Ivandro Alves

In 2007, as looking for shipwrecks in Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay, Mark Holley - professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan University - first came across a rock that he said bears a prehistoric carving of a mastodon. On further investigation, he also discovered an arrangement of ancient stones on the lakebed. The structure has an outer ring of stones, about 40 feet in diameter, and an inner ring about 20 feet in diameter, both made of local granite. They stand 40 feet below the water’s surface, and the stones are some 9,000 years old, making this one of the oldest structures ever discovered in North America. At that time the lakebed was dry. The structure has been nick-named the Stonehenge of Lake Michigan ( probably to popularize it ), in fact the stones are not of anything like the size of those at Stonehenge. Instead, they range in size from that of a basketball to that of a compact car. Also number of stones are arranged in a line over one mile long. The function of stone arrangement is still unclear. The Lake Michigan find, in fact, could be a smaller version of a prehistoric hunting structure found under Lake Huron. The football field-sized Lake Huron site was reported to hold humanmade stone lines and hunting blinds dating back 9,000 years, erected to herd caribou. Other researchers point to possible sunrise alignments that would place the structure among the oldest known calendrical markers in North America; a minority of geologists still argue for its purely glacial origin. #archaeohistories