"A long line of stones which is over a mile in length" could easily be laid by a single person in a relatively short time without any special skills, tools, or knowledge.
Note: the structure described above seems to be a bit more than this.
But why? Religion? Marking territory boundaries? Some kind of barrier to stop water flowing? Fencing for animals? I think it unlikely someone just decided to do it to mess with future archaeologists.
Oh wow very good callout and thanks for the academic (!) reference! This reminds me of the weirs used to trap fish - no surprise similar units were created on land for hunting as well
I found these fish weirs in Canada to be really interesting because of how many there were in this one area off Vancouver Island. And that they were found because most of the wood stakes came to the surface after an earthquake in 1946.
Right on, believe I read a similar article recently because am mentally placing weirs to B.C. - though they are/were certainly utilized throughout the world
Yeah, there's a similar ancient hunting strategy of building two converging fences, then driving herd animals into them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_kite From what I remember similar methods have been used by northern/arctic peoples as well.
> The buffalo jump was used for 5,500 years by the indigenous peoples of the plains to kill bison by driving them off the 11 metre (36 foot) high cliff. Before the late introduction of horses, the Blackfoot drove the bison from a grazing area in the Porcupine Hills about 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) west of the site to the "drive lanes", lined by hundreds of cairns, by dressing up as coyotes and wolves. These specialized "buffalo runners" were young men trained in animal behavior to guide the bison into the drive lanes.
> ...
> In Blackfoot, the name for the site is Estipah-skikikini-kots. According to legend, a young Blackfoot wanted to watch the bison plunge off the cliff from below, but was buried underneath the falling animals. He was later found dead under the pile of carcasses, where he had his head smashed in.
This reminds me of that standup routine from Billy Connolly where he talks about archaeologists finding the remains of an aircraft disaster 400 years from now in the middle of mountainous terrain, seeing people in life jackets and believing there must have been a river nearby.
It could be any of the above, but it could have been just about anything. Maybe it was just some bored kid, maybe with autism. At that scale it could have been done by one person all at once over a few days, or bit by bit over the course of a year or so. Maybe somebody commuted that way to their favorite fishing spot and tripped over a rock one day, then decided to clear whichever rock stood out the most to the side. Then the line grew slowly over the course of many years, like farmers creating hedge rows by throwing whatever rock they plow up to the side of the field.
"The boulder with the markings is 3.5 to 4 feet high and about 5 feet long. Photos show a surface with numerous fissures."
A very strong bored kid.
At the bottom of my garden there was the concrete remains of some bridge footings. There's a stream at the perimeter and Dr Beeching caused the bridge to be no longer needed back in the day. Anyway, I dug them out and the largest was a lump about 4'x3'x2'. It nearly killed ... it took a lot of effort and some funky lever action with a very long modern steel crowbar to move and the rest had some quality time with my hammer drill and a SDS chisel bit and the mechanism set to hammer with no spin (obvs).
Anyway, enough of the foundations of my rockery.
Autism? Not indicated. You are looking for Godzilla or King Kong.
Some time in the next few hundred years we will discover that the majority of mysterious archaeological finds were placed there by future humans to mess with past archaeologists.
I already do. I’ve bashed strange designs and my initials into rocks far from civilization when I’m out hiking. With the exact thought of throwing someone for a loop long into the future. They are always subtle and small (so as not to be annoying to other users ).
Welp, if the TV series “Ancient Aliens” has told us anything it’s that if there is any chance “prehistoric” or “non-white” folks did it, it was aliens. Always aliens. Except when it’s time traveling white humans from the future come to the past to help “those people” carve stones.
(I am mocking the horseshit show, in case anyone worries.)
That sounds even more interesting to me