Subj:	IUFO: A Down Side To Moundbuilding?
Date:	11/4/01 5:50:57 PM Pacific Standard Time

Science Frontiers, No. 138, Nov-Dec, 2001, p. 1

ARCHEOLOGY

A Down Side to Moundbuilding?


The thousands of earthen mounds and walls piled up basketful-by-basketful
by Native Americans throughout the Midwest and, especially, Ohio, suggest
only simple cultures that raised rude edifices and monuments to their
chiefs and gods.  But now some anomalies have arisen from below the
Midwestern soil.

Archeologists got a shock in 1998, when drillers installing a drainage
system at huge, terraced Monk's Mound in Illinois discovered that the
mound was not all dirt after all.  Some 40 feet below one of the terraces
they ran into a 32-foot-thick layer of stones.  Hidden for centuries,
no one knows the extent or purpose of this huge mass of stones. (SF#117)

Now, just 3 years later, scientists using magnetic and other noninvasive
equipment have discerned a buried circle of "something" measuring 90 feet
across.  Like the stones in Monk's Mound, the find was entirely
serendipitous.  The locale is Paint Creek Prairie, Ross County, in
Southern Ohio.  There are run-of-the-mill mounds at the site but no
one supposed there was anything of significance beneath the surface.

(Sloat, Bill; "Mysterious Circle Found Buried beside Mounds," Cleveland
*Plain Dealer* web site, September 6, 2001.  Cr. P. Huyghe)

Comment.  The Hopewell Culture flourished in this region from about
400 BC to 400 AD.  In fact, they held sway from the Great Lakes to the
Gulf.  Above ground, they left abundant mounds, earthen walls in
various enigmatic geometries, and, of course, the Great Hopewell Road
running 60 miles long through central Ohio. (SF#127)

Who knows what else a culture of this power and sophistication might
have built underground?