifty thousand pounds. There are no precisely carved lintels connecting sarsens with mortice and tenon joints, the equivalent of giant stone Lego blocks. There are no looming trilithons in New Hampshire, features in which two upright stones, each more than twenty feet tall and weighing nearly twice as much as the sarsens, are connected, again in a stone version of mortise and tenon joinery, by bulky lintel stones. No one, truly no one, has ever walked into the middle of the place now called America’s Stonehenge and thought, “Wow, this is a dead ringer for Stonehenge.” Other than the fact that the original Stonehenge and America’s Stonehenge are, well, crafted of stone, along with the claim that, like the real deal, the American knockoff was built to record celestial alignments, there’s no comparison.
Which brings me to this: when I first encountered the place as a kid, it was called Mystery Hill. In fact, it was called that from the late 1930s or early 1940s right up until 1982 when the name was changed to America’s Stonehenge. For what it’s worth—not much, I agree—I think “Mystery Hill” was a more interesting and far more accurately descriptive name for the place, and I don’t mean that ironically. The mysteries implicit in that name and to be discussed in this entry focus on the same questions long raised about this admittedly idiosyncratic site: Who built the place, when did they build it, and what was its purpose?
Here’s what we know
Connecticut insurance executive William Goodwin thought he knew the answers to those questions after visiting the warren of stone chambers, walls, and other features that characterized Pattee’s Cave and then purchasing the place in 1937. Goodwin was convinced it was one of the most important historical locations in North America, remains of a settlement of Irish Culdee monks who, fleeing from the Vikings as they spread across the North Atlantic in the sixth and seventh centuries AD, made it to the New World where they established a little colony in North Salem, New Hampshire (Goodwin 1946).
Now, the Norse were real, of course, and pretty much lived up to their reputation of badassery. Further, they did kick a bunch of monk butt more than a thousand years ago in their geographical expansion across the Atlantic, displacing them from Iceland, for example, at the end of the eighth century AD. Goodwin, essentially, ran with that and proposed that the place then called Pattee’s Cave had been an important and ancient sanctuary for Irish monks who had been chased away by the Norse.
So sure, the Norse were expansionist and displaced people who were already living in territories they, the Norse, wanted. And sure, there were Irish monks living in places the Norse coveted, and certainly these monks had seafaring capabilities. To get to some of the islands they reached to establish monasteries where they could worship God unimpeded by the considerations of the mundane world, they had to be able to construct and sail boats. We also know that the preferred vessel in Ireland, the ox-hide curragh, was remarkably seaworthy. Modern experiments have successfully sailed replicas great distances (Severin 1977). So, could America’s Stonehenge be a settlement of Irish monks? Well, yes, but there would need to be archaeological evidence of their presence there. And that evidence doesn’t exist.
After Goodwin passed away, the site became the property of the highly appropriately named Robert Stone. Stone and many others interested in the site eventually abandoned the Irish monk hypothesis and began pushing the age of the site back to two thousand, three thousand, and even four thousand years ago, and changing its hypothesized cultural affiliation from that of medieval Irish monks to ancient Celts led by their Druids, the priestly class of ancient Celtic culture (Fell 1976). Oh, and more recently it has been proposed by some that the place was built by Indians, making it ground zero for an entirely Native American Ceremonial Stone Landscape discussed in the entry for the Acton, Upton, and Peach Pond stone chambers (see Gage and Gage 2008).
Irish monks? Druids? Native Americans? Whatever; let’s not discriminate here. The only important questions, at least at this point, are, What is the evidence for who built the site, when, and for what purpose?
Why are archaeologists skeptical?
An immediate problem we run into concerning an interpretation of the meaning of America’s Stonehenge results from the fact that there is clear photographic evidence that Goodwin, entirely well intentioned but unfortunately, reconstructed at least some of the features at the site. In doing that, Goodwin was following in the footsteps of similarly well-meaning but similarly wrong-headed reconstructions by professional archaeologists at sites all over the world. Goodwin had a template of what he thought the structures at Pattee’s Cave should look like based on his belief that the site was the settlement of medieval Irish monks. That’s a problem in interpreting the original form, use, and meaning of those structures.
Okay, but what if Goodwin hadn’t changed any of the original structures? Are their shapes and construction methods enough to prove that the chambers, for example, date to more than a thousand years ago and were brought here by immigrants from Europe? Actually, the answer to that question is a big fat “no”! Dry-laid stone masonry of the sort seen at America’s Stonehenge was employed by ancient Celts in their sacred architecture, but as already shown, it was also used in recent history in the construction of farm and pasture walls and outbuildings, including root cellars. Just because a structure looks old, mysterious, and weird to our twenty-first-century eyes doesn’t make it old, mysterious, or weird.
You won’t be surprised that, in my opinion, archaeological evidence is the gold standard for determining who built and used the structures at America’s Stonehenge. And in fact, the site was excavated in the mid-1950s by a crew directed by Gary Vescelius, then a graduate student at Yale University (Vescelius 1956). The excavation yielded a rich and diverse assemblage of over seven thousand artifacts including pottery, nails, metal, and brick fragments, along with Native American artifacts that are common throughout New England. Here’s the thing; Vescelius and his crew did not find a single artifact at the site that could be traced to Western Europe dating to the period either of the Culdee monks or the even older Druid-led Celts. Once advertised as a Bronze Age site, it is telling that the excavators did not find a single bronze artifact there. There simply are no artifacts—no crockery or metal, for example—traceable to the ancient Old World either in style or raw material found among the ruins of America’s Stonehenge. That’s a deal killer for an archaeologist for the hypothesis that America’s Stonehenge was built by ancient European settlers of New Hampshire. That leaves open the question of what the site actually is. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Whodunit?
We have, more than anyone else, William Goodwin to thank for popularizing the notion that the site was something other than an interesting nineteenth-century farmstead. We have the Stone family to thank for maintaining the site and having it open to the public. I do not use the term thank ironically here. We really do have these folks to thank for preserving the place. It deserves preservation, attention, and study. The Goodwin and Stone families were well meaning; I simply disagree with their claims about the site’s age and cultural affiliation.
Why?
The place that began its life as Pattee’s Cave, then morphed into Mystery Hill, and is now called America’s Stonehenge is a genuine historical archaeological site. It’s a nineteenth-century farmstead consisting of features that were common in the nineteenth century, though the specific combination and configuration of the place is fascinatingly idiosyncratic. The “why did they do it?” question here is about why different people interpret it in ways that are simply not supported by the historical or archaeological records. That’s a more nuanced question than simply “Why did they do it?”
For example, I think that for those who like the idea that, just maybe, ancient Celts visited and even settled in the New World long ago, perhaps thousands of years before Columbus, America’s Stonehenge is viewed as a key piece of proof for that hypothesis. For those who like the idea that, just maybe, ancient Native Americans living in eastern North America built substantial features in stone, perhaps thousands of years before Columbus, America’s Stonehenge is viewed as a key piece of proof for that hypothesis.
Then there are those who view America’s Stonehenge as not just ancient Celtic, but as an ancient pagan site where fascinating, weird, and creepy rituals took place, conducted by an ancient priesthood called the Druids. The Druids were an actual priestly class in ancient Europe and have, since the Victorian Era, been the focus of intense romantic speculation and even veneration, with the Druids being viewed as the carriers of ancient mystical and spiritual truths that have been lost in the dim recesses of time but that we can and should aspire to recapture in the modern world.
What does America’s Stonehenge have to do with an ancient priestly class in Western Europe? It’s all about human sacrifice. One of the less appealing practices of the Druids was, at least according to the claims made by the Romans who encountered them in Gaul (France) and in England, was that of human sacrifice. Most historians today take those descriptions by the Romans of the pervasiveness of this practice with a grain of salt, viewing it as largely “fake news” for consumption back home in Rome. Nevertheless, the canard has stuck, though among modern Druid-o-philes, it’s viewed through a romantic lens. Sure, human sacrifice is terrible, but it’s pretty cool to imagine white-robed priests who are the bearers of esoteric knowledge conducting blood-soaked rituals in a deep and spooky time (Card 2018). Creepy, sure, but kind of cool and romantic at the same time (well, as long as you’re not on today’s sacrifice menu).
Here’s the connection: Visitors to America’s Stonehenge are directed to a flat slab of stone by signage printed in appropriately red, bold lettering: “To the Sacrificial Table” (figure 5.8). So, one must assume, a band of ancient Celts, led by their priests, journeyed to New Hampshire in deep time, built a settlement, and continued their grisly practice of human sacrifice in the dark forests of New England. We have the sacrificial table, more than large enough to accommodate a human being, with the predictable grooved channel along its perimeter to collect the life blood of the victim as it oozed out of his or her body. There’s even an exit channel, allowing the blood to be collected, likely for some grisly and unspeakable rite (figure 5.9).
Figure 5.8. The positioning of what the owners of America’s Stonehenge have long labeled the “sacrificial table,” a flat slab of stone resting on legs of stone.
Figure 5.9. The so-called sacrificial table at America’s Stonehenge is a flat slab of local stone with a channel carved along the perimeter of the surface. Notice in the lower right, there is an exit channel for whatever liquid was being collected on the surface. As a “sacrificial table” (yeah, those are my scare quotes), the owners of America’s Stonehenge believe the liquid was blood and the clear implication is that it was human.
Cool story. It might make a great movie. Well, not a great movie, but an okay movie. But no. In fact, nothing about the sacrificial table identification is supported by evidence. Those Roman descriptions of Gaul and England never describe anything that looks even vaguely like the table at America’s Stonehenge. The archaeology of the homelands of the ancient Celts lends no support to the claim either; there are no artifacts in Europe that resemble the table at America’s Stonehenge. In fact, rather ironically, if you perform an internet search on the terms sacrificial table, Europe, Druid, or human sacrifice, the images that commonly turn up are of the table at America’s Stonehenge! In other words, if you look for an ancient model or template in Europe, where the Druids originated, for America’s Stonehenge table, you come up with photographs of itself.
What could a flat slab of stone with a channel obviously meant to collect a liquid be intended for if not for collecting blood? Actually, that’s easy, and the America’s Stonehenge example is far from unique (figure 5.10). It’s called a cider press bed stone. Such stones served as the platforms for human-powered screw presses that squeeze the juices out of crushed apples. How do we know this? Even into the 1980s there were working apple cider presses in the UK that used bed stones that look like the America’s Stonehenge example (Quinion 2008). The presses were positioned upon, you guessed it, flat, channeled stones; that’s why they are called cider press bed stones. The artifact at America’s Stonehenge is a fascinating example. But it’s for cider, not blood, and shouldn’t be interpreted through the anachronistic lens of Victorian Era romanticism, though art work from that period depicting Druidical sacrifice are gruesomely interesting (figure 5.11). I will admit, however, that “This Way to the Cider Press Bed Stone,” with lettering in the amber color of cider, would not be quite as spookily romantic as “To the Sacrificial Table.”
Figure 5.10. The sacrificial table at America’s Stonehenge is not unique. I have seen several in museum collections in Southern New England where they are well known as cider press bed stones. This one is located at the Farm Museum in Hadley, Massachusetts. Serving as the base of a cider press, the press squeezes the juice from the apples and the bed stone collects the juice where it accumulates in the carved channels, finally flowing through the exit channel. Working cider presses with bed stones similar to this one and the one seen at America’s Stonehenge can still be seen.
Figure 5.11. This wonderfully macabre 1851 engraving by Felix Phillippoteaux is titled Human Sacrifice by a Gaulish Druid. With the victim splayed out on a stone table, his blood being collected in a chalice by a Druid priest, this image seems to be the perfect model for those who claim that the cider press bed stone at America’s Stonehenge is, in reality, a sacrificial table. But the engraving is, itself, a fantasy.
Public domain.
Fake-o-meter
America’s Stonehenge is a real, nineteenth-century site. But as far as being a medieval settlement of Irish monks or a Bronze Age village of immigrant Celts in the New World, there’s just zero evidence, so I’m going to need to go the full five on that claim.
Getting there
Pattee’s Cave, I mean Mystery Hill, no, actually America’s Stonehenge is located in North Salem, New Hampshire. Punch in 105 Haverhill Road, Salem, New Hampshire, on your phone or GPS to get there. I highly recommend a visit. It is a very cool place. Maybe don’t mention my name to anyone there. Just sayin’.
20. L’anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada
Archaeological perspectives
The best answer to the question “Who discovered America?” seems manifestly obvious: The ancestors of today’s Native Americans did. As we’ve already seen, archaeological, geological, and biological evidence proves conclusively that they were here more than fifteen thousand and probably closer to twenty thousand years ago. So, of course, they discovered America as they were the first people to arrive here and settle. That’s not politically correct speech, it’s just an accurate statement of fact.
So, it’s peculiar that there sometimes is an implication that this doesn’t really count as “discovery,” and the question is intended to ask “When did the first, you know, ‘people who count’ get here?” Meaning Europeans. So Indians, well they’re part of the natural world—like deer and buffalo—but Europeans are a part of history.
The truth is, Christopher Columbus did not “discover” America by any reasonable interpretation of that term. When he arrived, the New World consisted of two continents with tens of millions of people speaking hundreds of different languages and practicing at least that many distinct cultures. Imagine Christopher Columbus today, parking his boat—well, mooring it—on your street, walking onto your lawn, planting Spain’s flag, and sonorously intoning, “I claim this land I have just discovered in the name of the king and queen of Spain.” Your response likely would be: “Hell, no,” and then you’d escort him off of your property and call the cops.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t interesting questions that might be asked concerning who made it to North America after northeast Asians living in Siberia crossed over Beringia to become the first Americans and before Columbus. A bunch of sites in this book have been proposed as the ancient, Pre-Columbian settlements of any one of a number of different Old World peoples—Celts, Israelites, Phoenicians, Egyptians—here in North America. I’ve been skeptical about those interpretations. But how about this case?
Here’s what we know
Bjarni Herjolfsson was just a guy hoping to meet up with his dad for the holidays. Of course, his dad was living in Iceland—at least that’s where he believed his father was—and Bjarni was living in Scandinavia, which necessitated a perilous crossing of a bit more than nine hundred miles of the north Atlantic for the planned family reunion. Oh, and by the way, the trip took place more than a thousand years ago, in AD 986.
To make matters worse, Bjarni made it safely to Iceland only to find that his father had already left that island and had moved to a newly discovered country, Greenland, another 750 miles to the west. Bjarni must have been pretty frustrated, but his dad couldn’t very well have alerted him to that piece of news with a text, email, or Facebook post. Nevertheless, Bjarni was a brave and hardy Viking. Persevering, after stopping over in Iceland he continued to sail west, looking for his father’s new country.
Bjarni may have been a tough customer, but he wasn’t the best navigator in the world and, whether through error, bad luck, bad weather, or a combination of the three he sailed too far south, missing Greenland entirely. However, by making that mistake he accidentally made one of the most momentous discoveries ever made by a European sailor—one not to be replicated until the voyage of an Italian navigator five hundred years later. Bjarni spied the shores of the New World (though it wasn’t called that at the time; that title would have to wait until Amerigo Vespucci coined that term in 1503).
We know of Bjarni’s exploits from two manuscripts written two hundred years after the fact: The Greenlander’s Saga and Eric the Red’s Saga (Magnusson and Paulsson 1965). In those narratives—which both told, essentially, the same story—after missing Greenland entirely by traveling too far south, Bjarni continued sailing westward, eventually spotting three lands not previously known even to the seafaring Norse.
Now, at least one reason that I am not writing today from my home in the United States of Bjarniland is the fact that Bjarni never made landfall on any of these newfound lands (which, as you’ll soon see, is sort of a play on words). He wasn’t an explorer, and he wasn’t looking for new countries to invade or settle. He was just looking for his dad, who he did find when he turned his boat back around to the east and eventually made his way to Greenland.
After suitably greeting his father, Bjarni told the community of Vikings living there about his discoveries. That group included the infamous Eric the Red. Eric was living in Greenland because he had been exiled from Iceland for killing a man, but he had already been living in Iceland because he had been exiled from Norway for, you guessed it, killing a man. Eric had decided his days of exploring were done, but his son, Lief Ericson, wanted to know more about these new lands and attempted to convince Bjarni to take him there. Bjarni, however, had decided that his days of plying the Atlantic were done as well, so Lief did the next best thing; he bought Bjarni’s boat, believing that the vessel would remember the way back, which is kind of a charming belief.
Well, that must have worked because, as is very clearly detailed in the aforementioned sagas, just a little before AD 1000, Lief and a crew of about thirty-five Norsemen launched an expedition of exploration, sailing west from Greenland and encountering the three lands Bjarni had described. Sailing from north to south, Lief called these lands Helluland (translation, “Flat Slab Land,” for the rocks he spotted along the coast); Markland (translation, “Forest Land” for the abundance of trees growing along there); and Vinland (translation, “Wineland,” for the grapevines he thought he saw growing there). We now understand that Helluland is the northern Canadian territory of Baffin Island; Markland is Labrador; and Vinland is Newfoundland.
Lief and his men are said to have built “booths,” essentially houses, creating a small village, probably on Vinland, and then returned to Greenland. Their stories of the new lands inspired a number of Norse expeditions to Canada through the early years of the eleventh century culminating in a trip in AD 1022 led by Thorfinn Karlsefni—whose intention was to create a permanent settlement—and a group of sixty-five men and women and a small number of cattle (figure 5.12). We’ve already encountered Karlsefni; some have claimed that he left the markings on Dighton Rock. He didn’t.
Figure 5.12. A reconstruction of the Norse structure built in its archaeological footprint at L’anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the Norse settlement there dates to about 1,000 years ago, making it a European settlement in the New World predating the Columbus expeditions by about 500 years.
iStock ID: 503176269; Credit:GeorgeBurba
Helluland had already been deemed inhospitable, Markland seemed perhaps too big a challenge, but Vinland appeared to be just right. The sagas state clearly that a Norse colony was established and that it lasted for only a few years. The Norse abandoned the Vinland colony due to a combination of internal bickering and violence—some of it instigated by Lief’s sister Freydis who, if the sagas are to be believed, appears to have been quite a badass—but also as a result of poor relations with the Native People, Native Americans who the Norse called Skraelings.
Why are archaeologists skeptical?
It must be said that by the latter years of the nineteenth century, most historians regarded the Greenlander’s and Eric the Red’s sagas to be reasonably historically accurate, presenting the largely true story of the brief and ultimately unsuccessful Norse attempt at colonizing the New World five hundred years before the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Archaeologists were, perhaps, a bit more skeptical, as is often the case, of making a definitive identification of Vinland based primarily on written documents. As I have relentlessly asserted in this book, archaeology is all about material evidence, diagnostic remnants of culture left behind by people that can be definitively associated with them and unlike that of any other group. A reliance on and even a reverence for material evidence is encoded in our professional DNA, and there was no such evidence for a short-lived Norse colony in Canada in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This all changed, however, in 1960 when a husband and wife team of researchers excavated the archaeological remnants of a village site located on a promontory of land in northwestern Newfoundland and found a definitively Norse settlement dating to about a thousand years ago.
Whodunit?
In 1960, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad (1977) and her husband, writer and explorer Helge Ingstad (1964), discovered the location of a Norse settlement at a place called L’anse aux Meadows in the Canadian province of Newfoundland (Ingstad and Ingstad 2000). As the Greenlander’s and Eric the Red’s sagas indicate that the Greenland Norse had made a number of attempts to settle the New World, it’s impossible to say with certainty that the L’anse aux Meadows site represents Lief’s booths, his brother Thorvald’s 1002 settlement, or the later village established by Karlsefni. It makes little difference here. What’s key is that the excavation at L’anse aux Meadows produced clear evidence of a Norse presence in the New World. Among the diagnostically Norse features and artifacts recovered were the remains of typical Norse turf houses (see figure 5.12 for a reconstruction in the archaeological footprint of the actual structure), iron nails and rivets, an iron smithy (for smelting iron), a soapstone spindle whorl, and a ring-headed bronze pin (figure 5.13). None of this material culture bore any resemblance to that produced by Native People in the region. Charcoal was also recovered in the excavation, producing a radiocarbon date of AD 920–930, a little early by the reckoning of the sagas, but it is possible that the fires there were fueled with older driftwood. This date shows definitively that the L’anse aux Meadows site represents a Norse presence in the New World more than five hundred years before Columbus set sail.
Figure 5.13. This is precisely the kind of artifact archaeologists expect at a settlement of ancient visitors and colonists of the New World. A ring-headed bronze pin is not part of the native artifact assemblage but represents the material culture of the Norse in the tenth and eleventh centuries AD.
Why?
If the “they” in this question is the Norse, then the answer is simple: The Norse explored and attempted to colonize the New World because that’s what they did. Their culture was expansionist, always seeking out new territories to explore, exploit, dominate, and settle. Once Bjarni had told his story, there was little way the Norse were not going to try to retrace his nautical footsteps and settle the new territory.
If instead the “they” in this question relates to the Ingstads, the answer is that archaeologists, while clearly appreciating the value of written records like the sagas, aren’t necessarily comfortable relying exclusively on that written record. In his Devil’s Dictionary, satirist Ambrose Bierce defined history as: “An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.” The written record is filled with exaggerations, misrepresentations, half-truths, outright falsehoods, and maybe even “alternate facts.” Further, the people who control the historical narrative have agendas that don’t necessarily conform with those of professional historians or archaeologists. As I have stated too many times to count in this book, the gold standard for archaeologists is physical, tangible, material evidence, the actual stuff left behind by a people. What the Ingstads found at L’anse aux Meadows—and what archaeologist Patricia Sutherland (2000) has continued to find at sites located throughout northeastern Canada—is dead certain proof that the Norse were in America long before Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean. For archaeologists, the sagas prove the hypothesis of a Norse presence in America before Columbus. The lack of any such confirming archaeological evidence in Minnesota (Kensington Runestone) or Oklahoma (Heavener Runestone) is precisely why archaeologists are skeptical of those sites. The recovery of definitively Norse artifacts at a site in Newfoundland and an associated radiocarbon date of AD 920 is robust proof upholding the validity of that hypothesis.
Fake-o-meter
0. I’ve included the L’anse aux Meadows site in this book about archaeological oddities as what amounts to a ringer. In fact, there’s nothing fake here or odd. The kind of evidence recovered at L’anse aux Meadows is a model for the kind of evidence archaeologists demand for other claims of visitors to the New World in antiquity, whether those visitors were from Europe or Alpha Centauri.
Getting there
L’anse aux Meadows is part of the Parks Canada system. If you fly into the province’s largest city, St. John’s, it’s still an eleven-hour drive on Route 1! So you really have to want to see the site.