Comment by lb1lf
2 days ago
These are all over the place in Norway (as are they everywhere else, presumably!)
When we moved to the island we currently live on, our address was in a road called 'Solsteinen' (The Sun Stone), but I didn't think anything of it until I realized that the roughly hewn stone serving as the property limit marker was juuu-uuust touched by the sun on Winter Solstice. Aha.
A quick call to the local archaeologist confirmed my suspicion - 'Oh, so you're the new resident there, I'd planned on being in touch - that stone monument has been there for more than 2000 years, is A-listed and please, whatever you do, don't do anything with it. Seriously.'
The local archaeologist? Incredible
Oh, he works for the county, but happened to live just up the hill from us.
There's so much old stuff around here that he is basically being called out to perform an assessment every time anyone wishes to build anything.
Where we live now, for instance, there are a handful of burial mounds from God knows when (all plundered long ago), lots of old charcoal pits, a couple of late stone age fish traps in the lake in a corner of our farm.
To exaggerate just a little - where we could build our home was basically dictated by where we could find a spot noone had claimed thousands of years ago...
As someone from a place that is less than a century old this sounds incredible!
2 replies →
I suspect most local councils in the UK have an archaeology team and failing that there are a lot of professional consulting archaeologists - a lot (all?) large scale building works often include the need for archaeological surveys and/or remediation.
e.g. Work for what is now the Queensferry Crossing bridge uncovered a 10,000 year old home:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-2...
You're that guy who lives on the northeast island of the Chrono Trigger map, aren't you?
We also have these in Germany, in the region where I live it which is North Rhein Westfalis they are quite a common thing actually. Strongly recomment people check it out if they pass by here some time
[dead]
> as are they everywhere else, presumably!
They aren't "all over the place" in the US, and I certainly don't have a local archaeologist that I can just call up.
FWIW: The Northeastern US is quite recent with human presence. It wasn't settled until after the last ice age. Pretty much anything old is celebrated because there is so little of anything old.
> They aren't "all over the place" in the US, and I certainly don't have a local archaeologist that I can just call up… The Northeastern US is quite recent with human presence
Fun fact, New England has at least 71 different stonework “prayer sites” that are all astrologically aligned.
Two of the most notable are King Philip’s Cave (Sharon, MA) with a stone aperture through which a "dagger of light" appears specifically during the winter solstice, and Pole Hill (Gloucester, MA) which has fixed boulders that align with the summer solstice sunrise/sunset and the winter solstice sunrise.
Here is a research paper talking about all of them: https://neara.org/pdf/wantofanail.pdf
There are lots of historical preservationists in New England that you can call up. If you want my help finding one let me know where you are located.
When they built the new High School in my old home town in western CT one of the local archaeologists (day job: science teacher) did some exploration on site and discovered all sorts of stuff - no funding for a proper dig so they capped it and put up a plaque about it (ISTR they put the tennis courts on top since that disturbed it least?)
So, yeah, there's lots of archaeology in New England, it's just that a lot of it is literally buried or otherwise not called out. (And "in the US, 100 years is a long time; in the UK, 100 miles is a long distance" is also Just How It Is...)
This is really interesting, thank you.
Norway also wasn't populated until after the last ice age. As an American archaeologist, old stuff is also quite common here. The fun examples I like to use are the structures in Tucson older than Rome.
Your "local archeologist" is one of the staff at the state historic preservation society [0], though you'll likely have more luck contacting a local university archeologist if you find anything.
[0] https://www.ohiohistory.org/preserving-ohio/state-historic-p...
Ohio was populated with numerous earthworks, the Hopewell Earthworks finally being recognized as a UNESCO world heritage spot after being preserved for years by being used as a golf course. Unfortunately many of these have been lost as European settlers destroyed many of them. This continues to this day as Google is building a data center in central Ohio a top of land that was home to numerous native american burial mounds - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-breaks-gro...
Has no one on Google's datacenter leadership team so much as SEEN a horror movie before?
1 reply →
As the other replies note, there are things. Many were destroyed though and so there is nothing to preserve. However much of North America lacks ready access to building materials that will last and so many of the natives built with organic goods that rotted away in a few decades and so there isn't much to find. You can find many flint arrowheads - but that only tells us when (about) it was made and since there are millions of them there isn't much to learn anymore.
Don't take the above as a sign that the natives were uninteresting or stupid. Just that they didn't leave much for us to learn from, both because they couldn't and because what they did was destroyed.
> It wasn't settled until after the last ice age.
The UK wasn’t permanently settled until the mesolithic either. There are older artifacts like axes, but no monuments.