Human history is greatly fragmented and not well documented. Some eras we know a good amount about, e.g. Europe 300 years ago, while others we know surprisingly little about, e.g. America from 1900-1913. But the impression we come away with is that the human race kind of awakened one day about 13,000 years ago when we were living in caves and wearing animal skins and made things like knives, spears, axes and scrapers out of wood, rock and bone. We tend to cling to it in the face of the evidence that says that it ain't so.

I simply cannot shake the belief that a global, sophisticated culture existed at some point in our ancient past of which only remnants today survive. Doesn't it seem strange that the earth is dotted with places where amazing astronomical observatories graven in stone are to found? Who were these people that must have expended unbelievable man-hours to designing and building these things? When you look at all the ancient stone calendars and observatories there are in the U.K. alone, you have to conclude that these prehistoric people, whoever they were, were able to do things we're not giving them credit for in this day and age. Avebury, Stonehenge, Maes Howe, Castlerigg, Callanish, Loughcrew, Newgrange, Ballochroy boggle the mind of the ones who believe that ancient man was a mere hunter or farmer wearing skins huddled around a fire. Newgrange in Ireland dates back to 3200 BCE—older than Stonehenge. A 300-ft in diameter circular mound 36 feet high, one of the oldest roofed structures known to man. It has a passage that exactly aligns to the midwinter sun of 5000 years ago, it still works although there has been a slight drift due to precession.

In France, there is the Gavrinis mound from 3500 BCE. Its stone passageway aligns to midwinter sunrise and the southernmost lunar standstill, which happens every 18.6 years—called the Metonic Cycle. The stones of the passageway are carved in intricate, beautiful patterns of waves, concentric circles, chevrons and such. People who have seen it firsthand say effect induces awe and astonishment—almost a psychedic "everything-melting" experience.

Gavrinis stones

Another French site is Er Grah in Brittany where a 66-ft, 342-ton rock once stood. It has since fallen and broken into four pieces. No one knows when or how it fell. The stone is of hard granite that must be quarried no closer than 2.5 miles away. It was the tallest of all the marker stones of the neolithic world. Being set in the Bay of Quiberon, the rock was tall enough to be seen by everyone on the bay and so served as a navigational marker. Whether it had any other purpose is open to question since Quiberon has quite a number of sites consisting of tunnels, mounds and menhirs (single upright monoliths) seemingly scattered about haphazardly.

Outside of Europe, we find their traces. The Hashihaka of Nara, Japan is a huge heyhole-shaped mound or kofun although no one knows who is buried in it due to extremely limited archaeological investigation. The official reason is that the govt doesn't want the mound torn up and decimated. The unofficial reason is that the rightwinger nationalists—the uyoku—are afraid the mound will turn out to have been built by Koreans whom they insist had no influence in early Japan despite pottery from that period unearthed in Japan is virtually identical to that of the older Korean culture and the fact that "nara" means "motherland" in Korean as well as haniwa (figurines) found at the mounds that appear identical to Korean artifacts. The kofun is 886 feet long and 89 feet high. Today it is entirely covered by trees and is quite lovely.

Hashihaka 1

Hashihaka 2

It was once surrounded by a moat called a shugo but now only small lakes remain on two sides. One lake contains what is undoubtedly a manmade islet or hillock called a baicho. If one stands on the baicho and faces the kofun on the winter solstice, one will see the sunrise auspiciously marked over the top of the mound by a projection. The summer solstice sunrise is marked by standing on a platform on the kofun called Tukuridashi and looking over the round part of the mound (called a koen) to a large hill in the distance which exactly marks it. Hashihaka was built about 300-700 CE and is by no means the only kofun in the area. Nara and environs are dotted with 31 of them, all of them keyhole-shaped. There are 25 kofun at Osaka and at least 35 scattered throughout three of the four main islands (excluding Hokkaido). Although assumed to be a burial mound, the kofun have never yielded up a single mummy or skeleton nor have any burial chambers ever been found.

Some of the most remarkable mounds to be found anywhere belong to the ancient Cahokia complex. Cahokia was supposedly built by the Mississippian Indians starting around 700 CE. It covered 6 square miles in southern Illinois and contained at least 120 mounds of three distinctive types. Archeologist have found a great deal of evidence of astronomical alignments at Cahokia. The equinoctial and solstice sunrises could be observed in the layout of the mounds.

In Arizona stands a four-story structure called Casa Grande built by the Hohokam people although little is known about them. Evidence would indicate they were quite sophisticated. They had engineered excellent irrigation canals allowing them to farm on the desert around 300 BCE. All that remains of them today is Casa Grande built of sunbaked caliche mud, it still stands as a 35-ft high structure with a 60-ft by 40-ft base and 11 rooms. It required over 600 roof beams of juniper, fir and pine which had to be cut and transported no less than 50 miles.   It has a square hole that aligns to the southernmost major lunar standstill and a round window that aligns to the midsummer sunset. The building appears to be intricately linked to the growing and harvesting of corn—an extremely important staple to Indians of the area. The layout of the rooms suggests that Casa Grande represented the zenith, nadir and world center along with the four directions expressed in three dimensions. The large metal structure over Casa Grande is a shield against erosion. The first white men to encounter Casa Grande were the Jesuit missionaries in 1694 by which time it had been deserted for over 160 years.

Casa Grande