East Bay’s mysterious rock walls: Paranormal? American Stonehenge? Theories abound

If walls could speak, what a tale these mysterious huge boulders would tell. Perched high atop the lonely, windswept ridges of the Diablo Range, chains of stacked stones stand sentry above East Bay cities — yet they delineate nothing.

Long the subject of intrigue — Who built them? Why? How? — the walls are now being mapped by a San Francisco State archaeologist who believes they hold important clues to early California history and deserve our attention and protection.

“They are historic sites,” said Jeffrey Fentress, who is measuring and mapping them for the East Bay Regional Park District, then submitting his findings to the California Office of Historic Preservation. “By recording the walls, they become a permanent part of the state archive and are protected — as well as they can be — from future development.”

There are no written or photographic records of their construction in a landscape that has been inhabited by humans for at least 7,000 years. So, like the fabled crop circles of England, the walls have inspired theories ranging from the paranormal to the historically bizarre.

“There is no definitive answer on its origins, which further delights the public, who can take it to new levels of speculation,” said Mark Hylkema, archaeologist for the Santa Cruz District of California State Parks.

New Age mystics have declared that their builders were creatures from a vanished Pacific island; amateur historians suggest that they were Mongols or West Africans. Some theorize that the walls offered defence from intruders; others believe they played a peaceful and spiritual or astronomical role, perhaps serving as a “solstice site” like Stonehenge.

Sections of walls are scattered atop Santa Clara County’s Ed Levin County Park, the Russian Ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, several parks within the East Bay Regional Park District and a few private ranches in the Livermore Valley. Some also can be seen in the Sierra foothills, along state Highway 50 past El Dorado Hills.

While well known to the region’s hikers, park officials are reluctant to disclose precise locations because they fear they will attract vandals. A large stone circle on Pleasanton Ridge was destroyed by real estate development in the 1990s.

Standing 3- to 4-feet high and wide, they’re sturdy yet unsecured by mortar. They seem too low to offer much protection, or confine horses. Some rocks are melon-size. The larger ones weigh up to a ton. Lifting them no doubt required the effort of several men.

“Some go in a straight line, others twist like a demented snake up a steep hillside, others come in a spiral two hundred feet wide and circle into a boulder,” amateur wall historian Russell Swanson wrote in 1997. Over 12 years, he visited more than 40 miles of the stone structures. The walls seem out of place in California’s wild golden hills, evoking instead memories of tidy New England fields memorialized by poet Robert Frost, or the rich green pastures of Ireland.

Why, in such a vast landscape, didn’t builders simply use barbed wire? Or wood? Instead, they’re built of coarse-grained sandstone, abundant in these hills, called graywacke.

Native Americans say they historically had little interest in erecting boundaries. “In general, our ancestors did not believe in scarring or altering Mother Earth,” said Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. In 1904, John Fryer, a UC Berkeley professor of Oriental languages and literature, asserted that they were “undoubtedly the work of Mongolians. … The Chinese would naturally wall themselves in.”

Several years later, ethnologist Henry C. Meyers agreed they were the product of strong and ancient civilizations: “Neither man nor men of the present day could possibly put large stones of these walls in place without appliances of some kind.”

Dr. Robert F. Fisher, the founder of the Mission Peak Heritage Foundation, told the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 1984 that he was mystified: “They predate the Indians. They predate the Spaniards. It doesn’t fit in with any of the later histories.”

More recently, lichen analyses date the walls back to the 1850s to 1880s — the post-Gold Rush era, when California was swelling with newcomers anxious to lay their claim on acreage. While imperfect, the technique dates inanimate objects by measuring the diameter of growing lichens.

That evidence hasn’t stopped the internet from spawning its own theories, crediting mythical Lemurians — tall people who breathed through scaly aqua skin and sought refuge in California after the disappearance of the Pacific continent of Mu. Much more likely is an explanation put forth by a consensus of experts like Fentress; State Parks archaeologist Hylkema; and Beverly Ortiz, cultural services coordinator of the East Bay Regional Park District.

The walls were likely built to contain cattle by new European immigrants in the post-Gold Rush era, perhaps using unpaid or low-paid Native American, Chinese or Mexican labour, they believe. The stones stand as a legacy of our once-rural culture, poignant reminders of people long gone. Unlike the railroad or mining tycoons — the Crockers, Stanfords, Huntingtons and Floods — these early ranchers left no mansions, antiques or jewellery. Only rocks.

“The rock walls throughout the East Bay are neither ancient nor mysterious, even if the specific individuals who made them are unknown to us today,” Ortiz said. “They are associated with historic Euro-American ranching, dairy and dry farming activities.”

The historians note that cattle and sheep don’t need tall walls to be managed; they’re docile and don’t jump. The rocks, Fentress and Ortiz said, also could have been used to help catch or drain water or establish boundaries between ranches.

But which ethnic group built the walls?

The Portuguese were among the early ranchers, said Robert Burrill and Joseph Ehardt, of the Milpitas Historical Society. But other immigrants, such as Italians, Irish and Spaniards, may have brought wall-building skills from their homelands.

These post-Gold Rush settlers, who were not wealthy, likely built walls with their own hands, Fentress said. But they also may have enlisted low-cost labour from other ethnic groups, such as Mexicans — who had been displaced from their ranchos — and Chinese, who build the railroads and projects like Oakland’s Lake Chabot dam. Or perhaps they were built by Native Americans during an era that authorized the forced apprenticeship of native peoples, a practice not banned until the 1860s.

Archaeologists say the walls are a ghostly elegy of their builders.

“They are essentially the archaeology of the working class, the common people who came here and made a living,” Fentress said. “It is the only evidence we have of these people’s lives — and it is important to tell that story as well as we can.”

Remains of Ancient American Dogs Identified at Jamestown

Dogs first came to the Americas about 16,000 years ago, likely on the heels of ice age hunters crossing a bygone land bridge from Siberia. These indigenous canines remained on the continent for thousands of years as furry friends and hunting companions—until, suddenly, they were gone, replaced genetically by European breeds.

Now, a pair of jawbones pried from the earth beneath Virginia’s colonial Jamestown settlement may illuminate when these dogs vanished and the roles they may have played in the lives of both Native Americans and European colonists.

It’s a “pretty cool” study that provides a window into a period of time in which little is known about the continent’s first dogs, says Courtney Hofman, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who was not involved with the research. “A lot of work has focused on much older indigenous dogs, but less has been done on them in more recent times.”

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas in the 15th century, they brought with them large war dogs. Later European colonists brought over working dogs such as bloodhounds and greyhounds, as well as other hunting dogs.

Gradually, these European lineages almost completely replaced the indigenous dogs of the Americas. Today, only a few arctic breeds, such as Siberian huskies and Alaskan malamutes, are thought to retain a genetic connection to their ancient past.

How and when this dramatic genetic turnover happened remains unknown. So Ariane Thomas, a graduate student studying anthropology at the University of Iowa, turned to the remains of dogs uncovered at Jamestown between 2007 and 2010.

Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, founded largely by explorers with little farming experience.

Thomas managed to extract mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), inherited from the maternal line, from two canine jawbones, one found beneath a former bakery and the other inside a well thought to have belonged to Colonial Governor John Smith. Both structures date to the early 1600s.

Thomas compared the dogs’ mtDNA with that of modern and ancient dogs around the world. The Jamestown dogs’ maternal line was totally unrelated to European breeds, her team reported here last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. Instead, the animals were most closely related to other ancient dogs from Illinois and Ohio and were distantly related to several ancient arctic dogs, including the oldest known American dog, found in Alaska and thought to be about 10,000 years old.

Curiously, the dogs aren’t closely related to canines dated to about 1000 to 1400 C.E. found at another early Virginian colonial village known as Weyanoke, just 50 kilometres away.

“There’s a lot more diversity than maybe we initially thought,” Thomas says. That suggests European dogs may have replaced indigenous ones slowly, she says.

All the dog skull fragments recovered from Jamestown feature narrow, shallow cutmarks suggesting they were butchered, she says. The remains were also found amid food waste such as mussel shells and fish bones. The jawbone recovered from Smith’s well dates to a period known as the Starving Time, spanning the winter between 1609 and 1610 during which the Jamestown colonists nearly perished. “They were running low on supplies,” Thomas says, and “resorted to eating whatever was around.”

Some of the other dog bones were found in layers dating to at least 10 years later, suggesting eating dogs wasn’t uncommon when times got tough.

How exactly these indigenous dogs came to Jamestown remains a mystery, she says. Colonists wanted to maintain the prized lineages of European hunting dogs, so it’s unlikely they would have knowingly allowed native dogs to breed with their own, Thomas notes. Later, a law passed in 1629 expressly prohibited trading European dogs to Indigenous people.

The Jamestown dogs may also have had Indigenous owners. Thousands of mussel shell beads in various stages of construction found at the site suggest some Indigenous people—likely the local Powhatan—may have lived and worked at the settlement. If so, they may have brought their canine companions with them.

Next, Thomas hopes to sequence the nuclear DNA of the Jamestown dogs, which will reveal whether they were fully indigenous or hybrids of European-indigenous dogs.

The stories of these dogs highlight the “shared histories” of Indigenous people and colonial Europeans, says Raquel Fleskes, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. “It’s part of the story of Europeans learning from Indigenous societies, and [the dogs’ story] could shed light on their relationships and interactions.”

The U.S. Returns Looted Sculptures to Libya

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg today announced the return of two antiquities collectively valued at more than $500,000 to the people of Libya.

The artefacts, “Veiled Head of a Lady” and “Bust of a Bearded Man,” were both looted from the ancient city of Cyrene, which faced rampant looting in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s shortly before the appearance of the pieces on the international art market.

The items were returned during a repatriation ceremony attended by the Charge d’Affaires of the Embassy of Libya in DC Khaled Daief, and U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”) Acting Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge Mike Alfonso. 

“These are more than just beautiful artefacts – they are windows into thousands of years of culture and deserve to be returned to their country of origin,” said District Attorney Bragg.

“Manhattan is home to some of the most prized art and history pieces in the entire world, but they must be acquired legally. We will not allow New York to be a hub for trafficked antiquities, and will continue to crack down on looting and smuggling across the globe in coordination with our law enforcement partners.”

“Thanks to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, we are grateful for the opportunity to repatriate this cultural artefact.

We would like to express our highest appreciation and gratitude for the efforts undertaken by the Manhattan District Attorney and his staff, the Department of Homeland Security, and everyone that worked to ensure that this invaluable Libyan artefact returns to its homeland in Shahat Museum,” said Charge d’Affaires of the Embassy of Libya Khaled Daief.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) New York Acting Special Agent in Charge Ricky J. Patel said, “HSI is honoured to return these incredibly significant antiquities to the people of Libya. 

The stunning ‘Veiled Head of a Lady,’ which dates back to the late 4th century B.C., and the extraordinary ‘Bust of a Bearded Man,’ both of which derive from Cyrenaica’s rich archaeological heritage.  For decades, these pieces were stolen and trafficked around the world, ultimately landing in the United States. 

HSI is proud to partner with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to actively pursue the theft of these national treasures and work to preserve the cultural history of nations throughout the world.  Today, we return these invaluable pieces to the country of Libya – their rightful home.”

As part of an ongoing criminal investigation concerning antiquities looted from the Middle East and North Africa, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit uncovered evidence that the two antiquities repatriated today had been looted from Cyrene, an archaeological site located near modern-day Shahat, Libya.

Dating to roughly 350 B.C.E, the Veiled Head of a Lady is valued at nearly half a million dollars and was seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it was on view since 1998. Prior to its display at the Met, the piece had been looted from a tomb in Cyrene, smuggled into Egypt by an antiquities trafficker known to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and then shipped to New York.

Dating to 100-300 C.E., the Bust of a Bearded Man is valued at $30,000 and was also looted from Cyrene, where it originated in a tomb rich with small niches. The piece was smuggled from Libya to Geneva, Switzerland, before arriving in Manhattan.  

In January of this year, the Manhattan D.A.’s Office returned another marble antiquity looted from Cyrene valued at $1.2 million the “Veiled Head of a Female,” to the people of Libya.
 
Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, Chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit and Senior Trial Counsel, handled the investigation with Supervising Investigative Analyst Apsara Iyer and Special Agents Robert Mancene and Robert Fromkin of Homeland Security Investigations.

Additional support for the investigation was provided by Investigative Analysts Alyssa Thiel and Daniel Healey.

District Attorney Bragg thanked HSI New York, the Embassy of Libya in D.C., Morgan Belzic of the Institut National D’Histoire de l’Art, and the French Archaeological Mission in Libya for their assistance with the matter.

Burnt seeds show people used tobacco 12,000 years ago

Four charred tobacco plant seeds found in an ancient Utah fireplace suggest early Americans may have been using the plant 12,300 years ago. The finding makes the first known use of tobacco some 9,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Researchers believe hunter-gatherers in the Great Salt Lake Desert may have sucked or smoked wads of the plant.

Until now, the earliest evidence of tobacco use was a 3,300-year-old smoking pipe discovered in Alabama.

Archaeologists discovered the millimetre-wide seeds at the Wishbone site, an ancient camp in the desert in what is now northern Utah.

There, they found the remnants of an ancient hearth that was surrounded by bone and stone artefacts. These included duck bones, stone tools, and a spear-tip bearing the remains of blood from a mammoth or an early form of an elephant.

Their findings suggest the native American hunter-gatherers may have consumed the tobacco while cooking or toolmaking, the scientists say in a paper published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The tobacco plant is native to the Americas and contains the psychoactive addictive substance nicotine.

Tobacco was widely cultivated and dispersed around the world following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas at the end of the 15th Century.

“The tobacco seeds were a big surprise. They are incredibly small and rare to be preserved,” Daron Duke of the Far Western Anthropological Research Group told the New Scientist.

“This suggests that people learned the intoxicant properties of tobacco relatively early in their time here rather than only with domestication and agriculture thousands of years later.”

Today, the Great Salt Lake Desert is a large dry lake. But 12,300 years ago, the camp would have been on a vast marshland.

“We know very little about their culture,” Mr Duke said of the hunter-gatherers. “The thing that intrigues me the most about this find is the social window it gives to a simple activity in an undocumented past. My imagination runs wild.”

Ancient Mysteries Of Chicago: Is The Puzzling Waubansee Stone A Neglected Pre-Columbian Artifact?

One of the most fascinating and obscure artefacts in North America is tucked away in a Chicago museum. The Waubansee Stone is a huge glacial erratic granite boulder with a larger-than-life head sculpted upon its upper surface. The expertly fashioned relief carving shows the face of a man with a chin beard, depicted with his mouth open and eyes closed. On the top of the stone, just above the head, is a large drop-shaped bowl that once emptied through the head and out of the mout xxx , xxx vea,,00h, over the lower lip, to another drainage spout below the man’s goatee. There are also two connecting holes on either side of the boulder, presumably used as a line anchorage for a sea vessel. 

All holes and drainage spouts are currently plugged with putty or other additions, suggesting there is no interest in a modern restoration. The mysterious face carving and associated cavities have given rise to speculation about its origins, including one theory that the stone was carved by prehistoric Mediterranean seafarers who used the 3,000-pound  boulder as a mooring stone.

Originally standing around 8 feet in height, the Waubansee Stone has mentioned in the first Fort Dearborn accounts as being located just beyond the stockade walls, along the shore of the Chicago River. Chicagoua (or Chicagou) was a local Indian word for the native garlic plant Allium Tricoccum, not an onion plant, that grew profusely along the banks of the Chicago River. 

When the first fort was built in 1803, the Potawatomi Indians of southern Lake Michigan had been trading with white people for well over a century but were becoming increasingly hostile to the number of new settlers coming into the region and staking a claim on their land. President Jefferson, who was very interested in the Indiana Territory (the Indiana Territory included Illinois lands from 1800-1809), was anxious about its security. 

He felt that an American military outpost should be established to protect the new frontier. He selected the mouth of the Chicago River as the site for a new fort. At that time there were several fur traders and their Indian wives living in the region. The fort was named after General Henry Dearborn, Secretary of War. It was built on the south side of the Chicago River where Michigan Avenue now crosses at Wacker Drive. 

Skirmishes with the Potawatomi were on the rise, reaching a crescendo in 1812 when settlers and soldiers were massacred at the first Fort Dearborn (1803-1812) was burned to the ground by the enraged Indians. 

The second Fort Dearborn was rebuilt in 1816-1817 and the Waubansee Stone was presumably reduced in size to be dragged into the fort’s parade grounds where it remained until the fort was dismantled. After that, the stone passed from collector to collector until it found a permanent home at the Fort Dearborn exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society.

Historian Henry H. Hurlbut (1813-1890) developed the generally accepted theory about the stone’s origin in 1881, unsupported by any records or documentation. His belief, admittedly based on no evidence, has the stone being carved in the early 1800s by an unnamed soldier stationed at the original Fort Dearborn. Its face was supposedly fashioned after a friendly Native American Potawatomi Chieftain named Wabansee [1], and this appointed name stuck. 

Hurlbut had only hearsay on which to base his observations, including the presumption that the Indians used the upper recess as a mortar to grind their corn. This accepted explanation has come under fire from several angles. For starters, the recess was intentionally plugged after the Indians supposedly used it, so it would have been an ineffective mortar because the corn would have drained through the mouth. Also, why would a frontier soldier, who was probably suspicious of the Potawatomi in the first place, spend many months to carve the likeness of their tribal leader? Aside from the fact that granite is one of the hardest stones to sculpt, the face is clearly the work of a master stone-cutter who must have devoted a considerable amount of time and labour to the job—hardly in keeping with the strenuous daily tasks of a common frontier soldier. Finally, Native Americans were not known to have grown goatees, nor did they ever carve in granite. But if not Hurlbut’s anonymous soldier or an Indian sculptor, then who crafted the mysterious features on the Waubansee Stone?

With more source material than Hurlbut had at his disposal, yet with an uncertain date and a possible grisly usage, fragments of evidence can be pieced together using various historians to arrive near the truth. 

An article in the Chicago Tribune dated September 22nd, 1903 clearly illustrates the two opposing viewpoints clashing over the stone’s origin:

“The second school of historians and antiquarians is convinced that the so-called Waubansee Stone dates back hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years before even Father Marquette first visited the site of Chicago in 1673. They see in the tall boulder, with its deeply top, a sacrificial altar on which perhaps the mound builders of prehistoric America offered even human sacrifices, and they are ready to believe that the face carved on one side of the stone is a representation of an ancient idol—one of the far off gods to whom that mythical people poured libations and offered the sacrificial blood of animals. However that may be, there is no question of doubt that in the early days of Fort Dearborn, as far back as we have any record, that identical stone, practically the same as it is today, lay near the stockade of old Fort Dearborn.”

The diffusionist theory of the Waubansee Stone describes it as a sacrificial altar for ancient Celtic and Phoenician traders in the millennium before Christ.

All historians agree that the Mississippian Culture performed animal and human sacrifices high atop their platform mounds, but where this practice originated is unknown. The Aztec or Toltec people from Mexico may have influenced them, or perhaps an earlier seafaring people notorious for infant sacrifices were responsible. It is well known that the Phoenicians (and their Celtic allies) travelled across the ocean to “the Farthest Land” known as Antilla. The precise location of Antilla was a closely guarded secret because it contained the most valuable commodity to the Bronze Age people—copper. 

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the richest natural deposit of pure copper in the world. It may seem a long way to go for metal, but in the Bronze Age, copper was more prized than gold or silver since it was the primary alloy used in weapon and tool production. With profit as a clear motive for their journey, it makes sense that the Phoenicians would travel very far to export copper. It also makes sense that the Phoenicians would spread their religious practices with their voyages. An integral element of the Phoenician religion was infant sacrifice to appease pagan gods and win favour for whatever activity was at hand. At the height of Phoenician power—lasting a thousand years from 1,200 BCE until the Second Punic War—babies were taken to an outdoor sacred site, called a Tophet, where a young child was placed in a carved depression on an altar and had its’ throat slit. 

Both the Celts and Phoenicians were known to sacrifice infant children of their enemies or barter with their trading partners to acquire a baby for this heinous ritual. In the case of the Waubansee Stone, the sacrificial blood would flow through the sculpture into the Chicago River as an offering to the water gods, thus ensuring a safe passage. The stone’s hideous purpose is evident in the closed eyes, an unusual style elsewhere, but recurring in surviving Phoenician art used for infant sacrifices. Moreover, the face depicts a chin beard, a personal grooming style of male Phoenicians. 

The mouth of the Chicago River was a necessary transition stop before entering the narrow river network leading into the Mississippi and then down to the Gulf of Mexico. Ships would need to be reconfigured from open water safety to narrow river defense. Oars and shields would replace conspicuous sails. After arriving at the mouth of the Chicago River, the ancient explorers may have settled for a brief time, sailed onward, been killed off, or possibly assimilated with the native population. There was likely a small Tophet temple at this strategic crossroad of lake and river, which thousands of years later would grow up to be the third-largest city in the United States.

Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.

[1] Waubonsie, {Wah-bahn-see} a Potawatomi Chief.

Waubonsie (1760-1848) was a leader of the Potawatomi Native American people. His name has been spelled in a variety of ways, including Waubansee, Wah-bahn-se, Waubonsee, Waabaanizii in the contemporary Ojibwe language, and Wabanzi in the contemporary Potawatomi language (meaning “He Causes Paleness” in both languages)

Waubansee was a chief who supported the British in the War of 1812. In 1814 he signed the Treaty of Greenville by which Potawatomi allegiance was transferred to the United States.  In a series of treaties signed by Waubansee, Potawatomi lands around Lake Michigan were sold.  

In 1835 Waubansee visited Washington, D.C., to sign the treaty which sold the last of the tribal lands and to accept land west of the Mississippi River. During this visit, his portrait was painted by Charles Bird King (1785-1862). The Potawatomi Nation moved to Kansas in the 1840s and settled in what is now Waubansee County, just east of Topeka. Waubansee’s portrait illustrates the Native American attraction to military costume. Coats,hats, and swords were often presented as gifts to prominent chiefs. Additionally, Waubansee wears a Presidential Peace Medal and large trade silver earrings.