The recent discovery here of what may be a Native American Stonehenge - an arrangement of mysteriously carved boulders - could revolutionize historians' understanding of the people who lived in southern New England thousands of years ago.
Unearthed through the efforts of a curious dairy farmer who lives nearby, the three boulders - two on a north-south axis and a third about 200 feet to the west - plot an almost perfect corn planting and harvesting calendar.A person at the western rock looking east would see the sun rise over one rock on April 26 and the second rock on Sept. 6. Those dates mark, within a week, the optimum times to plant and harvest corn to avoid frost danger while allowing the 120-day growing season corn needs here.
Each of the boulders appears to weigh several tons, so it is not clear how they were brought into alignment. The copious carvings, including several oval and circular shapes, also indicate the rocks are no random occurrence.
"It's compelling but not conclusive," said David Wagner of Thompson, Conn., an amateur historian and artist who has investigated the site. "A lot more work needs to be done."
Other historians and archaeologists and who have begun intensively investigating the site, located in the Pachaug State Forest, are equally reluctant to jump to conclusions. They do not rule out the possibility the rocks are the creation of Vikings, pre-Columbus explorers, more sophisticated Indians who visited from the Midwest or even a Colonial-era hoax artist.
And representatives of the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes, although elated by evidence that suggests their forebears knew far more astronony and mathematics than historians had thought, fear that publicity about the find could lead to vandalism or desecration of a potentially sacred site.
Connecticut state archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, affiliated with the University of Connecticut, said he hopes to get funding for a detailed review.
"I'm rather confident that they are probably Native American in origin, but I have nothing to compare it to," Bellantoni said. "I think it is very much worth investigating. We just want to make sure that people respect the site."
Although some Native Americans have said the site could be 10,000 or more years old, Bellantoni said he strongly doubts it is that ancient. The earliest evidence of corn planting in Connecticut dates from the year 700, when traveling tribes from the Ohio Valley probably introduced corn to the area, he said.
For more than 80 years, some residents of the rolling countryside nearby have known about the mysterious carvings on the largest of the three granite rocks. Those include figures that appear to represent the heads of a deer and a mountain lion, with a prominent quartz outcropping for teeth.
But it was not until last spring that farmer George Molodich, whose family runs a 600-Holstein dairy farm nearby, went exploring near the carved rock, and a second with smaller carvings, and cleared away a pile of decomposing leaves to reveal a third rock with similar carvings and iron-oxide stripes.
Wagner, who teaches at Quine-bague Community College, made several sunrise trips to the remote site and began speculating that the three rocks formed some sort of celestial calendar.
He wrote to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and director Neil Tyson sent him back on Oct. 2 a specially calculated, seven-page chart listing sunrise locations at the site.
From his own azimuth calculations and the chart, Wagner determined that the three rocks would plot a corn-season calendar. Wagner has been visiting every few days for months to take solar readings and study the carvings, and he recently finished a 20-page report with charts and maps about the site.
Molodich, the dairy farmer, has since found another 26 boulders, many with similar carving and still-visible lines seemingly painted on them with a crude kind of iron oxide called bog ore. Together, the boulders describe a shape close to a circle. Some site visitors wonder if the stones could mark solstices and other solar events like eclipses.
"The more you look, the more you find," said Molodich.
John Brown, tribal history preservation officer for the Narragansetts, said he is certain the rocks indicate deep celestial knowledge and were used in ceremonies.
But Brown and Mohegan tribal historian Melissa Fawcett are leery of allowing uncontrolled public exploration. "There is direct concern about the safety of these rocks," Brown said. "The destruction of such a thing would be a terrible loss."
The Connecticut site is far less elaborate than another site in Salem, N.H., once called Mystery Hill and renamed in 1982 America's Stonehenge, that some scholars think Indians or Celts built millennia ago but whose origins have never been determined. The 110-acre site, developed as a tourist attraction, features a series of stone walls and boulders that mark solar and lunar events.
The earliest evidence of Native American life in southern New England dates back about 12,000 years, soon after the last glacier covering the region receded.
The Pachaug Forest site appears to have been occupied at various times by members of four different tribes that were all Algonquian-speaking, the Mohegans, Narragansetts, Nipmucs and Pequots. Although Indian communities still exist in the region, few traces of their past remain. That makes the apparent corn-planting calendar all the more important to scholars and tribal leaders.
"If we could verify that this is in fact Native American in origin" and somehow establish its age, Bellantoni said, "it could be very significant. We just do not have anything else like this."