America's Stonehenge & Ancient Phoenician Secrets [Full Documentary]. Wolter believes America's Stonehenge is related to England's Stonehenge and that ancient Phoenicians are common to both. America's Stonehenge is an archaeological site consisting of a number of large rocks and stone structures scattered around roughly 30 acres (120,000 m2) within the town of Salem, New Hampshire in the northeast United States. America's Stonehenge is open to the public for a fee. Part of a recreational area that includes snowshoe trails and an alpaca farm, it is a tourist attraction, with particular appeal to believers in New Age systems. America's Stonehenge & Ancient Phoenician Secrets [Full Documentary] http://www.youtube.com/user/ForensicObserver A number of hypotheses exist as to the origin and purpose of the structures. One viewpoint is a mixture of land-use practices of local farmers in the 18th and 19th centuries and construction of structures by owner William Goodwin in the 1930s.[1] Other claims that the site has pre-Columbian origins are usually regarded as controversial, possibly pseudoarchaeological or the result of an early-20th century hoax.[2] Among structures at the site are standing stones that may have been erected to align with astronomical events. America's Stonehenge & Ancient Phoenician Secrets [Full Documentary] The site was first dubbed Mystery Hill[3] by William Goodwin, an insurance executive who purchased the area in 1937.[4] This was the official name of the site until 1982, when it was renamed "America's Stonehenge", a term coined in a news article in the early 1960s, in an effort to separate it from roadside oddity sites and reinforce the idea that it is an ancient archaeological site. Although the area is named after the archaeological site of Stonehenge in England, there is no cultural connection between the two. The site first appears in print in the 1907 History of Salem, N.H. It is described thus: "Jonathan Pattee's Cave. He had a house in these woods 70 years ago; took town paupers before the town farm was bought. This is a wild but beautiful spot, among rough boulders and soft pines, about which the most weird and fantastic tale might be woven. There are several caves still intact, which the owner used for storage purposes." [5] The site's history is muddled partly because of the activities of William Goodwin, who became convinced that the location was proof that Irish monks (the Culdees) had lived there long before the time of Christopher Columbus, a concept he sought to publicize. The site has been altered by stone quarrying and by the efforts of Goodwin and others to move the stones to what they considered their original locations, with Goodwin perhaps responsible for much of what can now be seen.[6] Many of the stones have post 1830s drill marks from the quarrying that took place on the site. America's Stonehenge & Ancient Phoenician Secrets [Full Documentary] Proponents of a pre-Columbian, yet non-Native American, origin for the site argue that some stones are encased in trees that may have sprouted before the arrival of the first colonists, claim that there are similarities between the ruins and Phoenician architecture, and say that marks on some stones resemble some ancient writing systems of the Old World. The late Barry Fell, a marine biologist from Harvard University and amateur epigrapher, claimed that inscriptions at the site represented markings in Ogham, Phoenician and Iberian scripts, which he also called Iberian-Punic. America's Stonehenge & Ancient Phoenician Secrets [Full Documentary] Artifacts found on the site lead archaeologists to the conclusion that the stones were actually assembled for a variety of reasons by local farmers in the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, a much-discussed "sacrificial stone" which contains grooves that some say channeled blood closely resembles "lye-leaching stones" found on many old farms that were used to extract lye from wood ashes, the first step in the manufacture of soap

• published: 04 Dec 2013
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