The ruins at Stonehenge (Mystery Hill), New Hampshire

Summary of Discoveries of Dr. Barry & René Fell

NOTE: "Old Norse" and "Old Gaelic" as used by Fell may be equivalent to a Northern dialect of the Saharan language as discussed by Nyland, and most of the inscriptions in this section may also be transcribed with the Ogam/Igbo Dictionary: see Catherine Acholonu.

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A View of The Bronze Age

Salient aspects of the Bronze Age are now described by Fell. "In northern Europe bronze weapons and implements first began to replace the stone artifacts of the Neolithic inhabitants when trade routes to the Mediterranean lands permitted imports from the south. The change from stone and malleable copper to the more durable and more valuable bronze equipment is dated to about 2000 BC."

At this time, which marks the opening of the Bronze Age, the most numerous and conspicuous man-made features of the landscape were the massive drystone monuments that had been erected during the last phases of the Neolithic, from about 2200 BC onward. These great monuments, called megaliths (from Greek roots meaning huge stones) have remained an impressive feature of the European landscape ever since, and today tens of thousands of tourists visit the megalithic sites every year, to gaze with wonder at these mysterious works of our ancestors.

When the English Pilgrims began to settle northeastern North America in the early 1600s they found that the forests and open hillsides carried similar ancient stone monuments. Governor John Winthrop (the Younger) of Connecticut had become during his student years one of the first Fellows of the infant Royal Society, and after his arrival in America was regarded by the colonists as a fount of information on all matters to do with natural history and antiquities. hew wrote papers for the early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions (published by the Royal Society in London) and thus drew attention to the salient features of scientific interest in his new world across the Atlantic. Among his papers is found evidence of inquiries from settlers as to what could be the meaning of the strange stone "forts" they were encountering. it was noted that the Algonquian Indians did not use stone in their constructions (save for some rare instances), and the Indians themselves shunned the stone chambers and could throw no light on their origins.

Toward the close of the nineteenth century the opinions of a few influential archaeologists in North America were that no European had set foot in America until the time of Columbus. Since such opinions precluded any possibility that the stone monuments of new England might be related to the megalithic monuments of Europe, the entire subject fell out of favor. Americans were sent to Europe to study Stone Age and Bronze Age archaeology, and few, if any, though to pay attention to the problems raised by the New England megaliths. So deeply ingrained is this view of the age long isolation of America that when in 1976 Fell published his reasoned thoughts on the parallels between American and European archaeological sites, his book America BC was dismissed by most archaeologists as ignorant rubbish. In reality, much of Fell's reasoning was based on a careful comparison of engraved inscriptions found on the associated stonework, both in European sites (especially Portugal and Spain) and in American contests. Fell recorded, for example, well-known Iberian scripts of the late Bronze Age, found on hundreds of rocks in Pennsylvania, and his decipherments, utilizing Professor David Diringer's tales in The Alphabet (Hutchinson, 1968). Such works as Resurrección María de Azukue's Diccionario Vasco-Español-Frances (Bilbao, 1969) enabled me to recognize and report Basque gravestones and boundary marker stones, apparently dating from about the era of 900 BC.

European epigraphers and linguists, such as the foremost Basque scholars, carried out detailed checks on Fell's findings, confirmed most of them, and, as already noted, in the latest volume of the Gran Enciclopedia Vasca [a discussion is] now given over to matters raised by these American Basque inscriptions, and the analysis by Imanol Agiŕe in his Vinculos de la Lengua Vasca gives a virtual total confirmation of his findings: the inscriptions, in Agíre's opinion, do date from about 900 BC, and they do carry Basque phrases in the appropriate Iberian alphabets of that period. These findings have been the object of much discussion by archaeologists. For a current summary of the subject, reference may be made to the Occasional Publications of the Epigraphic Society, Volume 9 (1981), where some fifty opinions, pro and con, are set out. In general, it can be said in summary that linguists and epigraphers agree that the American inscriptions are genuine and ancient, and that many of them relate to the Bronze Age.

Since linguists and eipgraphers concur that the American inscriptions do include genuine products of Bronze Age scribes, and that the scripts and languages used show that the scribes came from European and North African lands, there is no longer any basis for doubting that the monuments of North America that resemble megaliths are indeed just that--megaliths. By this it should be understood monuments produced by colonists from Europe in Bronze Age times.

Now, a popular book is not the proper place to review the tedious details of various scripts and various languages employed and inscribed by these visitors, who came from so many different lands. Besides, Fell already wrote about these matters in America BC and Saga America, as well as in around a hundred or so technical papers. The most entertaining and attractive entrance to the subject is through visiting some of the sites where American megalithic monuments can be seen, and also through visiting the corresponding sites in Europe where, of course, there is no dispute at all as to the authorship or antiquity of megaliths.

Visual presentation rather than written descriptions form the best introduction to the monuments, and in the atlas of photographs that are presented here. European and American examples of each of the major categories of megaliths are arranged in comparable groups of similar structures.

Radiocarbon and amino-acid dating has only recently been applied to the determination of dates of American megaliths [as of 1982 here], but analogous features suggesting early European penetration into North America include the low circular burial mounds that are called disk barrows. Already noted previously the investigation of one of these, presently under way in New England by James Whittall. it has so far been learned that Whittall's site was under continuous occupation, at least for ceremonial purposes, from about 5000 BC (amino-acid date 7200 Before Present), until about 500 BC. Over that span of time a number of burials occurred and, as noted.... these include a Europoid skeleton. Associated stone artifacts resemble tools of the era called Archaic in America (8000 to 500 BC), corresponding to the entire span of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Europe. Sometime before, AD 900,m stonework structure was added around the margins of the barrow. These findings by Whittall point strongly to European arrivals in North America long before Bronze Age times.

Other radiocarbon dates show that some of the megalithic chambers in New England are of later date, one in Vermont, for example, yielding charcoal from the foundation layer that gave a carbon date of about AD 200.

As for those megalithic monuments that contain no artifacts or charcoal, dates can only be guessed at from indirect evidence. The guesses made in that way suggest that most of them were probably built during Bronze Age and Iron Age times, as indeed many of the European megaliths can be shown to postdate the Neolithic period also. So massive and enduring are megaliths that, whenever they were built, the affected the living space of later peoples, and certainly Bronze Age Europeans utilized the Neolithic megaliths. ........" ".....further comments will be restricted to the actual megalithic monuments, merely noting here that the disk barrow, with its contained female skeletons lying in flexed positions, is regarded in Europe as a feature of the early Bronze Age and that therefore it is relevant to note here that similar features occur in New England in districts where megalithic monuments occur. Fell's own opinion, of course, remained unaltered; it is that the megalithic monuments of northeastern North America were used during the Bronze Age and therefore may have been constructed either shortly before or during the Bronze Age.

The term dolmen is a Breton word meaning a stone table. It aptly describes many of the smaller examples of the megalithic monuments that go under this name. Such smaller examples, a meter or less in height are shown in Figs. 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, & 30. As can be seen, they comprise an upper, horizontal slab of stone, the capstone, which is supported on several vertical slabs, like a table, with an internal cavity. European archaeologists believe that the central cavity originally contained a burial and that the entire structure was originally buried in earth that has subsequently disappeared through erosion. it is known that some examples had partial earth cover still intact a century or so ago. Such bared burial chambers are often distinguished from other dolmens under the name cromlech.

Of the examples shown, Figs. 25 & 26 are European, Fig. 25 from Carrazeda, Portugal, and Fig. 26 from the Orkney Islands. The remaining four examples are all American. Fig. 27 shows an example at Gay Head, on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; a faintly visible ogam inscription occurs on one of the stones at the entrance to the small chamber within.... The others, Fig 28, Fig 29, & Fig. 30, are all located at Westport, Massachusetts. Similar ones occur in the Boston area. Nothing is known of any former burial relics in these small cromlechs." [Please see review of structures in <Megaliths>]

Very much large examples, with massive capstones and relatively shorter vertical supports, form conspicuous dolmens. These seem unlikely to have been covered by earth at any stage.

A collapsed dolmen was found in Vermont. The finder, John Williams, also found a remarkable sculpted ax and halberd that are cut into one end of the squared capstone (detail in Fig. 31). "A similar occurrence has been reported from an early Bronze Age burial cairn at Nether Largie North, in Scotland, ax heads being engraved on one end of the capstone and a halberd with streamers on another upright stone of the same burial cist. it is difficult to conceive of any Amerindian carving such devices and, as stated, the Algonquians of the New England region have no knowledge of the authors of these stone monuments.

The example from Scotland cited above postdates the Neolithic period, to which megaliths are customarily assigned, and suggests that dolmens are not restricted to a single period. Still more striking evidence is seen in examples from France..... The elaborately carved Tuscan columns that serve as the supports for the massive capstone indicate that this dolmen cannot antedate the Roman era. Also, dated Roman coins have been found under dolmens in France, and other evidence proves that they served as sites for some kind of ceremony even as late as the Middle Ages, when the church authorities regarded such assemblies s the practice of witchcraft. By analogy, then, there are no grounds for insisting that dolmens are restricted to the archaeology of the Neolithic period, as do some British authorities.

The largest of the dolmens utilize natural boulders, sometimes weighing up to 90 tons, supported precariously, so it would seem, on the underlying peg stones, yet their duration through 4,000 years shows their builders to have had a fine sense of stable construction. An example is depicted in Fig. 33, from Ireland, and another in Trelleborg, Sweden, is shown in Fig. 34. Corresponding examples from North America are illustrated in Fig. 32, Fig. 35, Fig. 36 & Fig. 38 , Fig. 35 shows the dolmen at Lynn, Massachusetts, locally known as the Cannon Stone. Fig. 32 is an example from near Lake Lujenda, northern Minnesota, discovered recently by David Harvey, and the first to be reported from that state. The other examples are from Bartlett, New Hampshire (Fig. 36), and North Salem, New York (Fig. 38).

It difficult to distinguish the North American examples from the European ones and believe that both sets were produced by ancient builders who shared a common culture. When the evidence of inscriptions is taken into account, ..... the relationship of the American examples to those of northern Europe becomes undeniable.

A second category of megaliths is supplied by the underground stone chambers, and on some of these, too, the American ones included, inscriptions are found that use European scripts appropriate to the Bronze Age, as well as later graffiti, which have no bearing on the date of construction. They fall in several categories, according to the mode of construction. Some are in the form of rectangular chambers, up to twenty feet in length by ten feet in width, often with the long axis pointed toward the sunrise direction for either the equinoxes or for one of the solstices. One at Danbury, Connecticut, carries engraved on a fallen lintel stone the ancient symbol of the equinox, a circle divided into equal halves, one half deeply engraved to represent night, the other left clearly visible; this chamber, as John Williams and his colleagues proved, faces the sunrise on the equinox days: that is, it is oriented due east and points to a notch on the horizon within which the sun appears on the days of the vernal and autumnal equinox. 

The mode of construction follows patterns appropriate to the type of stone naturally available. Where large slabs can be obtained, these are used as capstones to form the roofing, as in the Danish chambers called Jaettestuer ("giants, salons") Fig. 39 shows an example at Aarhus, Denmark. North American examples include a large chamber at South Woodstock, Vermont (Fig. 40). The entrances commonly have a massive lintel stone supported on either two vertical slabs (called orthostats), as [one found at Mystery Hill, North Salem, New Hampshire] or on a drystone vertical column of slabs on either side (Fig. 41, Mystery Hill). Alternatively, the construction may utilize natural features of the environment, as at Concord, Massachusetts (Fig. 42), and at Gungywamp, near Groton, Connecticut (Fig. 43). The chamber may be wholly subterranean, as in one of the White River examples in Vermont (Fig. 44), or may stand free, as at Mystery Hill..... [See Fell 1982]. In the latter case the details of the wall construction are visible externally (Fig. 45, Vermont) as drystone and internally (Fig. 46, Mystery Hill), the latter example showing some degree of trimming of the blocks. The internal chamber is usually rectangular (Fig. 47, South Woodstock, Vermont), but exceptionally, as in Fig. 46, the chamber may have lateral passages. Some chambers are covered by mounds, as in the example shown in Fig. 48, South Woodstock. Where large capstones are not available locally, corbelling is utilized to produce a roofing, as in the chamber at Upton, Massachusetts (Fig. 49). Chambers of the latter type seem to be related to the similar constructions called fougou in Cornwall, England, believed to date from the Iron Age and to have been used in and after Roman times. The function of a fougou is unknown, but food storage or places of refuge are considered possibilities. The New England tradition is that these chambers were built by the colonists as "root cellars," for storing vegetables. But inquiries disclose that they were already present on some sites at the time of the arrival of the colonists, who, in any case, found that root vegetables survive the winter frost well when buried in straw in the soil, but tend to decay from mold if placed in the so called root cellars. The enormous labor of construction, as opposed to the simplicity of building a log cabin, denies another legend, that the colonists built the chambers to live in while they were constructing their first farmhouses. Chambers are also found on mountainsides where no farm has ever existed but where a good astronomical viewpoint is obtained.

Like the dolmens, megalithic buildings continued to be utilized, and also to be constructed, until Roman times. Fig. 50 and 2-30 depict Pictish broch construction at Baile Chladaich, northwestern Scotland. The brochs are believed to be defensive structures made around 100 BC.

Some other distinctive megaliths occur in both Europe and North America. These include phallic monuments of standing stones, called also dall or menhir. ...... [They ] are associated with male fertility.  So also the megaliths called men-a-tol (Cornish "Hole in the stone") or just "holey-stones," are [associated] with the fertility goddesses. The well-known stone rings and monuments such as Stonehenge are also a feature of the megalithic industry. ....  [These are noted] in connection with astronomical observatories and calendar regulation. For, although the English archaeologist Glyn Daniel denies any connection of these structures with astronomy, competent astronomers, notably the Thoms, father and son, of the Department of Astronomy, Edinburgh University, and Gerald Hawkins, Fred Hoyle, and John Carlson in America have all concluded that an intimate connection exists between these ring structures and the development of astronomical science." (Please also see Figs. 37  & 51),  [Please see review of these structures in <Megaliths>]

What the Excavations Reveal

Fell (1982) continues that his professional work as an oceanographer had taken me to various remote oceanic islands, and while there he had learned of the existence of unexplained inscriptions cut in caves or painted in rock shelters. These raised questions as to who had made the inscriptions and when they had been made. Fell's first paper on Polynesian rock art has appeared under the aegis of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1941. His colleagues began to look out for inscriptions, too, when they know of his interest, and he gradually assembled a considerable collection of photographs and casts as the years went by. He soon became convinced that Stone Age humans were by no means an ignorant, land-tied savage. On the contrary, he appeared to him to have been a resourceful and accomplished mariner, who could cross ocean gaps between Pacific islands greater than the total span of the Atlantic Ocean.

As oceanography advanced, methods were developed of sending various ingenious devices down to the ocean floor to take samples by boring into the muds on the bottom. Since mud accumulates extremely slowly far away from the effluence of rivers, even just an inch deep in the ocean floor takes us back to a time of deposition of the mud that amounts to thousands of years. Also, since bones and shells of marine animals fall to the bottom, they are preserved there in the mud and become fossils. This fact led to Fell's becoming involved in paleontology, the study of fossils, and before long Fell was serving as consultant to various geological institutions. One of the skills that Fell had to acquire was knowledge of anatomy, so that fragmented bones could be reassembled and identified. Some of the restored bones that he  produced in this way became the object of research by specialists, and various museums sought his aid in these matters.

Consequently when Fell learned by chance of the existence of hundreds of fragmented human bones taken from archaeological digs that had yielded artifacts on which he could see delicate inscriptions written in the Iberian alphabets of about 1000 BC, he naturally became very interested and inquired whether the bones might be made available to me for study. They would be the first human remains we had yet encountered that were directly linked with gravesites from which readable inscriptions in an ancient European language were also recovered. Through the good offices of Dr. William P. Grigsby of the Tennessee Archaeological Society, he eventually found himself sorting, washing, and restoring the skulls of the former owners of the inscribed artifacts.

The first Americans, by which is meant people born and bred in the New World, certainly descended from migrants who entered North America by the only land route that links the Americas to the Old World, the now nonexistent land bridge of the Bering Strait. Whether the first humans, pithecanthropoids of the species Homo erectus, ever reached the New World is unknown [Dr. R. D. Simpson, Callico Dig, CA. expressed a belief to Dr. Fred Legner in 1998 that Homo erectus might certainly have reached Southern California]. Their fossils span areas in Africa and Eurasia that are or were tropical and subtropical (as during interglacial phases in Europe). Since it is doubtful whether a suitably warm climate could have occurred in the latitude of the Bering Strait, especially at times when the sea level was low enough to enable a land bridge to develop, it is possible that the reason why no pithecanthropoids have been found in the Americas is because none ever reached here [see Climate]. By the time humans had evolved to the stage represented by the Neanderthals of Europe, and the Old World generally, periods of low sea level were still occurring, and it seems evident that the bridge to America was crossed by humans on one (or many) of those occasions. Fossil humans at the Neanderthal stage is now known from Brazil, and George Carter's latest (1980) estimate suggests that a conservative date for the entry of humans into America might be about 100,000 years ago. How long people like Neanderthals may have survived in the New World is not known, but their cousins in the Old World were contemporaries of modern types of humans, at least until about 40,000 BC.

As to what kinds of humans came next to America, opinions of the various anthropologists who have commented in recent years seem all to be much the same: that is likely that pygmies were early entrants, since they once formed an important part of the southern Mongolian population, still linger on in isolated parts of Malaysia and neighboring territories, and are known by carbon-dating to range back in time to at least 40,000 BC. Before these latter facts were known, writers such as Harold Gladwin, E. A. Hooton and Carelton Coon suggested that there are traces of former pygmy populations in America, mainly in the shape of isolated communities of undersized people on the offshore islands.

"Others, such as the zoologist W. D. Funkhouser, and the physicist W. S. Webb, of the University of Kentucky, drew attention to the extraordinary diversity of skull form in the prehistoric burials of Kentucky, and proposed that several distinct races are represented. Bennett H. Young (1910) had encountered a living tradition among Kentucky folk that pygmies had once lived in some of the valleys of tributaries of the Mississippi in that state. But when he tried to track the stories to their source he concluded that they must have been based on a misinterpretation of the cist burials. The latter, are small stone-slab burial containers, some three feet in length, into which the disarticulated bones of the dead were placed. The examples he saw did not disclose pygmy skeletons.

Fell's interest in this problem was aroused in 1980. Fell was engaged on reconstructing the thousands of fragments of crania from sites in east Tennessee, sent to me by Dr. William P. Grigsby and his colleagues. Among the best of the materials they sent me from 600 burials were several fragmented but almost complete crania, with jaws, in which the brain capacity was that of a seven-year-old child (950 cubic cm), yet the teeth showed from their complete development and severe wear that the skulls were from middle-aged individuals. Later Fell received from Dr. Grigsby some complete skulls among which was one unbroken pygmy skull, with the jaws still attached to the facial bones.

As is often the case in Europe, prehistoric burial grounds from which these and other skeletons were recovered by members of the Tennessee Archaeological Society showed from their associated artifacts that a broad time span is implied, and that whereas some of the burials had occurred during the Woodland period (ranging back to about 1000 BC), others had taken place later. From the similar states of preservation of the bones of both the pygmy types and those of the other races present in the burials, it appeared that the pygmies were contemporary with the other races. Fell obtained permission to sacrifice some of the long bones of the limbs for radiocarbon dating. The result of a carbon-14 determination, with C-13 correction, made by Geochron Laboratories, Cambridge, on carbon dioxide recovered from the bone collagen yielded an age of 2,160 years plus or minus 135 years: that is, they dated from about the third century BC. (Please see Figs. 52 & 53).

The majority of the other skeletons conformed to the most common type of Amerindian anatomy, in which the head is of the rounded (brachycephalic) type, and the jaws project slightly (mesognathous), the lips therefore being full, as in many Western tribes today. [Please see Fig. 56] This a typical Mongolian condition, and there could be little doubt that the population was derived from ancient forebears who had entered the Americas from Asia. Some of the skulls, however, were of a Europoid type, and reference by Dr. Grigsby to his very large collections (some 32,000) of stone and bone and pottery artifacts from the sites had already disclosed to him that inscriptions in old European scripts were engraved on some of the objects.

It looked, therefore, as if a mixed population of several races had lived in the east Tennessee area, and in all probability they would have interbred. No pygmies are known to have survived to modern times in North America, at least not in the United States or Canada, but it does seem likely that pygmies may have been among the native peoples encountered by the first European explorers to come to eastern North America." [The devastating effects of diseases such as measles and smallpox on Amerindians after 1492 AD and repeated European invasions, are known to have reduced population numbers by over 85% in many parts of America].

Before Fell received the skeletal material he had already become interested in the problem of whether or not pygmies might have inhabited North America. The ancient European word for pygmy or dwarf is a root based on the form nan. Thus in ancient Greek it is nanos, in Basque it is nanu or nano (according to dialect), in Irish Gaelic it is nan, and modern French has nain, Spanish enano. This strange unanimity among the various languages of Europe, not all of them closely related, seemed to suggest that there might once have been a race of pygmies known to ancient Europeans. The lack of pygmy bones in European archaeological sites seemed to imply that the inferred pygmies, if they existed at all, may not have been European pygmies. Yet it seemed inconceivable that ancient Europeans could have known about the pygmies of central Africa, of those of the remote highlands of Malaysia and the Philippines.

What intrigued me still more, and prompted me to draw attention to the matter in two papers Fell wrote on the language of the Takhelne tribe of British Columbia, was that these American Indians also had a tradition of pygmies (or dwarves), whom they called the Et-nane. Later Fell learned from a colleague that the Shoshone vocabulary also includes a similar word, whose root is nana- and is defined by the compiler of the Shoshone Dictionary as "elf-like people."

Now, when Fell began to analyze the anatomical characteristics of the pygmy skulls from Tennessee, he soon discovered that they matched those of the pygmies of the Philippines, who are also brachycephalic. [Please see Figs. 58 & 59] Further, he learned from the accounts of explorers in Malaysia who had penetrated to areas where no racial intermixture had occurred that the pure or true-bred pygmy there has very prognathous jaws, as is the case with the American skulls. These Malaysian and Philippine pygmies are regarded by archaeologists as remnants of a formerly extensive Mongoloid pygmy race that once occupied much of southern East Asia. Carter believes that their characters area still to be recognized in dilute trace form in the occasional frizzy hair, dark skin, and squat stature observed among southern Chinese. Significantly, perhaps, the best-known native name of the Oriental pygmies is the Aëta. Perhaps this root is the origin of the prefix Et- used by the Takhelne. Whether that be so or not, it is clear that the pygmies of Tennessee were of Oriental--that is to say, East Asian--origin; and since pygmies are not maritime people, they can have reached the Americas only by the land route.

They must once have been more widely dispersed than our present finds imply. However, since they reached as far east as east Tennessee, and their bones have been found in association with Europoids and inscribed artifacts of Europoid type, such as loom weights and pottery stamps, lettered in ancient Irish (noted as Celtic) and Basque [see Figs. 183, 185, 186, 187 & 189], Fell concluded that there were in fact meetings of the two races, and that therefore the European visitors could well have taken back to Europe some account of these mysterious undersized people. An inscription that Professors Heizer and Martin Baumhoff had recorded from 1California (Fig. 63), when deciphered as Ancient Irish ogam, seemed also to suggest that early explorers had encountered some pygmy race that they considered dangerous.

In addition to skeletal remains, a number of sculptures, evidently of ancient origin, have been discovered at varying depths in the soil, some of them depicting people of obvious Europoid origin, yet all the evidence indicates that these sculptures were created in America, at an era long before the colonists arrived in modern times. Some representative illustrations (Fig. 60, Fig. 61, Fig. 62) may serve to show their nature and their similarity to ancient European sculpture that has been attributed to the Gauls. Most striking is the head of a man, carved in Ancient Irish style, with the curving nostrils and staring eyes that one encounters in Irish art and wearing as a chaplet a twig of bog oak leaves and acorns. it seems difficult to regard this as representing anything other than an Irish priest, or druid. It was found in Searsmont, Maine, a part of a larger work of which the torso still remains on the site, the head being now in the museum at Sturbridge, Massachusetts.

Fell believed that these heads and others like them are truly ancient American artifacts, and that the hands that carved them are also responsible for the engraved inscriptions in ogam and other ancient European alphabets, found on artifacts at burial sites and also cut in rock.

The Tifinag Alphabet at Peterborough, Ontario

The alphabet used by scribes at Peterborough, Ontario was detailed by Fell (1982) as follows: "Using Fig. 17 Table I, the comparisons of the Tifinag alphabet with the short inscriptions found in Sweden and Denmark, and supplementing these by the much more extensive material now recognized in America, it is not difficult to reconstitute King Woden-lithi's own alphabet [at Peterborough]. It is given in Fig. 64 Table 2."

It is now possible for anyone who cares to do so to visit the site at Peterborough, Ontario, with [the present information]... in hand, and perhaps a copy of Geir T. Zoega's Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Oxford University Press, 1910) as an independent check, and to see and read the inscriptions the king had cut, and thus for the first time ever hear the words of a Bronze Age language that stands in the direct line of descent of English and the other Norse tongues. Although nearly 4,000 years stand between us and King Woden-lithi, we can still recognize much of his language as a kind of ancient English. It is an eerie feeling to realize that we are reading, and hence hearing, the voice of the ancient explorers of Canada whose thoughts now come to us across the space of forty centuries, yet still with familiar words and expressions that remain a part of the Teutonic heritage.

This is not the place to instruct readers in the grammar of Old Norse <= Saharan?>, let alone the still more obscure grammar of Bronze Age Norse, but it is quite within the realm of practical life for visitors, including teachers and their students, to examine for themselves at least the more conspicuous and best preserved of Woden-lithi's recorded comments. The diagrams.... will make this task relatively easy. And for those who wish to make independent checks, or to translate parts of the text that are not included [here] , there can be no better guides than Zoega's Dictionary, a grammar of Old Norse such as E. V. Gordon's (Oxford University Press, 1927), and a camera to record the inscriptions for more detailed study at home. For many of the words and Anglo-Saxon dictionary will also aid recognition.

The easiest parts of Woden-lithi's text are, of course, those where the letters are engraved on the largest scale, and that therefore have suffered least from the erosion of time and the elements. One of the clearest sections is located about 30 feet to the west of the central sun figure. The individual letters are from 20 to 40 cm high, and they form a horizontal band about 5 feet (1.5 m) long. The inscription lies directly beneath the Fig. of the god of war, Tziw, and it is in fact a dedication to this god. The god can be recognized from .... Fig. 111 and Fig 112, and by the fact that he stands beside the Fenrir wolf, which has just bitten off his left hand.... [see later section]. For the present we will restrict ourselves to the line of dedication, shown in.... Fig 112. With the exception of the ornamental capital TZ  [or TS] that begins the name of the god, all the letters are easily recognizable from the table of Woden-lithi's alphabet.... [Fig. 64 Table 2]. Remember that vowels are nearly always omitted in all Bronze Age inscriptions except when they occur at the beginning of a word, or where possible confusion of meaning might result. The line of text of the dedication reads:

W-K   H-L-GN   TZ-W   W-D-N-L-T-YA

The last two letters are written in ogam and form a rebus of a ship, on the right, all the others are in Bronze Age Tifinag. The meaning of the text is "Image dedicated sacred to Tziw by Woden-lithi." The individual words are as follows.

W-K, matching Old English (Anglo-Saxon) wig, a heathen idol, in this case a bas-relief ground into limestone, depicting the god. Probably we have to supply the same vowel, i, to make the letters w and k pronounceable, g and k are related consonants, both formed in the throat; the only difference is that g requires the vocal cords to reverberate (as can be felt by placing the fingers on the throat when uttering the sound of g), while in pronouncing k the vocal cords remain inactive, so no vibration is felt on the throat. Jakob Grimm, the great German philologist, first showed how pairs of consonants, such as g and k d and t, b and p, change (mutate) from voiced to unvoiced if they occur in certain positions in words. Woden-lithi apparently spoke with an incipient "German" accent, and preferred to use a k at the end of words where we in English are usually content to retain the ancient g sound.

The next word, rendered by Woden-lithi's scribe as H-L-GN means hallowed or, as we would prefer to say in Modern English, dedicated. It is a root that is common to all the Teutonic languages. Germans, for example, retain it to this very day as heilig, meaning holy, which in turn is another Modern English word derived from H-L-GN. In the Scandinavian languages the word survives unchanged, as helgen, meaning holy or to make holy, and the Anglo-Saxon form of the word is represented by such old terms as halig (holy), halgan (a saint), halgung (a consecration or dedication), with hallow, hallowing, Halloween (All-Saints' Eve) as surviving English derivatives. Halloween is the night before the first day of the ancient Norsemen winter (November 1), when ghosts are reputed to roam at large. These spirits could be bought off, by bribes, from any evil intention during the following year, hence our modern surviving custom of given token gifts to children dressed as demons and ghosts. The children of Woden-lithi's Ontario settlers no doubt carried on the same custom.

The next word is the name of the god himself, here rendered as TZ-W. This implies a pronunciation similar to the ancient German name of the god of war, Tziwaz. Our Anglo-Saxon forebears called him Tiw, and in the Middle Ages the surviving form of the name, in the word Tuesday, became what we still say today, for the god of war is still commemorated by having the second day after the sun god's day named for him.

The last word is the name of King Woden-lithi himself, and it is written beside a pictograph of a man wearing a robe and crown, to show the reader that the word is the personal name of a king. Elsewhere in the various texts on the site we find the word king spelled out in Tifinag, and it then has the form konungn, matching Anglo-Saxon cyning, Old Norse konungr and other similar forms in all the Teutonic languages. Lithi, here rendered as litya, means "servant," thus the king's name is "Servant of Woden." Woden was the king of the Aesir or sky gods.

"The dedication to Tziw illustrates the way in which we can use dictionaries of Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse, as well as modern English dictionaries that give the old roots (such as the OED or the American Heritage), not only as a guide to understanding what Woden-lithi is saying, but also as a means of guessing approximately what his language-- our ancestors' language-- actually must have sounded like.

It is not needful here to continue treating in detail the rest of the numerous texts that lie about the site at Peterborough and at other places such as the sites along the Milk River, Alberta, or in Coral Gardens, Wyoming. Readers can devise their own philological checks, if these interest them, or ignore the subject if they are more interested in other aspects. ......" [This discussion is merely to show how to approach the ancient inscriptions]. [Please refer now to Figs. 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 & 70].

Now that we have seen that the alphabet really does give us the means of reading the various texts that King Woden-lithi had engraved at the Peterborough site, when he selected it for the sacred center of his colony, following are some comments on the origin of this alphabet.

It is essentially the same alphabet as that used by the Tuareg Berbers. A possible reason for this surprising circumstance is suggested [later]." However, none of the scholars who have worked on Tifinag inscriptions in North Africa could ever understand the relationship between the Tifinag alphabet and the Berber language. it has now become clear that there is no relationship. Tifinag is not a Berber invention --instead it is Norse-- and that changes the whole problem.

The decipherment of any ancient and unknown inscription requires first that the alphabet in which it is written must be solved. Various methods can be used to achieve this first essential. In the case of Woden-lithi's inscription Fell found the solution relatively easy, for he had previously traveled widely in the Scandinavian countries, where shorter but similar inscriptions occur on Bronze Age monuments, and he had also carried out research on the ancient scripts of North Africa, including the Tifinag of the Tuaregs. The Tuaregs had preserved their unique system of writing since time immemorial, and its origin was unknown, though all epigraphers, including me, supposed it to have been their own invention.

Four thousand years ago the ancestors of the present-day peoples who speak Teutonic languages were all grouped together in Scandinavia, in parts of Germany, and along the Baltic coasts. They had not yet differentiated into Germans, English or Scandinavian, so we can refer to them collectively as Norsemen. Their descendants today not only live in northern Europe but also have spread across the world. Most people in North America now speak a tongue directly descended from the ancient Norsemen of the Bronze Age.

Although short inscriptions in the Ancient Norse alphabet have recently been recognized in Scandinavia, that discovery stemmed from the more significant one of Ancient Norse engraved on North American rock. Thus North America has now become custodian of the oldest and most precious of the ancient records of the Norsemen peoples, and to Canada is assigned the responsibility of preserving them intact, and the thanks of millions of people must go to the geologists, surveyors, and archaeologists who uncovered the main site and placed it under the protection of the local government.

Our ancestors of the Bronze Age inherited some of the signs of their alphabet from their Neolithic predecessors, who also spoke a Norse tongue and used a number of signs. Thus the following signs were already known in northern Europe before the Bronze Age, and we now know that they give us the sounds shown in Fig. 64 Table 2.

As is quite obvious, these are hieroglyphs in which the signs depict recognizable objects, and the sound they stand for is that of the first letter in the name of the object. Thus, the crescent that is m is obviously the first letter of mán, the older form of our modern English moon. Similarly the circular sign r, or hr, is the first letter of the word hringr, meaning our modern word ring. So also the circle with a dot in the center, s, is the first letter of sol and of sunu, the two Ancient Norse names of the sun. The b symbol is clearly the Old Norse buklr, the circular shield with a leather arm-strap, which is still called a buckler in modern English. These four signs, with the indicated sound values, were needed by the Neolithic wizards to indicate certain words that mean magic (bur- in Proto-Norse), sailing ship (also bur-, though a different root), and the combinations of these two words with signs for the sun and moon, both of which were viewed as celestial gods that sailed their sun ship and moon ship by magic across the heavens. Simple statements of this kind can now be read, by sound as well as by pictograph, in the Neolithic engravings on rock in Scandinavia and also in North America, as far west as California.

The German philologist Jakob Grimm traveled among the village communities of Germany and the Baltic lands 150 years ago, and discovered old words such as those have been mentioned. He used his findings to develop a forecast of modern theories on how language evolves through time. He also recorded the old names of the constellations. This is fortunate for us, for when we look at the deciphered Norse alphabet of the Bronze Age we can now recognize more of the origins of the alphabet. For just as the letter s and m reflect the form of the sun and the crescent moon, so also we now perceive that the dots that make up other letters, in a kind of Braille system, are really the constellations.

Thus, just as the ancient Irish (noted as Celts) gazed at their fingers and invented a writing system called ogam based on the varying combinations of five strokes above, below, and across a central writing axis, so also the ancient Norsemen people gazed instead at the sky and saw their letters writ large upon the face of heaven. No doubt they said their script was divine, sent from the sky by the sky god Woden (Odin), lord of magic and of runes, the secret writing of the magicians. As this word runes has already been applied to later types of writing developed by the Norsemen after the Iron Age, we cannot use it without some qualification for our Bronze Age alphabet, to which it undoubtedly was originally applied. So we have to compromise and call the oldest writing of the Norsemen peoples, Bronze Age Runes.

There remain a number of other letters that seem to be formed from more commonplace objects of everyday life in ancient times. Fig. 64 Table 2, with Fell's suggestions as to these origins, explains itself.

In Fell's popular books on North American inscriptions he was faced with the difficulty of trying to explain to an English-speaking public the meaning and language of texts engraved in tongues so remotely different from English that it made the tasks both of writing the books and of reading them (as many correspondents have told me) decidedly difficult.

Now, thanks to King Woden-lithi, these problems all vanish. he spoke and wrote a language that resounds down the centuries with the age-old familiar tones of all the Norse tongues. We speakers of English, as well as our cousins in Europe who speak related languages, can all recognize many of the words that Woden-lithi and his Ontario colonists spoke and wrote here seventeen centuries before Julius Caesar first encountered the Norsemen tribes of the Rhineland.

Although Woden-lithi's site at Peterborough is the first recognizable Norsemen Bronze Age site to be discovered in America, it now appears that there were other visitors from the Norsemen world of that era. For some years a puzzling inscription has been known from little Crow Island, near Deer Isle, Maine, but it could not be deciphered, nor was the script recognized. It is shown in Fig. 72 and in Fig. 73, a provisional reading is given, which suggests that some voyager from Scandinavia, seemingly named Hako or Haakon, visited Maine at a time when the Bronze Age runes were still in use. [= Ey vik hvi nokkvi leya a vika = "A sheltered island, where ships may lie in a harbor. Haakon brought his cog here."] This inscription greatly resembles the script called bead ogam, but the resultant text, if it were read as bead ogam, is gibberish, whereas if we treat it as Tifinag script, a Norse text, although rather obscure, emerges. The lack of associated pictographs or hieroglyphs increases the difficulty of reading the signs.

Servant of Woden's Observatory

To the discerning eye the solar observatory that King Woden-lithi established at his trading center near Peterborough is one of the wonders of American archaeology. So surprising do his knowledge of the constellations and his understanding of the motions of the sun through the signs of the zodiac appear that at first it seems impossible that the site could be ancient. it is more like what one might expect to have been constructed during the early Middle Ages. However, consideration of what has been discovered about the growth of astronomy shows that it is not at all impossible for Woden-lithi to have known what he did know and yet have lived in an epoch 3,5000 years before our own.

Until about a century ago, all that we knew about ancient astronomy was what the Greeks and Romans had written. It was supposed that the Greeks had named the constellations, and that therefore man's knowledge of the stars as mapped in the constellations could not be older than about 2,700 or 2,800 years. For some of the constellations, and their roles in setting the time of year for plowing, sowing and reaping, are mentioned by name in the works of Hesiod, the first Greek writer to refer to them, who lived about 800 BC.

Then an unexpected discovery was made. Archaeologists in the Middle East began to uncover tablets of stone in which clear reference was made to constellations, some of them recognizably the same as those we know today, yet the age of the records extended many centuries earlier, into a time antecedent to the Greek civilization.

An English astronomer, Richard Proctor, devised an ingenious method of finding out when the constellations first received their names. He plotted on a chart all the constellations known to the ancients. He then examined the area in the sky, over the Southern Hemisphere, in which no constellations had been recorded until modern astronomers named them, because the ancient astronomers had not explored the Southern Hemisphere. He found that this southern blank area has its center, not at the southern celestial pole, as one might expect, but in quire a different place: a point in the southern sky some 25 degrees to one side of the South Pole. When he realized that this center must once have been the pole, at the time when the constellations were named, he then attacked the related question, the known motions of the poles as the earth's axis has slowly wobbled like that of a spinning top. He found that the ancient position of the poles he had discovered, for the time when constellations were named, corresponded to a direction of the earth's axis that was correct 4,000 years ago. Thus, the constellations must have been named some 2,000 years before the time of Christ. it was then discovered that the description of some features of the sun's motion in the sky, given by a Greek astronomer names Eudoxus, could not possibly have been true at the time when Eudoxus wrote, but would have been correct had he been quoting from sources dating back to 2000 BC. The position of the sun at the time of the vernal equinox (in March) was recorded by these early writers as lying in the zodiacal constellation of the Bull. But in classical times, when Eudoxus wrote, the vernal equinox occurred when the sun is in the constellation of the Ram, some 30 degrees away.

What this means is that when the Norsemen farmers first learned the arts of sowing seed by the calendar, and could thereby be sure of seeing the seed sprout instead of rotting in the ground. Such would have occurred if it were not sown at the correct time. This phase of social history in the northern lands matched the rise of astronomy, about 2000 BC. Evidently the astronomical skills passed along the same trade routs as did the trade goods themselves: from the Danube and the Rhine there spread outward and northward into Germany, and then Scandinavia, a knowledge of the constellations and the motion of the sun through them. Observatories would be established to watch for the equinoctial rising of the sun and for other significant astronomical events that could be used to keep the calendar correct and functional. 

Hence it was one of the concerns of Woden-lithi in America to ensure that his colonists were provided with a practical means of observing the sky and the heavenly bodies, so that they could have always a reliable farmers' calendar. Certain religious festivals were also regulated by the calendar, such as the spring (New Year) festival in March, and the midwinter or Yule festival held in December.

To establish his observatory, Woden-lithi had first to determine the position of the north-south meridian of his site. He probably used the following method. First, he selected a central observing point, and engraved two concentric circles into the rock (thus forming the head and central "eye" of what later became the main sun-god image). An assistant then held a vertical rod, centered in the marker circles, on a clear day as the sun approached its noon altitude. The shadow cast by the vertical rod would grow shorter as the sun rose higher, and then would begin to lengthen again as the sun passed the highest elevation at noon, and commenced to decline. The direction of the shadow at its shortest length was marked on the rock. Checks on subsequent days would establish this shadow line more precisely. The marked lines except for minor errors due to variations in the velocity of the earth's motion (for which no correction could be made in those early days), would be the meridian, running north and south.

Woden-lithi could now lay out the cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west, by making a right-angle intersection with the meridian line, to give the east-west axis (see Fig. 74). Instead of cutting lines for these cardinal axes, however, he made sighting points at their extremities by cutting a sunburst figure, as shown.

The sighting sunburst for due east he then identified by an inscription lettered in ogam consaine, shown on the right side of Fig. 74. In his Old Norse language <= Saharan?> it reads M-D  O-S-D-N (Old Norse mot osten, facing east). The illustration gives a plan view to the scale shown, so the visitor can readily identify these features at the site.

At this stage in his work Woden-lithi had now provided his colonists with the fundamental tool for regulating their calendar, for, every year at the vernal equinox in March, when the ancient year began for all civilized peoples, an observer standing on the site would see the sun rise at a point on the horizon lying on the line of sight from the "eye" of the central sun-god figure. to the eastern sunburst figure. On that occasion each year the Norsemen peoples held a festival, named for the goddess of the dawn, Eostre. The name survives in our modern language as Easter, now of course linked with a Christian festival to which the old pagan name has been attached.

Ancient peoples also celebrated another festival on the shortest day of the year, called by the Norsemen nations Yule; this pagan festival is nowadays lined with the Christian festival of Christmas, still called Yule (spelled Jul) in Scandinavian countries. Woden-lithi therefore wished to provide his colonists with a means of determining the day on which the Yule feast should be held, for to the ancient peoples it was a great day of celebration, marking the end of the sun's winter decline and the promise of a new and warmer season ahead.

Woden-lithi's inscriptions tell us that he remained in Canada only for five months and that he returned to his home in Scandinavia in October. hence he could not observe the direction in which the sunrise would be observed on the actual day of midwinter, for he was no longer in Canada. So apparently he estimated the direction, drawing on his experience in Scandinavia. In southern Norway the precise direction of sunrise on Midwinter Day varies quite considerably, for at the latitudes spanned by the interval between the southern end of the Skagerrak (at about 56 deg. N) and the head of Oslo Fjord (at 60 deg. N), the astronomical equation that determines the sunrise direction gives solutions that range over a span of some seven degrees between the extreme values. Consequently, since Woden-lithi probably did not have any clear conception of latitude, and would have to judge the situation in terms of his notions of the variations seen in Norway itself and neighboring Sweden, he would probably conclude that the Peterborough site seemed to be comparable with southernmost Scandinavia. For example, he would have noticed that the midday sun stood higher in the sky at midsummer at Peterborough (when he was present to observe) than it did in his homeland, and he would also know that the noonday sun stands higher in the southern Sweden than it does near Oslo on any given day. From such knowledge he perhaps estimated the likely sunrise direction for Midwinter Day, and cut his estimated axis into the rock at the site. This he marked by another sun-god figure (which is labeled Solstice on Fig. 74). Woden-lithi himself had a label carved into the rock beside this figure. As can be seen from the illustration, it spells W-L  H-K. Hoki was the Ancient Norse name of the midwinter festival: the word still survives today in the Scotch word Hogmanay, the traditional name of the Scottish midwinter holiday, now applied to the New Year holiday. The letters W-L evidently represent the hvil of Old Norse <= Saharan?>, meaning a time of rest, a holiday from work. The importance of this Hoki holiday can be judged from the large scale in which the letters have been engraved at the site. It was, no doubt, the time of the major national festival for all Norsemen peoples, and Woden-lithi undoubtedly intended that the old traditions be kept alive in his trading colony in the New World.

As we examine the site today, where these ancient instructions for regulating the calendar year and its festivals still survive, it is clear that whereas the critical date for starting the year and determining the correct time of planting seed, the equinox, is accurately set out, the same is not true of the Hoki axis. it overestimates the southern declination of the sun by several degrees. Woden-lithi's colonists would find that the midwinter sunrise did not, in fact, ever range quite so far south as the king had predicted, and that the sunrise point would begin to return toward the eastern horizon before ever reaching the southeastern azimuth to which Woden-lithi's Hoki axis now points. Nonetheless the general tenor of the matter would be clear enough, and since most years the midwinter sunrise tends to occur in banks of low-lying cloud, the error was probably known to only a few of the more meticulous observers.

Those of us who have made the somewhat hazardous journey to observe the midwinter sunrise at sites in the Green Mountains [Vermont?] that are oriented for this purpose, have discovered the whole area under the deepest snowdrifts. The same circumstance, no doubt, is true of Woden-lithi's site: the whole inscription area, with all the astronomical axes, would usually lie buried under deep snow, hence invisible and useless for making astronomical determinations of the festival dates.

An explanation for these conflicts of data is to be sought in our developing knowledge of climatic change. In Woden-lithi's time the whole earth had a much milder climate than it did one thousand years later [see Climate]. The site at Peterborough may well have been prairie rather than dense needle-forest, as it is a present. Open views of the distant horizon could be had, the actual sunrise could be observed, and because of the milder climate, the snow, if present at all, could be cleared away from the site.

Also, as the climate deteriorated with the progress of time, the people here at the end of the Bronze Age, around 800 BC, began to find the snow an increasing impediment to their calendar regulation [see Climate]. They were forced to construct a new type of observatory, one that could retain its major astronomical axes in a visible and usable state despite the snow accumulations. These new observatories are probably where the observers could be housed comfortably below ground, with a large living space that could be heated by fire, and with the axis of the entire chamber directed toward the midwinter-sunrise azimuth on the distant horizon, so that the calendar observation could be made simply by sighting from the inner end of the chamber, through the entrance doorway, which was built so as to face the midwinter sunrise point. Once this practice had been adopted to overcome the ferocity of the winters, reaching its extremes of discomfort as the Iron Age began, the advantages of astronomically oriented chambers would be realized, and soon all observatories, whether based on summer, equinoctial, or winter sunrise directions, would eventually be constructed as comfortable chambers. The old open-air sites, like that of Woden-lithi, would be abandoned forever, became buried under drifting soil and leaves and then turf (as happened at Peterborough), or would be eroded away by the elements till nothing readable remained, and thus disappear altogether.

To return to Woden-lithi's site, it is of interest to note that he adopted the ancient Semitic> method of naming the south direction. The Semitic peoples regarded east as the main map direction. Facing east they would name the cardinal points on either side, so that north became "left-hand" and south became "right-hand." On Woden-lithi's site w find that he has engraved in very large Tifinag letters the word H-GH-R at the southern extremity of the platform, where he as cut yet another sunburst figure. The word intended is Old Norse hogr, meaning "right-hand." The word is still sued today in Sweden where, if you are given street directions in Stockholm or Lund, you are sure to be told to take such and such a turn till högra, "to the right." The Danes say højre, but we who speak English seem to have lost the word, and replaced it by another root. The Old Norse <= Saharan?> words for south (sudhra) and north (nord) are nowhere to be found on Woden-lithi's site, so perhaps they had not yet come into use.

Now, since we find Woden-lithi using the Semitic (Mesopotamian) methods of naming directions by reference to the right and left when facing east, and since east is the only direction that he actually calls by its special name, east (osten in his dialect), it is not surprising that we should find Woden-lithi in possession of so much information on the Babylonian maps of the heavens, as designated in the form of the named constellations.

Constellations Known to Woden-lithi

The first hint we encounter on the observatory site that the stars were already grouped into constellations in Woden-lithi's day is given by the northern end of his meridian (see Fig. 74). Here we find an inscription in Tifinag that reads W-K-N  H-L  A-GH, and it is evidently to read as Old Norse Vagn hjul aka, "The wagon-wheel drives." Our Norsemen ancestors knew the constellation near the present north celestial pole that we in America call the Big Dipper today, and which Europeans often call the Plow or Wain, as the Wagon. it was supposed to be an ox wagon (that is, the ancient chariot, before horses had been tamed) and was said to be driven by the god Odin, the Woden of our colonists. In Woden-lithi's day the north celestial pole was marked by the star Thuban, in the constellation Draco; nowadays it lies some 25 degrees away from the pole. The Wagon was conceived as wheeling around and around the Pole Star. The wheeling motion, of course, is caused by the rotation of the earth, but in Woden-lithi's day it was conceived as a rotation of the sky itself. We have other hints.... about star groups known by name to the peoples of the north in Woden-lithi's time: the four stars that form the square of Pegasus (Called Hestemerki, "horse-sign," by the Ancient Norsemen) seem to be the basis of the four dots that make the Tifinag letter h; and the w-shaped group of stars that form Cassiopeia, called Yorsla by the ancient Scandinavians, seem to be the origin of the w-shaped letter that gives the sound of Y.

To the southwest of Woden-lithi's observatory lies an area of limestone where the constellations of the Norsemen zodiac have been engraved. These are shown in Fig. 75 and Fig. 76. We note that some of the Babylonian constellations bear replacement names in the Woden-lithi version. The ram (Aries) is obviously a bear, and some broken letters beside the image of the animal seem to spell in Tifinag the word B-R-N, a root that appears in all Norse tongues in one form or another, as bjorn in Scandinavian, and bruin in English. The next sign, the Bull (Taurus) of classical astronomy, is drawn as a moose; it is labeled in Tifinag L-GN, Old Norse elgen, the elk. The Lion (Leo), though labeled L-N (Old Norse leon), seems to have been carved by an artist who had in mind a lynx. The Crab (Cancer) looks like a lobster, and it is drawn as if it lies at the feet of the Twins (Gemini), here identified as M-T  TH-W-L-N-GN (Old Norse matig-tvillingr, "the mighty twins").

The significance to Woden-lithi's people of the zodiac was that it provided a means of describing the annual path of the sun through the heavens. The sun spends about one month in each of twelve constellations, which together form the so-called zodiac (a word meaning, "girdle of animals"). The vernal equinox, the start of the ancient Norsemen year, occurs at the time when the sun is located in the zodiacal sign for that equinox. Two thousand years before Christ, when, as we have seen, the constellations received their names, the sun occupied the Bull (the elk in Woden-lithi's zodiac). Around 1700 BC the slow wobble of the earth's axis (called the procession of the equinoxes) caused the vernal equinox position to move out of the Bull into the neighboring sign, Aries (in Woden-lithi's terminology, the bear). In Woden-lithi's zodiac map he shows the situation in just that way. The word W-GN (Old Norse vaegn, a balance) signifies the "balance of night and day," and is set opposite the space between Taurus and Aries. In addition, as can be seen on the right-hand side of Fig. 75, the sun is shown entering the W-R-M zone of the zodiac at that point. The word intended is simply our word warm, Old Norse, varm, meaning summer. On the part of the zodiac corresponding to the sun's positions during the cold months the engraver has written the letters W-N-T, our word winter, Old Norse vintr. All the indications are, then, that Woden-lithi used a chart of the sky that was appropriate in 1700 BC. Since his writing system and the style of his inscriptions match so well the inscriptions that Scandinavian archaeologists declare to belong to the early Bronze Age, we may assume that Woden-lithi did in fact live around that time. Hence, until evidence is found to the contrary, Fell believed that we have to date his visit to America as having occurred around 1700 BC.

There are other indications that this is a reasonable estimate. Some archaeologists who have investigated the site have suggested a possible age of 3,500 years, based on the similarity of the art style to that of Europe 3,500 years ago. At a neighboring site in Ontario where a thousand or so copper artifacts were excavated, radiocarbon dating indicated occupation a thousand years before the time proposed for Woden-lithi;, that is, around 3000 BC. And some of the radiocarbon dates from the Lake Superior copper mines indicate that the mines were worked between about 3000 and 2000 BC. All these data suggest that the copper-mining industry was already an old established activity in Canada long before Woden-lithi came to trade for copper.

Circles of Stone

Yet another form of calendar site has come under investigation in recent years: the circles of standing stones that occur in large numbers in Europe [e,g., Fig. 80] and also span the entire continent of North America from New England to California. A variant form in America, especially in western Canada and the adjacent United States territories, such as Wyoming, is the stone circles with radial lines of boulder forming spokes to the outer rim, hence the name Medicine Wheel. In some cases it is believed that the spokes are oriented toward points on the horizon that were formerly the positions of the rising or setting of conspicuous stars, which could be used to mark the seasons. These star-rise and star-set positions can be calculated for particular epochs in the past, making use of the known equations that describe the motions of the earth's axis.

One of the best-known sites is Mystery Hill at North Salem, New Hampshire..... Apart from the numerous stone chambers on the site there is also a stone circle. The native forest has encroached upon the circle, like many others now becoming known,, but radial avenues have been cleared to permit visitors to sight the major standing stones from the central observation platform. As the diagram (Fig. 79) showed, there are five principal standing stones, four of which are still standing erect. The fifth has fallen over. One stone marks the meridian and lies due north of the central observation point. The other four mark the sunrise and sunset points on the horizon for the midsummer and midwinter solstices. On account of persistent distant cloudbanks on the horizon the actual moment of contact of the rim of the sun is often invisible for, as the moment when the ball of the sun is about to reach the marker stone, it vanishes into mist. However, about once every eight or ten years a totally clear sunset or sunrise can be expected, and on such an occasion the event is truly impressive. On the diagram (Fig. 79), in which Osborn Stone assisted by reading the exact azimuths from his transit telescope, the observed angles are those shown; their deviation from the theoretical calculated values is only of the order of minutes of arc. It is obvious that the site is an ancient astronomical observatory for the regulation of the calendar, whatever else it may have been. To judge by the modern solstice ceremonies of Amerindian tribes, one may assume that much religious import was also attributed to the celestial phenomena by the ancient peoples who would assemble at the site to participate. At Mystery Hill the major significance seems to have been the summer and winter solstices, and regulation of the calendar by the vernal and autumnal equinoxes does not seem to have been an important part of the purpose of the ritual.

There are also many sites, as yet little known or wholly unrecorded, where a dozen or so natural boulders form ring-shaped structures. They vary from small circles, such as one that occurs at Gungywamp near Groton, Connecticut, to rings of more massive boulders, up to 15 meters in diameter that would have involved considerable labor in assembling the giant stones in this manner. One photographed by Jerry McMillan in the Santa Cruz Mountains, California, is shown in the photograph in Fig. 79b [same pic as Fig 79] & Fig 79c [same pic as Fig 79]. An approximate plan of the thirteen stones forming it is seen in Fig. 78. These rings seem to have been places of assembly for religious purposes; whether they also served as astronomical observatories (as seems very probable) remains yet to be proven. Jerry McMillan and Christopher Caswell discovered and photographed old engraved markings on two of the stones; these have not yet been deciphered but they seem to record angles of sight.

 Some of the smaller rings of stones that are found in the Sierras and in Montana do not seem to me to be calendar sites. They remind me of the old shielings of the Scottish Highlands. A shieling was a place on the open mountainside where the young women of a clan would gather in spring, when the herds ere in flow, to make cheeses and other milk products. They slept in the open, in shelters provided by such rings of stones, which remain today as witness to a way of life that has vanished from Scotland. It was still practiced a century ago, and when Fell was a student in Scotland in the 1930s he met aged women who had participated in the shieling and who had a stock of folklore to relate on the subject (The Devil himself being one of the personages liable to frequent the shielings, on the watch for any careless maiden who might not have said the necessary protetective charms).

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REFERENCES

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Allen. Derek 1978. An Introduction to Celtic Coins. British Museum Publ., London. 80 p.

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Epigraphic Society's Occasional Publications. 1981. Epigraphy Confrontation in America

Fell, Barry. 1974. Life, Space and Time: A course in Environmental Biology. Harper & Row, NY. 417 p.

Fell, Barry. 1974. An Introduction to Polynesian Epigraphy with Special Report on the Moanalla Stele known as Pohaku ka luahine. Polynesian Epigraphic Soc.

Fell, Barry. 1976. America BC. Ancient Settlers in the New World. Pocket Books, NY. 312 p.

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Fell, Barry. 1983. Saga America. A Startling New Theory on the Old World Settlement of America before Columbus. Times Book, NY. 392 p.

Fell, Barry. 1985. Ancient Punctuation and the Los Lunas text. The Epigraphic Society. p. 35-43.

Fell, Barry. 1989. America BC: Ancient Settlers in the New World. Pocket Books, NY. (revised ed.)

Geir, T. Zoega. 1932. English-Icelandic Dictionary. Bokaverslun Sigurdar Kristjanssnar, Reykjavik. 712 p.

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Heizer, R. F. & M. A. Baumhoff. 1962. Prehistoric Rock Art of Nevada and Eastern California. Univ. of Calif. Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. 412 p.

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Vastokas, Joan M. & Romas. 1973. Sacred Art of the Algonkians: A study of the Peterborough Petroglyphs. Mansard Press. 1694 p.

Vastokas, Joan M. 1984. Native and European Art in Ontario 5000 BC to 867 AD. Toronto, Canada, and Gallery of Ontario. 48 p.

Zoega's, Geir T. 1910. Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Oxford University Press

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