Mystery in the Green Mountains: Film Debut

Submitted by coldrum on Friday, 31 August 2007 Page Views: 1481

Deep within the Green Mountain National Forest, an enormous pile of rocks has people puzzled. In "Hidden Landscapes," a documentary screening twice this weekend during the Lake Champlain Maritime Festival on the Burlington waterfront, scientists observing this 20-by-30-foot cairn.
The film, a work-in-progress by Ted Timreck, is full of details about the original inhabitants of this region. His cinematic saga challenges long-held assumptions about Champlain Valley civilization through the examination of stone.

Among the scientists is Stephen Loring, an anthropologist who conducts archaeological, ethno-historical and paleo-environmental research for the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "I think we all agree that we don't know what's going on here," he says to the other men scrutinizing the mysterious structure. "It's so perplexing."

Timreck, a New York City-based filmmaker and Smithsonian research associate, traces Loring's three-decade quest: In the late 1970s he came across a translucent Native American fluted point near the Missisquoi River, but did not identify its genesis for another 25 years.

Previously, Smithsonian scientists thought native people from these shores had reached northern Labrador 4,000 years ago. In 2004 Loring experienced a breakthrough leading to a different hypothesis. He determined that the Vermont point was at least 10,000 years old and fashioned from "Ramah chert," a volcanic rock found only on the coast of Labrador.

"That's 1,600 nautical miles," Timreck notes. "The theory is that Paleolithic people brought the Ramah chert here by boat when Lake Champlain was still a sea."

The frozen configurations of the last Ice Age mean these ancestors "had to adapt to hunting Arctic animals," he adds, "so developing full Arctic maritime capability was essential. A culture that could do that is, by implication, a gee-whiz phenomenon."

"The Siberians are thought to have evolved into Clovis people," Timreck explains. "The question of pre-Clovis in the New World is the big issue now, however. Who they might have been is up in the air."

While an identity remains elusive, he acknowledges, "We're finding artifacts that carbon-date at 16,000 to 17,000 years old."

For more, including artifact finds and stone pile of New England and information about the planned series of films, see the Burlington Free Press.

Note: "Hidden Landscapes" film draft to be shown in Burlington Vermont Aug 31-Sept 1.

Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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