Free Republic

On a recent December morning, Mack Jones hiked a trail bordering the lake at Sandy Creek Park in Athens before he ventured off the path and up a forested ridge. There he showed a group following him a series of mysterious stone terrace walls and rock piles. "It's hidden in plain sight, and it's been that way for the 30 years the park has been here," Jones said. "No one has messed with it and maybe they won't." Jones believes those numerous rock piles - and especially the stone wall terraces lacing the hillside - might constitute evidence that the...

Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap, near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside. Visible are at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures. Much more may be hidden underground. It is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.