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Clarke County site may be ancient celestial calendar by bat400 on Friday, 11 November 2011
Excerpts from an article by Val Van Meter in the 3 Nov 2011 Winchester Star. Note the comments from a peer archaeologist.
[unfortunately, the link to the original news item has been broken.]
Rock circles on a spit of mountain land along Spout Run may be the oldest above-ground Paleoindian site in North America, according to Alexandria archaeologist Jack Hranicky. He will deliver an address about the site - which he dates to 10,000 B.C. - to the Society for American Archaeology next April in Memphis, Tenn.

The set of concentric circles drew the attention of landowners Chris and Rene White as they were planning to create a medicine wheel on their 20 acres. As White prepared to put his medicine wheel on the site, he realized that a circle of stones was there - actually, several concentric circles.
Someone suggested that White contact Hranicky, who had studied five other Paleoindian sites in Virginia.

He said he saw the pattern in the rocks as soon as he arrived at the site, noting three concentric circles at the western edge.
To the east, touching this area, is another circle that Hranicky calls the observatory. Here, rocks on the edge of the circle align with features on Blue Ridge Mountain to the east.
From a center rock, over a boundary rock, a line would intersect the feature called Bears Den Rocks on the mountain. Standing on that center rock, looking toward Bears Den, a viewer can see the sun rise on the summer solstice, Hranicky said.
To the right of this rock around the circle, another lines up to Eagle Rock on the Blue Ridge, and with sunrise at the fall equinox, he said.
Yet a third points to a saddle on the mountain where the sun makes its appearance at the winter solstice.

Hranicky, 69, a registered professional archaeologist who taught anthropology at Northern Virginia community College and St. Johns High School College, has been working in the field of archaeology, for 40 years. Hranicky was convinced that it was a Paleoindian site, based on the configuration of the concentric circles, the solstice alignment and the altar he has seen at other such sites. But he wanted an artifact.
His test pit turned up three artifacts. One was a thin blade of quartzite. The second was a small piece of jasper, a type of quartz rock and an important find, Hranicky said. Jasper was prized by Paleoindians for making tools. It was hard and durable, but could still be worked by Stone Age methods. They traveled miles to find sites where jasper nodules protruded from native rock, and quarried the stone to make projectile points and tools.
The third artifact was the most important. It was a tiny piece of jasper, no bigger than the end of a thumb, but this rock had been worked, Hranicky said. It was a tool, a mini-scraper.

Jasper on the site ties what Hranicky believes was a ceremonial observation site to another proven Paleoindian site just to the south of Clarke County in Warren County - the Thunderbird site. William Gardiner of Catholic University excavated that site for several years. Indians camped on the east bank of the South Fork of the Shenandoah River and quarried jasper for tool making from bluffs on the west bank. The Thunderbird site is dated to 10,000 B.C.

Hranicky is applying to have the Whites' stone circles added to Virginia's list of archaeological sites.
"It will be recorded," said state archaeologist Mike Barber.
Barber said several ceremonial observatories across North America are attributed to Paleoindians.
"Jack has recorded several of these types," he said. "The real problem is proving what these things are. We haven't arrived at that level yet."
Barber said he has received a preliminary report on the site from Hranicky, and is trying to schedule a time to visit it.
Is the Clarke County site an ancient solar observatory for early Americans?
Barber is cautious.
"I'm not to the point where I can say that this is one of them."

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