Posted on 12/29/2008 9:53:57 AM PST by BGHater
The remains of the 855-foot stone wall that gives Fort Mountain its name wind like a snake around the northeast Georgia park,and its very presence begs a question:Who put them there?
A Cherokee legend attributes the wall to a mysterious band of "moon-eyed people" led by a Welsh prince named Madoc who appeared in the area more than 300 years before Columbus sailed to America.
A plaque at the wall says matter-of-factly it was built by Madoc and his Welsh followers,but most professional archeologists give no credence to the legend.
"There has been no archaeological evidence to back up stories that either this Welsh prince or any others came to explore the New World," said Jared Wood, the manager of the archaeology lab at the University of Georgia.
As the legend goes, the group arrived at Mobile Bay around 1170,made their way up the Alabama and Coosa rivers and built stone fortifications at several spots near present-day Chattanooga, Tenn.
Dana Olson, an author who has spent decades trying to prove the legend,said circumstantial evidence on both sides of the Atlantic is too compelling to ignore.
"I've traveled all over the country finding these forts. Some of them are pretty well known,but I'm still uncovering some of them," said Olson, the author of "The Legend of Prince Madoc and the White Indians."
The stone structures have long been a topic of debate. Many scientists have come to believe that the walls at Fort Mountain and other Southeast sites were built by native Americans between 200 B.C. and A.D. 600.
"We're not exactly sure what purposes these enclosures served,"said Wood,the UGA archaeologist."But they were likely well-known gathering places for social events. Seasonal meetings of friends and kin, trading of goods, astronomical observance, and religious or ceremonial activities may have occurred there."
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeologynews.org ...
The word "enclosure" is PC-speak for, "We're going to put our hands over our eyes and loudly shout, 'It's not a fortification because we're positive the indigenous people were peaceful and wouldn't need fortifications." They apparently believe primitive people had nothing better to do with their time than build heavy stone and wood "enclosures" to ensure privacy for their "social events" and to keep their animals from wandering off. It's the sort of willful ignorance that would make someone look at Fort Ticonderoga and call it a corral, enclosed pasture, or meeting hall.
In his book War Before Civilization (which goes into the willful ignorance at work in archaeology), Lawrence Keeley talks about being denied research grants to dig on ancient "fortifications" in Europe until he changed the word "fortifications" to "enclosures" on his research grant request. The map he provides of one of his digs proves the absurdity of interpreting the large palisades of logs as anything but a fortification, with arrowheads concentrated around the wall and particularly clustered around the gate, as you might find from an attack.
Sounds more like Union bosses. ;-)
Yep, because the White Sea-Baltic Canal's been done already.
The Archeologists answer to any pile of rocks!
They built it because the tribal elders wanted to keep the neighboring tribes’ kids the hell off their lawn.
Cool! Thanks for the ping!
Trashed as he is by the “experts”, I highly recommend the “America BC” series of books by Barry Fell.
America, B.C.
Saga America
Bronze Age America
I find a lot of odd things on the mountain that “experts” attribute to “paleo Indians” when in reality, they look exactly like paleo-European artifacts, to me.
[since when did “Indians” sit around and carve cup marks into granite glacial boulders?]
Also, why they think something like this wasn’t built for defense, but for some religious ceremony or something. We put fenses around our properties today for defense or setting boundries to keep our kids and pets in. Why are these “acedemics” such goofs?
Mystery?
To be able to farm, you have to clear rocks. What do you do with the rocks? Stack them up. After a while, you get enough where are you're making a wall...then it becomes a fence.
We make the boys pick up rocks to clear grazing pasture and ones that float up in the wheat field (Rocks float). Use the rocks for erosion control. Then the boys made a three sided structure off in the back...it should last for hundreds of years. *If the cows can't knock it down, it will last.
i would wonder what legends actually say now. did the white welsh folks describe themselves as being from cymraeg (was this name used in the 12th century already in old welsh?), or some other gaelic-derived place? any place-names? was the Madoc name actually used Lack of any written records makes it hard to know what filtered in from spanish and others later on in the colonial period. What is the earliest recorded spanish or english transcription of the legend?
does enough remain at the site to make any comparison to contemporary stone-work in wales at this time? there are a many structures in wales older than the date given here which have extant parts from before this period intact still.
ANY actual finds on -site of demonstrably british origin pre-16th century?
at any rate, these are the first things that come to mind.
The fences in the pictures posted here seem to have a definite purpose. They are built on very steep hills which probably means they were agricultural, in order to create "steps" on which to grow crops in hilly terrain.
Just a guess looking at these pictures.
I have been there. It sure doesn’t look like it could have served as fortifications - the “walls” are much too low.
Could have been ceremonial, there is a “rock eagle” made of piled stones in southern Georgia.
Lower down, the Indians built very defensible mound villages and forts with stockades, etc.
It’s always possible it wasn’t a fortification, but that shouldn’t necessarily be the default assumption. I highly recommend Keeley’s book. It’s well written with some interesting arguments and conclusions.
Hilltop fortifications were widespread across Wales and into England, in the correct period for this to be somewhat plausible. I tend to give at least some credence to native legends involving the encroachment of other peoples upon their territories. There is no obvious, compelling reason to lie about such things. Where the original truth might go astray is in attributing these hilltop fortifications to a specific Welshman by the name of Madoc. But, then again, there appears to be at least some corroboration. Native tribes are considerably more European, genetically speaking, than they should be, unless just this sort of encroachment had occurred.
Oh, and those hilltop fortifications were known variously as “Toothill,” “Totehill,” “Tuthill,” etcetera. The original English translation of the Bible, for which Wyclyffe was branded a heretic, had “watchtower” translated as Toothill ... “upon the Toothill of the Lord I am stondeth.”
The hilltops would have been kept bare of trees. Fortified for protection/defense, also used for astronomical/astrological observation and possibly for communication over distance, one to the next. Quite a bit of lore built up around them, ley lines and such. The one near London had quite a reputation as a pagan ritual site, but that might have come about in later years as a result of popular misunderstanding. Who knows.
Toothills are typically found atop natural high ground, but I think there’s one near Glastonbury that involves a barrow, a manmade hill. Left breast of the Virgo Effigy, if I’m not mistaken.
I’ll check the library. But the piles of rock that make up the “walls” there wouldn’t hold livestock in, much less attackers’ out. They’re not even much good as cover. Maybe they were better built and higher once?
Keeley doesn’t talk about that site in particular but about the tendency among archaeologists to assume that primative people are peaceful and that things serve a non-warlike purpose by default in general. It’s possible that this particular site isn’t a fortification but don’t assume that what you see now is all that was ever there. A lot of primative fortifications were built of mixed materials that included gravel, dirt, clay, wood, and other materials that can decay or wash away. Stone is heavy and hard to work and thus requires a lot of effort to build with. England was once covered with small castles and keeps made of wood, none of which have survived. All you’ll see now are mounds of dirt that were once part of the fortifications.
There is a map of the outline of the 'stone wall' on this website, the outline of which is repeated on pottery discovered at the site.
Reminds me very much of Serpent Mound. IMO what we see here is the representation on the ground, of a celestial phenomenon.
“...By far the most intriguing theory positions the wall as a product of ancient astronomers. The seemingly random zigzagging shape of the wall could very well be intentional. During the same period the wall was being constructed, Native Americans in southwest Georgia were producing pottery with strange zigzagging designs quite similar to those of the Fort Mountain wall. Some say these patterns reflect observations of specific planets and their movement across the night sky over time. Makes sense. After all, where are observatories? On the top of mountains. And native people wanting to study the heavens would seek out high unobstructed places as well...”
http://www.wildernessviewcabins.com/ActivitiesDetail.aspx?ActID=161
Building them on hillsides meant the slaves probably had to carry the rocks up from the bottom ~ must have been an exceptionally aggressive bunch of slaves to scare their masters that way.
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