Manchester, Tennessee
Thinking
about future destinations in my MRV (Mobile Research Vehicle – similar to a
Recreational Vehicle which is often abbreviated as an RV except that I am aboard,
ready to write off my travel expenses as "Above the Ground Archaeological Research"),
I found an interesting place that will look good on paper, hopefully, to the
IRS.
I liked
the first write up I came across, since the author said, “The earliest theories
were some of the most entertaining. The Pioneer, a newspaper in Jackson, TN,
speculated in 1823 that the fort was “built by Buccaneers from Seville after
one of their ships wrecked off the coast of Florida and forced them inland.”
Later, after Viking artifacts were discovered in North American, many
speculated that Vikings had built all of the stone and mound structures in the
eastern US, including Old Stone Fort. In
1950, Zella Armstrong hypothesized that the fort was built by “Welsh-Indian”
descendants of prince Madoc, a Welsh prince who sailed to America in 1170.” I
was glad that the author included the following since I couldn’t easily gratify
myself with a quick look at the website mentioned: “After exploring the western
side of the trail, I headed up to look at the mounded walls encircling the
site. The wall is strange and mysterious. What was it for? Here’s what
the official park webpage says:
The Old Stone Fort is a 2000 year-old
American Indian ceremonial site. It consists of mounds and walls that combine
with cliffs and rivers to form an enclosure measuring 1-1/4 miles around. The
50-acre hilltop enclosure mound site is believed to have served as a central
ceremonial gathering place for some 500 years. It has been identified as,
perhaps, the most spectacularly sited sacred area of its period in the United
States and the largest and most complex hilltop enclosure in the south.
Settlers tended to name such enclosures “forts.”
The spectacular setting occurs where two
rivers drop off the plateau of the Highland Rim in Middle Tennessee and plunge
to the level of the Central Basin of Tennessee. As the forks of the Duck River
cut down from the plateau level they isolate a promontory between them before
they join. This promontory was further set apart by the construction of long,
wall-like mounds during the Woodland prehistoric period.
At the narrow neck of land between the two
rivers there is a set of parallel mound walls oriented to within one degree of
the summer solstice sunrise. It was typical of ancient societies to recognize
this significant farthest north sunrise and to hold reenactments of creation
myths at such times. Mound sites such as the 50-acre Old Stone Fort provided
modified landscapes for ceremonies that may have represented in some way the
culture’s concept of their place in the cosmos and a separation of the sacred
and mundane or pure and impure.”
Not bad for an official write up, leaving
out those 19th century theories that seem to ignore Indigenous
People and include those on their signage, as if Sir Wolter Scott or Graham Cracker Hancock
were writing them up to boost TV ratings or sell some sort of merchandise. If by some sort
of miraculous employment opportunity I were writing these things up,
I’d change that “prehistoric” to “Precontact” and work “Ceremonial Stone
Landscape” into the thing, stress that every place is a Sacred Place, that
everything is connected to the Sacred...
The second
thing I found had me scratching my stubbly beard about the author’s choice of
words and phrases such as “clumsy stone axes,” “primitive culture,” “stubbly
beards” and “finely carved stone pipe,” as well as just what Ceremonial Site
means:
“We are camped at Old Stone Fort State
Archeological Park. This park features a peninsula of about 50 acres located
high on limestone cliffs and encircled by two rivers which form a natural moat.
About 2000 years ago the Woodland Indians (so-called because their real name
has been lost to the dust of history) built a stone wall fortification around
the top of the peninsula. It’s a rare and unusual undertaking for people who
had only clumsy stone axes to construct such a permanent and monumental
structure. Eons (an indefinite and very
long period of time, often a period exaggerated for humorous or rhetorical
effect, or a unit of time equal to a billion years or a major division of
geological time, subdivided into eras) later, after the Indians
were long gone, white settlers saw the stone walls and assumed it was a fort –
hence the name, Old Stone Fort.
In fact archeologists haven’t a clue about the purpose
of the wall, or why a primitive culture would expend such enormous effort to
build it. There’s no evidence of a village here, no burial grounds or troves of
artifacts have been unearthed, and of course no Indians left to explain the
legend of the place. So, as often happens in the field of archeology, when the
purpose of something is unclear they wring their hands and scratch their
stubbly beards and label the thing a Ceremonial. And that is the explanation
offered today at the park’s tiny museum – it was a ceremonial place.
What sort of ceremonies might have taken place here,
or why they needed to be protected by such an ambitiously planned fortification
is left to the visitor’s imagination. The only clue ever discovered was a found
by a farmer in 1876, who decided to have a poke around the rubble of the old
walls and somehow unearthed a finely carved stone pipe. The Raptor Pipe became
the iconic symbol of the area, and then was promptly whisked away to the
Smithsonian. So it’s not even on display here...”
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