Did pre-Columbian Amerindians build stone chambers in New England?

The normal theory about the First Peoples of the Americas is that Native Americans traveled to North America from Siberia through the Bering Land Bridge, which was a land crossing 30,000-11,000 years ago. More specifically, they have been dated to the Clovis culture of 11,500 BC that spread across North and South America. A number of "pre-clovis" artefact findings have occurred to push back that date of arrival even earlier. Thus, the first Amerindians in the Northeastern US probably arrived in 15,000-10,000 BC.

As to their DNA, Northeast Amerindians carry X and R1 haplogroups, versions of which have been found in Western Eurasia, but rarely in East Asia:
For a map of Haplogroup X, please see:
http://ift.tt/2esUCo5

Or:
http://ift.tt/2esRZT9

For a map of Haplogroup R1, see:

(an image I made by combining R1 distributions in both hemispheres)

A map of two physically possible routes of entry into the Americas is here:
http://ift.tt/2esRjxf
Some scholars have proposed in the "Solutrean Hypothesis" that stone age Europeans immigrated by following the ice sheet connecting Scotland, Iceland, and the Americas.

Ice Age West Europeans were not advanced to the extent of the Celts who arrived centuries later. Amateur drawing of pre-Celtic Picts:
http://ift.tt/2esSJYD

An article Skeptic Magazine comments about a route into the Americas from Europe that just because transatlantic routes are possible does not make them likely:

Quote:

Thor Heyerdahl was convinced that the ancient Egyptians had made the journey across the Atlantic. To underpin this conviction he crossed the Atlantic in 1969 on a small ship of ancient Egyptian design. In a similar quest, in 1977 Timothy Severin traveled from Ireland to Newfoundland in a primitive boat made of laths and animal hides. He took his inspiration from the legend that Saint Brendan of Clonfert, a 6th century Irish priest who claimed to have reached “a blessed island covered with vegetation” while sailing westward in search of the Garden of Eden. Although their Atlantic crossings were daring and inspirational, Heyerdahl and Severin showed us only that it is possible to cross the Atlantic using ancient European and Eurasian ship-building techniques, not that it really happened.

http://ift.tt/2esS1dJ

It's true that Inuits were able to make it to Greenland from North America before Columbus' time:

Quote:

In 1420, Danish geographer Claudius Clavus Swart wrote that he personally had seen "pygmies" from Greenland who were caught by Norsemen in a small skin boat. Their boat was hung in Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim along with another, longer boat also taken from "pygmies". Clavus Swart's description fits the Inuit and two of their types of boats, the kayak and the umiak.[126][127] Similarly, the Swedish clergyman Olaus Magnus wrote in 1505 that he saw in Oslo Cathedral two leather boats taken decades earlier. According to Olaus, the boats were captured from Greenland pirates by one of the Haakons, which would place the event in the 14th century.[126]

http://ift.tt/2esQu7j

A piece of evidence that some scholars use to propose prehistoric European contact with the Americas is to compare Clovis and pre-Clovis tools with paleolithic European ones. Similarities though are not actually a proof of a direct connection: Both groups could have carried similar designs with them from a common source in Eurasia, with Amerindians keeping clovis points as a tradition with them as they passed through the Bering Strait.

Based on the difficulty in crossing the North Atlantic for such a distance, even with an ice sheet for guidance, we can say that it's unlikely that prehistoric Europeans settled in eastern North America.

We can also conclude that precolumbian settlements in New England were not "Celtic" or "Bronze Age European" ones, because we have not found bronze age artefacts at these sites. Bronze age sites in Europe will have bronze shields, swords, and other such artifacts not found in New England (minus hoaxes). The only possibility for this is if the supposed European explorers lost their bronze tools and artefacts and just used Stone Age tools and construction, which is extremely unlikely.

This leads us to the last question of whether Amerindians built the stone chambers and arranged the megaliths found in New England, or whether these were built by English colonists or fell randomly into place, respectively. Charcoal and other remains at stone constructions in New England have been dated to 5000-100 BC and later. Fire, tools, and ceramics found at the sites matches the technology of Native Americans. And alignment of the locations by astronomy or the earth's calendar suggests a dating preceding the Christian English colonists. However what especially makes the Amerindian connection less likely is that stone buildings by pre-Columbian Amerindians are quite unusual northeast of the Mississippi basin, if not the US Southwest.

It would be interesting to see what reliable archaeologists have proven about the dating of these stone constructions.

Pre-columbian Native Americans have been known to make petroglyphs and work with boulders. In 1690 the Puritan leader Cotton Mather described a New England boulder with petroglyphs, the Dighton Rock, that the Puritan colonists found:

Quote:

“Among the other Curiosities of New-England, one is that of a mighty Rock, on a perpendicular side whereof by a River, which at High Tide covers part of it, there are very deeply Engraved, no man alive knows How or When about half a score Lines, near Ten Foot Long, and a foot and half broad, filled with strange Characters: which would suggest as odd Thoughts about them that were here before us, as there are odd Shapes in that Elaborate Monument.…” Hypotheses about the creation of the markings include: Indigenous peoples of North America – who were known to have inscribed petroglyphs in rocks (a schematic face on the Dighton Rock is similar to an Indian petroglyph in Eastern Vermont)

http://ift.tt/2eQ14Ul

A photo of the rock can be seen here:
http://ift.tt/2eQ24re

Paul Bell claims in his article "Who Built New England’s Megalithic Monuments?"
That this eyelike image (http://ift.tt/2esT2SU) can be found in numerous megalithic structures in New England. He proposes that Phoenicians could have traveled to America:

Quote:

Around 1110 B.C., it is accepted by all historians, the Phoenicians were active throughout the Iberian region, settling the southern areas of Spain and mingling with an older, established civilization called the Tartessians. Not much is known about the Tartessians other than that they were an adventurous maritime people. ... After the fall of Carthage, the Mediterranean was completely closed to Phoenician traders, and historian Robert Ellis Cahill tells us they sailed away from North Africa in great numbers, never to be seen again. ... According to author Louis A. Brennan, in his thought-provoking book No Stone Unturned, “float copper” (pure surface copper that need not be smelted) was abundant in the Michigan region and had been mined since 4,000 B.C. by an ambiguous culture known as the Lamokans—one he says was not related to the modern Athabaskan Indian inhabitants of the region.

http://ift.tt/2ePZO3f

Stone phallic monoliths have been found in prehistoric Europe, and Bell posts a photo of one in New England, writing:

Quote:

Neolithic people probably danced around stone phalli like those still to be found throughout New England, their May Day festivals taking on a decided fertility aspect. .... Such stones remain standing at many New England sites, giving us an insight into the religion of the ancient Europeans. IMAGE: http://ift.tt/2esSbSk

But just because something is a standing pillar monolith doesn't make it phallic. He writes about other theories that I don't find likely, such as Celtic colonists in New England:

Quote:

One reliable Norse account of the voyage of Thorfin Karlsefni in A.D. 1123 claims the Viking explorers came across blond-haired, blue-eyed inhabitants of New England who spoke a form of Gaelic. One account tells that these people lived in underground chambers, like those we find today in New England. http://ift.tt/2ePZO3f

The Norse accounts I think are reliable to show Norse were in the Northeast of North America, but are not reliable to the extent they have strange ideas.

David Goudsward writes in his book Ancient Stone Sites of New England about "altar stones"

Quote:

These tables are large, flat slabs of native stone, with a groove carved on the horizontal surface, ostensibly to channel the flow of liquid. .... Although the one on Mystery Hill, North Salem, NH is the most well known, other examples of these oversized slabs exist. .... Supporters of pre-Columbian contact with Europe suggest these stones are similar to Neolithic dolmens. More conservative identifications..... suggest more recent possibilities such as tar kilns, lye stones..... from the colonial era.... It is highly unlikely that any of these stone tables were used as commercial tar kilns. By the time the towns associated with these stones were founded, tar production.... was located predominantly in the southern colonies.

The author rules out the possibility that the table at Mystery Hill could be a "sacrificial table" if one imagines that it was founded by medieval Celts. The author points out how the altar table has a special alignment in the middle of the Stonehenge USA complex and is put into the side of a wall.

He notes:

Quote:

There are a number of logistical problems with the theory that the Mystery Hill stone was a lye stone. First.... there is simply no reason to produce lye on a scale that the stone's size would suggest. The .... table would hold 4 to 6 hogshead barrels simultaneously - enough lye to supply the entire town of North Salem with soap. And there is no indication in the local history that anyone inthe region was attempting to make soap commercially. Lye stones are traditionally small enough to be moved and stored out of the way when not in use. A 4.5 ton stone is not portable by any stretch of the imagination. .... when William Goodwin began to work on the site in the 1930's , the table was thought to be at ground level. Only when goodwin's crew removed soil and debris from around the slab was it discovered that the table sood in a manmade recess, three feet off the ground. ... Based on other areas of the site, it takes about 125 years for an inch of soil to accumulate undisturbed on the site. Three feet of soil would suggest that this lye stone had been abandoned over 4000 years in the past. This matches the C-14 dates at Mystery Hill.

Here you can see a photo of the "altar table":
http://ift.tt/2esTdho

The author discusses other "altar tables" in New England, and mentions some archaeologists who found similarities to a table slab in Malta from 2500-1500 BC.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2eQ0vKe