In Chaco Canyon in New Mexico evidence of an advanced culture here is not only undeniable, it is bewildering. The floor of the canyon is dotted with nine "Great Houses" (which in Spanish is Casa Grande), villages with buildings over a story, pueblo building with nice terraces containing courtyards, kivas, storage areas and ceremonial chambers. One of the Great Houses was Pueblo Bonito, the largest prehistoric ruin in the United States which covers three acres and has over 800 rooms. There are smaller such Great Houses scattered throughout the canyon—at least 150 of them. All are in ruins having been built between 900-1115. These buildings lie next to perfectly straight roads 30 feet wide and stretching for 50 miles or more passing through gateways in the Great Houses, crossing one another at points along the canyon floor and sometimes running parallel to each other for many miles. Since the people thought to inhabit these settlements, the Anasazi, appear to have occupied 26,000 square miles of canyon floor but did not have horses or wheels, the purpose of such roads remains a complete mystery.

One of the most stunning discoveries in Chaco Canyon occurred on a beautiful 430-ft high sandstone outcrop called Fajada Butte.

Fajada Butte

Near the top of Fajada Butte sit three large stone slabs leaning against a sandstone wall creating a sort of lean-to effect. All three slabs leaned at the same angle but were not touching. The slabs were about 10 inches apart. On the wall under the slabs were a pair of spiral petroglyphs carved into the rock--one spiral rather larger than the other. They were obviously artificial but their purpose was unknown until 1977 when an artist named Anna Sophaer was inspecting the site on the summer solstice and, at about midday, noticed a sliver of light shaped like a dagger blade passing down through the exact center of the large spiral for the next 18 minutes or so. The slabs formed an opening at the top that allowed sunlight to pass through this way. Sophaer was intrigued because this seemed too much to chalk up to coincidence. She told others but the scientific circles blew her off. But some people returned to Fajada Butte on the solstices and equinoxes to see if there was something to Sophaer's observation. After all, the structure must have served some purpose. To their astonishment, they noticed two daggers of sunlight flanking the larger spiral on the winter solstice at midday. On the equinoxes, a dagger passed through the small and large spirals simultaneously. There was no doubt about it, the slabs were actually an observatory. The observatory was nicknamed the Sun Dagger.

Further investigation revealed the Sun Dagger also a moon dagger that marked the major lunar standstills. The cycle of standstills is 18.6 years from maximum to maximum. By using the sunrise at positions where the moon would rise during a major standstill, the large spiral was observed to be cut exactly in half by a shadow. The large spiral is 19 grooves in diameter and half a cycle—from maximum to minimum--occurs every 9.3 years after a major standstill. This was marked on the spiral by moonlight exactly grazing the edge of the 10th groove from the center (this was proven using lasers as no one could afford to wait 9 years). The spiral tracked the entire 18.6 year Metonic Cycle!! Sophaer had proven the slabs had been cut and set in place to function as an observatory. People flocked to Fajada Butte in such numbers that they wore a path in the sandstone leading to the slabs and researchers feared anymore erosion would cause the slabs to shift. A law was passed restricting access to the slabs to qualified researchers only. But alas, a rain exacerbated the tread worn into the sandstone and the slabs shifted as predicted forever ruining the alignment only 10 years after its discovery. But nonetheless, a great deal of research has been done on the sun dagger to prove that it was beyond all doubt an ingenious stone age observatory.

Sun Dagger

Equally mysterious are the Michigan copper mines. We today have no idea who mined the copper in Michigan starting from about 5000 BCE. But we know they opened many copper pits in the thousands across upper Michigan. We know they used mauls to chip out the ore. They made copper tools with some of their copper but what did they do with the bulk of it? We estimate today that these people mined about 1.5 billion pounds of copper. The level of mining sophistication would have required 10,000 men to spend about 1000 years developing that technology. Lake Superior copper had turns up in old Indian implements from Michigan to South America but still the bulk of the copper must have gone overseas simply because there is no trace of it in the Americas. Indeed, there are archaeologists who claim Lake Superior copper can be found in tools and artifacts from all over the ancient world before the times of Christ. Who transported it, where and how?

Even stranger, why did these mysterious copper miners leave behind no traces whatsoever of their culture other than the tools they used to mine? No petroglyphs or rock art, pottery, figurines, hunting implements, dwellings or burial mounds have ever been found. Only their stone mauls and copper axes used to chip out ore and separate it from the copper have been found along with copper knives, arrowheads and spearheads. Moreover, they appear to have dropped their tools and walked off the face of the earth. Their mauls are found at mining pits left as though the miners had set them down and gone home for the day, ready to resume work in the morning but that morning did not come. No one knows why or even when this happened although it would seem that 1200 BCE would be the cut-off point.

The Michigan mounds are also mysterious because the local Indian tribes do not claim them. Their legends say that their ancestors had taken the land from an "evil" people who mined copper and built the mounds (archaeology shows that the mounds were not built by the people who mined the copper). According to a Detroit news article, the Ottawa Indians call the mound-builders "yam-ko-desh" or "prairie people." Michigan had at least 1100 mounds at one time. Artwork recovered from one mound showed an unmistakable elephant being used as a beast of burden. From one mound in Sanilac County in Michigan's thumb area, Professor W. B. Hinsdale of the University of Michigan discovered the following skull fragment while surveying the mounds in 1925:

Skull fragment

The caption beneath above photo reads:

"This skull found in a Michigan burial mound reportedly suggests that the early inhabitants of the state were performing brain surgery well before the birth of Christ."

http://info.detnews.com/history/story/index.cfm?id=167&category=life

Some of the images on the Ica stones of Peru depict brain surgery at a time when no one on earth supposedly possessed the knowledge. While many dismiss the stones as a hoax, this skull fragment appears to bear out what some of the stones depict. And we know for a fact that the Mesoamerican tribes had extensive dentistry techniques including the drilling and filling of cavities, the performing of root canals, the making of crowns, the manufacture of plates and partial plates (made from the palates of wolves or jaguars) and could even replace a single tooth by pulling the bad one and anchoring the wooden replacement, shaped exactly like the original tooth, into the bone. Mesoamerican dentistry goes back at least 4500 years. It wasn't always pretty and didn't always seem to work out well for the patient, such is the case today as well, but most of the time the work was surprisingly good and rather advanced even by today's standards.