You know, when I was a kid, we lived out in the country and I used to drag rock around with my 4-wheeler and made circles and piles and such. I wonder if several millennium from now, someone will find it and speculate if it was a temple, fort, place for human sacrifice, or astronomical clock.
I’m thinking it was, maybe, the village “time out” circle for unruly children.
Two days later, there's a knock on my door and it's my landlord. He's looking at me it a most amusing fashion, and asks "did you guys do anything weird last weekend?" [Apart from drinking, fishing, shooting, and causing a ruckus the answer was no].
I replied, "what do you mean?" and he takes me out back where there is a seemingly random pile of stones arranged around a perfect circle. I was mystified.
It took me two days to determine that my friends had spent a good part of the night throwing stones at circular tent (where someone had passed-out). The stones bounced-off in all directions and when the tent was taken-down, a perfect circle in the center remained. It was pretty cool.
Aha! We always figured you kids were sacrificing humans out there.
Our local swimming hole had a large flat gathering place on one shore.
We had gathered a couple ton of pumpkin and cantaloupe sized stones for a fire pit, and then ringed the pit with larger boulders for seats.
While strictly utilitarian in it’s construction, I personally know of several Bulls— ah, “story tellers”, that convinced their girlfriends that it was an ancient Indian “pow wow” site, where tribal chiefs gathered for war councils and such.
It was romantic enough of a fiction to get some “action”, and, while mysterious, not as scary as a cemetery.
I would imagine the fiction has pretty much become accepted as local “factual” history over the decades, with very few of us original site builders now around to refute the myth.
I would even expect it to show up as an illustrated magazine article in some tourist magazine or historical site.
The fact is much simpler.
We needed a barbecue pit and we didn’t want to sit on the ground while we ate.