viz-
“7.52n. 122w37n.
“Around Berkeley there are mysterious and ancient walls of stone with no apparent purpose. They are rather ordinary looking and survive in sections from 20 feet to 200 yards long. They vary from 2 feet to 5 feet tall and are 4 feet wide at ground level. This indicates that the walls were originally much higher. The rock goes down ten inches below the surface. Some of the rocks weigh more than 200 pounds. The walls extend nearly seven miles into the Oakland Hills. They do not appear to be animal corrals or pens either. They are mainly straight. Some intersect at angles and there are distances of parallel walls separated by ten yards or so but no indications that they form enclosures.
Many of the rocks weigh hundreds of pounds and some of the stones in the walls weigh up to one ton. They are chiefly located around Vollmer and Grizzly Peaks, a gully on the South slope of Mount Baldy and overlooking Redwood Canyon on the South side of Round Top.
The structures consist of loose piles of rocks strung along in straight, curved and sometimes even parallel lines. Weathering and lichen covering as well as the fact that they are now embedded in a soil rise of one foot on average indicates extremely great age.
https://sites.google.com/site/georgemitrovicauthor/mysterious-archeological-sites
California’s East Bay Walls < Prev Next >
Posted By: lehara2003 lehara2003 Offline Send Email
Wed Aug 18, 2004 6:29 am |
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Enigma Unsolved:
California’s East Bay Walls
By Andy Asp
In the barren, dusty hills to the east of the San Francisco Bay, there exist a number of crude stone walls running across grassy peaks and down through dry streambeds. Up to a meter high and a meter wide, the walls run in broken sections ranging from ten meters to over a half mile long. Some look to be careless piles of melon-sized rocks, while others are carefully constructed dry-laid (unmortared) masonry, occasionally using large sandstone boulders weighing a ton or more. The walls appear to be very old, perhaps even ancient. Many of the formations have sunk far into the earth, and others have accumulated thick calico coats of lichen. They are often completely obscured by dense thickets of poison oak and other brush.
Scholars and amateur archaeologists have been puzzled by the walls’ origins for over a century, due in large part to their apparent lack of purpose. The modest height would seem to rule out their function as fortifications, and the rambling start-and-stop patterns render them useless as corrals or containment fences. Examples can be found as far north as Berkeley and as far south as Milpitas, near the Silicon Valley. One researcher estimates that if the walls were strung together, they would probably stretch for 20 miles or more.
So who built these ancient walls, and for what purpose? Science and history give us only a handful of clues, leaving room for a colorful range of theories. The appearance of a few rock circles in or near the walls— which some speculate to be “solstice sites”— helps to propel the imagination. In a 1904 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, a journalist asked:
“Do the miles of mysterious stone barriers, which serve no modern purpose, bespeak a lost civilization of Toltecs or Atlanteans?”
Let’s begin with the known facts. The land on which the walls lay was settled at various times by Native Americans, Spain, Mexico, and finally the United States. (Russian traders and Basque shepherds may have also passed through over the years.) In 1797, the Franciscan Order began the establishment of Mission San Jose in nearby Fremont, using conscripted Indian labor. One quite plausible theory states that the walls were built by Indian slaves, possibly to instill some brutal Christian work ethic into their heathen souls. However, the copious mission records make no mention of this.
The area’s earliest residents, the Ohlone Indians, are usually ruled out as the engineers behind the unusual walls’ construction. The tribes of this region were largely hunter-gatherers, and there is no ethnographic evidence to suggest the Ohlone built any lasting structures. While it’s possible the tribe may have built the walls as game blinds or perhaps for some spiritual purpose, author Malcolm Margolin (The Ohlone Way, 1978) stated:
“It was not typical of the Ohlone to go off and move heavy stones around. It sure beats the heck out of me what those walls are doing up there.”
This lack of a credible explanation for the walls’ existence has inspired generations of “wall-nuts” to pack a lunch and trek off into the scrub brush and oak-dotted hills in search of clues. Early in the last century, local newspapers featured a number of articles on the stone walls’ origins, some quite fanciful. A 1916 Oakland Tribune story (”Was Oakland Ancient Battleground?”) contained an illustration depicting sinewy bald Neanderthals angrily hurling rocks at one another. In 1904, Dr. John Fryer, professor of Oriental languages at U.C. Berkeley, declared:
“This is undoubtedly the work of Mongolians... the Chinese would naturally wall themselves in, as
they do in all of their towns in China.”
The popular and long-held notion that the walls were built by wandering visitors from Asia is not entirely without historical basis. In 1761, the noted French sinologist Deguignes returned to the West with accounts of a fifth century voyage by a group of Chinese Buddhist monks who claimed to have visited a distant land which they called Fusang. Some historians have interpreted descriptions of the voyage to support the idea that Fusang may have been California, though most agree it was more likely present-day Mexico. More recently, linguists have discovered similarities in the languages of California Indians and Siberian tribes. [See FT 133:12]
There is a less far-fetched possibility that the walls were built using the cheap and abundant Chinese labor left in California at the end of the Gold Rush. Thousands of Chinese workers had been imported to work in the gold fields, and later to complete the Transcontinental Railroad. Some long-time residents maintain that Asian workers built the walls, although no direct evidence supports this view.
A shortage of formal scholarship on the East Bay Walls has added to their mysterious appeal. But a turn-of-the-century ethnologist, Dr. Henry C. Meyers, Ph.D., believed that the walls were:
“...Undoubtedly erected centuries ago... Neither man nor men of the present day could possibly put the large stones of these walls in place without appliances of some kind.”
And Dr. Robert F. Fisher, the former president of the Mission Peak Heritage Foundation, stated:
“These walls are just enigmas. They predate the Indians. They predate the Spaniards. It doesn’t fit in with any of the later history.”
One early wall researcher was Sister Mary Paula von Tessen of the Dominican Order at Mission San Jose. She devoted twenty-five years to studying the walls, making a number of maps and drawings in the early 1900s. But when Dr. Fisher (who served as personal physician to the Order until his retirement in the 1980s) tried to obtain Sister Paula’s notes, his efforts were met with a stony wall of silence. The Order’s archives still contain her writings on religious matters, but most of her work on the walls has apparently vanished into thin air.
Some wall enthusiasts would undoubtedly be disheartened were science to provide irrefutable evidence of a mundane or “earthly” reason for the walls’ original construction. Local legend states that the walls were built by wayward Celtic Druids, and there have been solstice vigils held in their presence. Dowsers have claimed to detect powerful and shifting “energy fields” surrounding the walls. (Upon trekking out to inspect the walls, this author was menaced by a pair of large rattlesnakes at the wall’s base, dancing erect like cobras and rattling their tails. Though it was surely some harmless courtship ritual by the timid creatures, it was nonetheless a bit disconcerting.)
One of the most clear and sober bits of evidence comes from the papers of Weller Curtner, descendant of Henry Curtner, a rancher who owned 2000 acres near Mission San Jose and leased land to tenant farmers in the 1870’s. The younger Curtner wrote:
“At the corner of Weller and Calaveras Road there was an Amish family by the name of Matthews... Those were the people that built the stone walls that you find along the top of the ridges. In the fall when the crops were off they would go out with stone boats made out of a couple willow trees.... They cleared the land and built the fence at the same time... same as they did in New England.”
While portions of the wall appear just moments from the campus of U.C. Berkeley, there has been little research done in the modern era using contemporary techniques. Russell Swanson, an amateur wall researcher, has tried in the past to arrange for tree core samples (from trees that grew up through the walls many years ago), Carbon-14 dating tests, and lichen dating tests, but was largely met with ambivalence by the scientific community.
Whether built by Toltecs, Druids, Atlanteans, Indians or farm workers, one thing is clear: certain portions of the walls are in danger. Due to increasing urban sprawl, the sections found on private land are being threatened by the bulldozer’s blade (a large stone circle on Pleasanton Ridge was obliterated by real estate developers in the 1990s). Ranchers have carved holes for roads and hauled off stones for more utilitarian purposes. Unless legislation is enacted to preserve the walls as part of California’s rich cultural heritage, their future is uncertain.
For the present, the bulk of the walls remain safely undisturbed on land held by the East Bay Regional Park District, for “wall-nuts” through the ages to follow and explore, pondering the unanswered questions: “Who? Why?” And the fact that these questions may remain unanswered suits most of them just fine.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Burress, Charles, “Unraveling the Old Mystery of East Bay Walls,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1984
Buxton, Terryn, & Norris, Courtney, “Rock Walls of Mission Peak Regional Preserve: An Overview,” for the East Bay Regional Park District in cooperation with Americorps/East Bay Conservation Corps, 1995
Collier, Michael, “More Mysterious Stone Walls Sighted in Hills Near Hayward,” Hayward Review, 1985
French, Harold, “Was Oakland Ancient Battleground? Prehistoric Walls Puzzle to Science,” Oakland Tribune, 1916
French, Harold, “Who Built the Pre-historic Walls Topping Berkeley Hills?” San Francisco Chronicle, 1904
Lane, Del, “Stone Walls an Ancient Mystery: Massive relics of unknown era,” Oakland Tribune, 1982
“Stone Age Relics Discovered in the Berkeley Hills,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1904
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The Berkeley Walls Extended
For almost two decades, R. Swanson has been searching out the enigmatic stone walls that festoon the Berkeley Hills and beyond, far, it now seems. We first mentioned these walls and provided a photograph back in 1985. (SF#39) Since then, Swanson’s labors have received a modicum of public notoriety but hardly a flicker of academic interest. One reason for professional disinterest seems to be that grant money for exploring old walls is nonexistent!
To bring new readers of SF up to speed on these perplexing California walls, we quote two paragraphs from a recent article by Swanson.
“On the crest of the Berkeley hills there is a long line of large rocks, some are three feet in length, they may weigh a half ton. A century ago they ran for miles on these dry, wind-swept crests then down in a line to what is now the botanical gardens.”
.....
“In the past twelve years, I have visited over forty miles of these stone structures. To call them walls is something of a misnomer. Some do 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 with a six-inch knob carved on the top of it. Some are massive, over six feet tall and run for miles.”
In the same article, Swanson relates how a local TV station that wanted to film the walls took him for a helicopter ride. As expected, all along the East Bay hills they discerned line after long line of walls. Then, when the copter passed over Mission Peak toward Mt. Allison, mile upon mile of still walls appeared. Numbed by these new discoveries, Swanson remarked:
“I could see years of work just laying there waiting for me.”
(Swanson, Russell; “The Berkeley Walls and Other Enigmas,” Bay Area Rock Art News, 15:7,
June 1997.)
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf115/sf115p01.htm
Fascinating, thanks!