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My contention is that when you have something this huge, with this many features, shouldn't someone take a look at it? Bear in mind that extensive research now shows that many early Europeans here saw and wrote about stone features built by Indians. I have seen and read the passages. Features in the southern United States that are similar in some ways, in fact, are promoted for tourism as native structures--a number of them are on the internet, and I can show you URLs.
Yet archaeologists have chosen not to even visit these northern places. I'm confident that if some experts on Woodland Indians and of the mounds of the Ohio Valley were to visit a few of the Pennsylvania sites, they would see things that would make them want to learn more. It takes a few visits. I think I saw 3 or 4 sites before the similarities and inner consistencies broke down my very active skepticism. How many farmers living many, many miles from one another in every direction can go crazy in just the same ways?
But, even if these were built by Europeans, shouldn't they still be preserved and researched? If you saw the many shapes, sizes, configurations of the stoneworkas well as the immense spread of the site, especially at Oley Hills, trust me, you would really want to know who did it and why. It took a tremendous amount of work and man hours. And it's not field clearing. We have those walls, too, in our counties, but the grounds of Oley Hills are not even cleared of rocks.
Towns in this country preserve old movie theatres as historic sites. This is much more singular and curious, regardless of who made it. Houses from colonial times get plaques on them. This is at least that old.
Even though I agree with him, I sometimes think that Fred's decision to be honest about his belief in the indigenous origins of the sites was a sort of tactical error. The idea of Indians here makes many people's consciences squirm uneasily. They don't want to think they killed and ran off people who actually had a culture, who were intelligent and philosophical, observant and capable. The whole primitive savage image is more comfortable to live with.
I actually was at a hearing that was considering whether to preserve a site that had evidence of continuous indigenous occupation from eight thousand years ago until the arrival of Europeans, and heard one man say, 'why should we preserve this Indian place when you can walk around and pick up arrowheads almost anywhere?' The logic being, I guess, that this heritage is so common and so unrelated to us and our history that it's not worth learning about or preserving. (His side lost in that case, I am happy to say.)
Maybe if Fred had said these odd complexes were part of the heritage of our German forefathers, they would be not only permanently preserved, but widely famous.
Just some thoughts that have arisen since I posted.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road