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Ohio's StonehengeFort Ancient is largest, best preserved earthwork of its kind in America. Its purpose is not known By Bob Downing Beacon Journal staff writer A sign identifies one of the prehistoric earthworks at Fort Ancient State Memorial. Ohio law forbids walking off trail or on any mound or earthwork.OREGONIA - Fort Ancient remains a mystery. The extensive earthen mounds and walls in southwest Ohio are unlikely a fortress, although they might have been used for social gatherings and religious ceremonies and astronomical viewings. The site, atop a wooded bluff 235 feet above the Little Miami River in Warren County,...

5000-YEAR-OLD AXE HEAD FOUND ON STONEHENGE WORLD HERITAGE SITE By David Prudames 19/09/2003 Photo: field walkers from Wessex Archaeology covered a 90-hectare area in three weeks in search of ancient artefacts. Photo: Elaine Wakefield. © Wessex Archaeology. Archaeologists have discovered a 5000-year-old polished stone axe head during an investigation of an area that forms part of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. Dating back to the Neolithic Age - 3000 to 2500 BC - the axe head was found, along with a leaf-shaped arrowhead, during a three-week field walk of farmland by Wessex Archaeology. Covering a 90-hectare area, the farmland is...

Stonehenge Didn't Stand Alone, Excavations Show James Owen for National Geographic News January 12, 2007 Recent excavations of Salisbury Plain in southern England have revealed at least two other large stone formations close by the world-famous prehistoric monument. One of the megalithic finds is a sandstone formation that marked a ritual burial mound; the other, a group of stones at the site of an ancient timber circle. The new discoveries suggest that many similar monuments may have been erected in the shadow of Stonehenge, possibly forming part of a much larger complex, experts say. The findings were part of the...

The study, published in the current issue of the journal Antiquity, indicates that two quarries in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, in southwest Wales, are the source of Stonehenge’s bluestones. Carbon dating revealed such stones were dug out at least 500 years before Stonehenge was built — suggesting they were first used in a local monument that was later dismantled and dragged off to England. The very large standing stones at Stonehenge are sarsen, a local sandstone. The smaller ones, known as bluestones, consist of volcanic and igneous rocks, the most common of which are called dolerite and rhyolite. Geologists...

High in the skies over Kazakhstan, space-age technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground. Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old. The largest, near a Neolithic settlement, is a giant square of 101 raised mounds, its opposite corners connected by a diagonal cross, covering more terrain than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Another is a kind of three-limbed swastika, its arms ending in zigzags bent...

SALEM, N.H. — Using the astronomical chart on a table in the covered tower, visitors aim their gaze along worn arrows to huge, upright stones hundreds of feet away. Beyond each slab of granite, clearings stretch the eye to the horizon on a dazzling day in late summer New Hampshire. On Wednesday's autumnal equinox, people will flock to the woods near the Massachusetts state line, watch the sun rise or fall over the massive chunks of granite and decide for themselves whether they're standing amid relics of ancient history or pure hooey.

Discovery of Oldest Known Art and Agriculture Calendar in New World MU Researcher Unearths Earliest Known Western Sculptures and Astronomical Alignments in Peru's Temple of the Fox. Andeans Used Myth and Astronomical Markers to Determine Agricultural Calendar. Project Buena Vista unearths a personified disk flanked by foxes at the Temple of the Fox in Peru. Newswise — In one of the most significant archaeological and anthropological finds in recent history, Robert Benfer, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has discovered the earliest astronomical alignments and sculptures in the round, which is a sculpture designed to be viewed...

Buried megaliths discovered at stone circle site Archaeologists have discovered an arc of buried megaliths that once formed part of the great stone circle at Avebury in Wiltshire. The National Trust says the existence of these enormous stones, originally constructed more than 4,500 years ago, has remained a puzzle for the last 300 years. Visitors to Avebury will see most of the standing megaliths in the western half of the stone circle. The famous map of Avebury drawn up by William Stukely in the 1720s showed that many of the stones in the south east and north east quadrants of...

<p>For centuries Stonehenge has mystified and enraptured archaeologists and visitors.</p> <p>So maybe it is not surprising that another monumental wonder from prehistory has been overlooked for so long – even though it is just a mile away.</p> <p>Experts have discovered an 'extraordinary' line of giant stones that dates back more than 4,500 years.</p>

The tomb was a relic of the first settlers in the Spanish Cristovo de Cea region and was originally built some 4000 years before the birth of Christ. Every builder, tradesman and DIY enthusiast knows the embarrassment of making a howler on the job, whether it's taps installed the wrong way round or a wonky shelf. But few will know the sheer panic these Spanish workmen probably felt when they discovered they had smashed up a 6,000-year-old Neolithic tomb and replaced it with a concrete picnic table. The tomb was a relic of the first settlers in the Cristovo de...

A 12-METRE monolith, hacked out of limestone by stone-age humans some nine thousand years ago, has been found at the bottom of the Mediterranean. The enormous stone totem, now split in two and sitting in the Sicilian Channel between Tunisia and Sicily, was hewed from a rocky outcrop some 300m away when the Mediterranean Sea was still a dry basin. It’s now under 40m of water. The new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, says the area was submerged about 9350 years ago (give or take 200 years) when the last Ice Age retreated. Before that time the...

Our ancient Irish ancestors carved images of an ancient eclipse into giant stones over 5,000 years ago, on November 30, 3340 BC to be exact. This is the oldest known recorded solar eclipse in history. The illustrations are found on the Stone Age "Cairn L," on Carbane West, at Loughcrew, outside Kells, in County Meath. The landscape of rolling hills is littered with Neolithic monuments. Some say that originally there were at least 40 to 50 monuments, but others say the figure was more like 100... Martin Brennan and Jack Roberts discovered that the sun illuminates this chamber on the...

New theory on Stonehenge mystery Experts believe the stones may have been levered into place A fresh theory on how Stonehenge was built has been tested out by a group of experts and enthusiasts. Gordon Pipes, of the Stonehengineers group of scientists and archaeologists, has suggested that levers may have been used to move the giant stones. They have tested his "stone-rowing" theory which involves a 45-tonne stone being levered on a track of logs. "It's akin to rowing a boat, weights can be picked up with levers using body mass and balance," said Mr Pipes. Mr Pipes, from Derby,...

Experts reveal 'ancient massacre' The Neolithic bones were discovered at Wayland's Smithy Bones found at a prehistoric burial site indicate they belonged to victims of an ancient massacre, say scientists. Remains of 14 people were discovered at Wayland's Smithy, near Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire, in the 1960s. Latest techniques date the bones at between 3590 BC and 3560 BC, and have led experts to believe the people may have died in a Neolithic Age massacre. English Heritage carried out the work with the help of Cardiff University and the University of Central Lancashire. Flint arrowhead Michael Wysocki of the University...

Archaeologists from the University of Reading will start a three-year excavation on land between the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avenbury this summer. Exploring the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire is expected to reveal more about the lives of the people who worshipped at Stonehenge. The work will be done in collaboration with Historic England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Wiltshire Museum. The site is a barely explored archaeological region of huge international importance. The project will investigate Marden Henge. Built around 2400 BC Marden is the largest henge or Neolithic earthwork in the country and one of...

Rare Bronze Age gold artifact found in burial mound in Wiltshire, U.K. For the first time, an early Bronze Age sun-disc from Monkton Farleigh in Wiltshire, U.K., is being exhibited for public view at the Wiltshire Museum, in time for this year's summer solstice. It is one of only 6 sun-disc finds and is one of the earliest metal objects found in Britain. Made in about 2,400 BC, soon after the sarsen stones were erected at Stonehenge, it is thought to represent the sun. The sun-disc was initially found in 1947 in a burial mound at Monkton Farleigh, just over...

After nearly 30 years, a team of archaeologists will be returning once again to the site of So na Cacana on the island of Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain, to renew investigations of a prehistoric sanctuary complex that archaeologists believe represented the remains of the Talaiotic Culture , a prehistoric culture that flourished, particularly on the islands of Majorca and Menorca, during the 1st Millenium BCE... The ancient settlement remains are located about six km away from the municipality of Alaior. The site features a tower-like monument resembling a large rectangular talaiot (Bronze Age megalithic structure) at the highest point of...

The data obtained by Teresa Fernández-Crespo in seven megalithic graves in La Rioja and Araba-Álava suggest that certain individuals were excluded from burial on the basis of age and sex. The research Demographic evidence of selective burial in megalithic graves of northern Spain by Teresa Fernández-Crespo and Concepción de la Rúa of the Department of Genetics, Physical Anthropology and Animal Physiology of the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country challenges the widely-held view that societies were egalitarian during the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic ages. This work, published in the leading Journal of Archaeological Science, comes from Fernández-Crespo’s PhD thesis entitled Antropología...

There’s something new about the very old Great Serpent Mound, the earthen snake effigy that stretches a quarter of a mile along the terrain in Adams County in southern Ohio... What is new about Serpent Mound is that it might be far more ancient than currently thought. Some archaeologists have recently discovered evidence that it was constructed around 300 B.C. by the Adena culture. That contrasts with the prevailing school of thought that it is about 920 years old and was built by the Fort Ancient culture... For instance, the massive head of the snake effigy points to where the...

On a remote Pacific island not much bigger than Manhattan, there are ancient pyramids built out of living coral. New evidence reveals that these tombs could be up to 700 years old — much older than experts had previously thought. The royal tombs are tucked away in an artificially built ancient city called Leluh just off the mainland of Kosrae, a Micronesian island. Leluh was home to Kosraean high chiefs (as well as some lower chiefs and commoners, too) from about 1250 until the mid-1800s, when foreign whalers, traders and missionaries started to arrive on the island. With impressive canals...