Free Republic

Octagon Earthworks’ alignment with moon likely is no accident Tuesday, February 13, 2007 BRADLEY T. LEPPER The Octagon Earthworks in Newark is one remnant of the Newark Earthworks, recently listed by The Dispatch as one of the Seven Wonders of Ohio. Earlham College professors Ray Hively and Robert Horn demonstrated in 1982 that the walls of this 2,000-yearold circle and octagon were aligned to the points on the horizon, marking the limits of the rising and setting of the moon during an 18.6-year cycle. The implications of this argument for our understanding of the knowledge and abilities of the ancient...

More than 1500 years ago, a vast culture known as the Hopewell tradition (or Hopewell culture) stretched across what is today the eastern United States. The cause of the culture's decline has long been debated, with war and climate change two of the possibilities, but now a new avenue of inquiry has opened up: debris from a near-Earth comet. Researchers working across 11 different Hopewell archaeological sites covering three states have found unusual concentrations of iridium and platinum in their digging – telltale signs of meteorite fragments. Meanwhile, a charcoal layer in the sediment suggests an intense period of high...

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati have found evidence of a cosmic cataclysm 1,500 years that may be responsible for the downfall of the Hopewell Culture. The Hopewell Culture was a widely dispersed set of pre-Columbian Native American populations connected by a common network of trade routes from 100 BC to AD 500 in the Middle Woodland period. The researchers found evidence of a cosmic airburst at 11 Hopewell archaeological sites in three states stretching across the Ohio River Valley in the United States, which rained debris down into the Earth’s atmosphere creating a fiery explosion around 1,500 years ago...

ST. LOUIS - Funeral arrangements were announced Friday evening for David Dorn, a retired St. Louis police captain and municipal chief who was shot to death by looters at a St. Louis pawn shop early Tuesday. A public visitation will be held from 1-9 p.m. Tuesday at Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church, 915 Taylor Ave., St. Louis. A private funeral will be held Wednesday at 10 a.m., followed immediately by interment at Valhalla Cemetery, at 7600 Saint Charles Rock Road. Dorn was shot and killed protecting a friend's pawn shop early Tuesday as the city was hit by violence and destruction...

On a lush hilltop deep in Southern Ohio, a giant snake slithers through the grass, its intentions a mystery. Despite more than a century of study, we still don't know who built the Great Serpent Mound, or why. That's part of what makes a visit here so fascinating, and also a little bit frustrating. There are still questions that can't be answered through a Google search or more than a century of research. This much is known: At 1,348 feet long, the serpent is the largest effigy mound in the world -- that is, an earthen creation in the shape...

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,...

About 2000 years ago in what is today western Illinois, a group of Native Americans buried something unusual in a sacred place. In the outer edge of a funeral mound typically reserved for humans, villagers interred a bobcat, just a few months old and wearing a necklace of bear teeth and marine shells. The discovery represents the only known ceremonial burial of an animal in such mounds and the only individual burial of a wild cat in the entire archaeological record, researchers claim in a new study. The villagers may have begun to tame the animal, the authors say, potentially...

...So, while my Journal of Ohio Archaeology paper concludes rather pessimistically that there are no documented early American Indian traditions that speak reliably to the original purpose and meaning of the ancient earthworks, there is no reason to believe that traditional stories of contemporary tribes with historic roots in the eastern Woodlands could not include themes and elements that echo, if faintly, traditions of the Hopewell culture. And if that’s conceivable, and I think it is, then it would be worthwhile to look for them... One reason why it’s important to take seriously what American Indians have had to say...

HOPEWELL, Mo. • William Helms was building a shed for his farm. Needing one more board, he went to fetch a discarded plank near the railroad bridge over the Big River in Washington County. The Iron Mountain Railroad’s passenger train No. 4 rumbled over the bridge, bound for St. Louis 65 miles to the north. Helms was walking the track through a low rock cut when he heard a strange squeak, like that of a field mouse. He saw a small, battered piece of luggage. “I opened it, and inside was a baby,” said Helms.

Archaeologist, William Mills, dug up a treasure-trove of 2000 year old carved stone pipes in the early 1900s and was the first to dig the Native American site, called Tremper Mound, in southern Ohio.When he inspected the pipes, he made a reasonable, but unverified, assumption. The pipes looked as if they had been carved from local stone, and so he said they were. That assumption, first published in 1916, has been repeated in scientific publications to this day, but according to a new analysis, Mills got it wrong.Researchers tested the mineralogical profiles of stone from sites across the upper Midwest...

Glenn Beck TV thread August 18th 2010 Welcome to the GLENN BECK television thread...Stand. Never give up. Never give in. We are another day closer to the 2010 elections. All Beckerheads, infidels, sick twisted freaks, ilks and lurkers are welcome and are encouraged to participate in the thread.

For the first time since media coverage was banned in 1991, the return of the body of a fallen member of the U.S. armed forces was opened to news outlets late Sunday. The U.S. Air Force informed media on Sunday that the family of Staff Sgt. Phillip Myers consented to allowing coverage of his casket being returned to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Myers, 30, of Hopewell, Virginia, was a member of an engineering unit based in Britain. He died Saturday in a roadside bombing in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. military reported.

4/6/2009 - KABUL, Afghanistan (AFNS) -- Servicemembers and civilians deployed to International Security Assistance Force Regional Command-South gathered to pay final respects to a fallen Airman April 6 in the base chapel of Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan. Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Myers, 30, was killed April 3 by an improvised explosive device while conducting military operations with the 755th Air Expeditionary Group Explosive Ordinance Disposal Operational Location Bravo near Musa Qal'eh in the Helmand Province of southern Afghanistan. Those gathered at the service remembered Sergeant Myers for his humility as a leader. Capt. Robert Scott, the 755th AEG/EOD OL-B officer in...

Pearson said, "I think the key thing is that from the moment that Stonehenge is built -- this is very shortly after 3,000 B.C. -- they're putting in burials as well as the parts of the monument itself. And I think it's something that is going hand in hand with it." He referred to alternative theories, including Bournemouth University archaeologist Timothy Darvill's idea that Stonehenge was a place of healing, as in no way inconsistent with the site also serving as a cemetery. A place devoted to the ancestors naturally could have a variety of secondary uses, such as invoking...

Warning to residents of Hopewell, VA and surrounding area about the water.

Hopewell culture shows little evidence of warfare Tuesday, December 18, 2007 2:56 AM By Bradley T. Lepper War, in one form or another, has been a part of the human experience for centuries. Archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, in his book War Before Civilization, argues that it has been with us for millennia, but that historians and archaeologists have downplayed its importance because we like to think our ancestors were smarter than us and lived in more or less perfect harmony. The evidence against that, however, is growing stronger with each discovery. Otzi, the 5,000-year-old Italian "Ice Man," died with an arrow...

EAST AMWELL, New Jersey (Reuters) - Michael Strizki heats and cools his house year-round and runs a full range of appliances including such power-guzzlers as a hot tub and a wide-screen TV without paying a penny in utility bills. His conventional-looking family home in the pinewoods of western New Jersey is the first in the United States to show that a combination of solar and hydrogen power can generate all the electricity needed for a home. The Hopewell Project, named for a nearby town, comes at a time of increasing concern over U.S. energy security and worries over the effects...

A VIEW TO A CHILL: Councilman member of supremacy group   DAVE SOMMERS , Staff Writer 07/11/2003 . HOPEWELL BOROUGH -- For 12 months, he has been a member of the National Alliance, a white supremacist group, which -- in addition to its disdain of illegal immigration -- also hates Jews. Now, Marc Moran is also the newest member of Hopewell Borough Council thanks to his five colleagues, who at the request of the mayor, unanimously appointed him to the position last week to temporarily fill a vacancy that opened up just last month. Actually, Mayor David Nettles said...