One of the most spectacular lithic sites in New England sits on a hilltop in southern New Hampshire, known for many years as Mystery Hill, and now called America's Stonehenge. The complex consists of stone chambers, dry-stone walls, underground passageways, standing stones, alignments and inscriptions.
The questionable history of Mystery Hill, subsequent ramsacking of rock from the site for Colonial-era and later building and often poorly managed excavations have left much disagreement in the scientific community as to the site's real antiquity. From more recent and better facilitated digs it would seem that this was not a Colonial-era farm, as has been put forth, although the fanciful names given to some of the structures, i.e. The Oracle Chamber, detract from serious archeological consideration. Now a privately owned tourist site, Mystery Hill continues to be studied today.
In 1826, the wooded rise was owned by a farmer named Jonathan Pattee, who built his house amidst the stone ruins as they stood then. The home burned some thirty years later, and the family moved elsewhere, leaving the site to the weather for decades. Locally the area of stone structures and walls became known as Pattee's Caves, and many people believed that farmer Pattee himself spent his time building all these wondrous chambers, for purposes unknown. This is a debatable point, although evidence for Mr. Pattee's utilization of the stones extant on the site is undeniable. Local history also makes vague reference to Pattee as a moonshiner, and that General Lafayette paid him a visit on his last tour of America. In any case, many stones were removed in later years and can be found in still-existing buildings and structures in the nearby towns of Lawrence and Andover, Massachusetts....cont'd
http://lithic.50g.com/newhamp.htm__________________________________________________________________
The Mysterious Megaliths of New EnglandBy Paul Tudor Angel
Mystery Hill, the Upton Cave, Calendar I and Calendar II, Gungywamp and Druid’s Hill are just several of the names given some incredibly important historical sites of which many have never heard a whisper. But their existence—and their importance—is becoming harder and harder to hide as more are discovered and interested folk become exposed to their grandeur.
Sometime in the late 1600s or early 1700s, early American colonists began discovering and utilizing underground "root cellars" made of large, but manageable pieces of dressed stone as storage houses for food stuffs. Colonists were also finding numerous stone buildings, usually of "one story, circular or rectangular in form, and up to 30 feet in length and up to 10 feet wide and eight feet high or more." Many included roof slabs or lintels of several tons. Many also had carefully crafted openings in their roofs which allowed a small amount of light to pass through to the interiors.The colonial newcomers were convinced that these so-called root cellars had been constructed by the former Amerind inhabitants of the area—irregardless of the fact that their Indian neighbors showed little hint of an ability to work in large stone or the desire to do so. Before long, the inheritors of these properties thought their own American ancestors had built these cellars—some which were eighty feet deep and lined the entire way with roughly hewn stone.
Simultaneously, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of oddly-inscribed flagstones were being found in the surrounding New England woods, carted off by farmers for use in stone walls or in larger stone structures in the settlements of the growing northeast. The angular cuts on these stones looked much like the marks a plow makes when it strikes a submerged piece of stone—at least they looked that way to most of the simple country farmers of the day. Others believed the markings appearing in rocks all across New England were "the action of the roots of trees." For decades nothing at all was thought of them. As any New Englander can tell you, the entire northeast is strewn with large chunks of striated stone material left from the last era of glacial recession.
But a local Puritan clergyman, Cotton Mather, was not convinced. In 1712 he discovered some strange incisions on an exposed seaside rockface in Dighton, Massachusetts—far from where any plow could have marked it. Winter ice and constant submergence at high tide under the Taunton River began obliterating some of the older markings and Mather was concerned the inscriptions would be lost for posterity...cont'd
http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/usmega.htm
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