Posted on 02/03/2009 12:19:57 PM PST by BGHater
An academic maverick is challenging conventional wisdom on Canada’s prehistory by claiming an archeological site in southern Alberta is really a vast, open-air sun temple with a precise 5,000-year-old calendar predating England’s Stonehenge and Egypt’s pyramids.
Mainstream archeologists consider the rock-encircled cairn to be just another medicine wheel left behind by early aboriginals. But a new book by retired University of Alberta professor Gordon Freeman says it is in fact the centre of a 26-square-kilometre stone “lacework” that marks the changing seasons and the phases of the moon with greater accuracy than our current calendar.
“Genius existed on the prairies 5,000 years ago,” says Freeman,the widely published former head of the university’s physical and theoretical chemistry department.
Freeman’s fascination with prairie prehistory dates back to his Saskatchewan boyhood.He and his father would comb the short grasses of the plains in search of artifacts exposed by the scouring wind.That curiosity never left him and he returned to it as he prepared to retire from active teaching.
Looking for a hobby, he asked a friend with an interest in history to suggest a few intriguing sites to visit. On a warm late-August day in 1980, that list drew him to what he has come to call Canada’s Stonehenge,which is also the title of his book.
A central cairn atop one of a series of low hills overlooking the Bow River, about 70 kilometres east of Calgary, had been partially excavated in 1971 and dated at about 5,000 years old. But as he approached it, Freeman strongly felt there was much more there than previously thought.
“As we walked toward the hilltop,I saw all kinds of patterns in the rocks on the way up. As I walked around the hilltop, I could see patterns that I doubted very much were accidental.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnews.canoe.ca ...
I would never suggest it was stupidity. It's more likely that no one saw the need for a them. Just a few decades ago, almost nobody thought people needed a home computer — let alone one that fits in a shirt pocket.
Priorities drive invention. Most native Americans were at least semi nomadic which means they didn’t really make roads over time. I suspect the travois was just as effective over rough ground as wheels.
After all, I use a wheel barrel here in the yard just fine but I really don’t want to try pushing it through the woods.
Ever played DOD?
Strange the wheels of the toy on the left even seem to have a spoke detail the you might see on a full size wooden wagon wheels like they knew all the concepts... Hmm maybe the Mayans had some unknown odd taboo about wheels and their uses
No horses or decent draft animals was why no great carts. (Llamas are OK, but not exactly oxen.)
Plus, their territory was awfully mountainous, further limiting usefulness.
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Zheng He’s fleet, and the ships in it, were on a scale that wasn’t matched until the 20th century. There are populations of Chinese ancestry on African islands from one of his ships that wrecked. His voyages put Marco Polo to shame, and some folks believe he even reached the New World.
The Ming government ordered his ships burned and his records destroyed in the belief that China had all the wisdom the world had to offer and all this running around was a waste of time. Which leads to an important point: The critical prerequisite for discovery is curiosity.
The world would be a very different place if China hadn’t managed to end up with some really ignorant egocentric rulers along the way.
The great First Emperor did major damage to China’s future when his paranoia drove him to destroy records of things rulers before himself had done.
My thoughts exactly!
China and Europe were on about an equal footing in 1000 A.D., with other civilizations not far behind. Europe had a few factors in it’s favor early in the second millenium — competition among peoples locally, a religion that encouraged finding new places to proselytize. Some scholars even posit that the Black Death, in giving Europe a drop in population and hence excess productive capacity, led to the free time needed to cook up the Renaissance.
Odd.
MeanWestTexan offers a plausible explanation in post 25, above.
I think nearly everyone just takes their culture (including all the technology) for granted, and rolls (ahem) with it. In traditional societies everywhere, there wasn't a notion of "progress". People didn't ask “is there a better way". Even today, there are huge differences in inventiveness between cultures. Compare the U.S. to nearly anywhere. Or, more dramatically, Israel to everyone else in their neighbourhood.
More interesting to me besides the wheel (which, again, I view as a product of terrain and lack of draft animals) is the lack of pulley, block-and-pulley and the like.
This would have been of great use in mountainous terrain and for building their elaborate stone structures.
As in, “how do you get the rock to the top?”
It appears, they built earthworks around the structures and pushed and pulled (probably on logs, which are akin to wheels, and better since a double-axle cart would break), which is primarily what the Egyptians did.
But still -— a pulley is a force mutiplier extraordinaire.
I suppose that is a factor of lack of ships and sails, which is where our pulley thinking came about.
...but the moral to the story is that government intervention always eventually results in decay.
Bit overbroad, don't you think? A partial list of government-sponsored expeditions:
Columbus
Magellan
Drake
Cook
Lewis & Clark
Apollo
Voyager
Viking
While prairie looks flat, a lot of it is not, and is in fact punctuated by deep draws and badlands terrain. Wheels would not fare as well in such an environment as the travois did, and the travois had the added benefit of utilizing the lodgepoles for the 'house' en route, making something which would have been freight useful as part of the transport device.
YMMV, but crossing the countryside out here with wheels would have been far tougher (wheels need roads).
......that’s attention to detail.....
It is science..... the study of the heavens
Interesting stuff.
Can’t blame them for not figuring stuff out.
I’d be eating mushrooms and raw meat in a cave for 100 years before I’d discover cooking.
Government was then a private organization (a royal family) seeking profit. Capitalistic gubmint.
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