Americas Stonehenge

42.8442°N, 71.2072°W.

Stone arrangement on a 12-hectare hilltop in Salem, New Hampshire, consisting of approximately 30 dry-stone chambers, niches, and standing stones distributed across a wooded site. The site was sold to William Goodwin in 1937 and called “Mystery Hill”; renamed “America's Stonehenge” by William Jackson in the 1980s. Construction date is contested. Mainstream archaeology (Stewart-Smith and Cole, 1990s) attributes the site to 18th-century farmer Jonathan Pattee and his sons, who quarried stones for foundations and built the principal chambers as root cellars and outbuildings; carbon dating of charcoal from the chambers has yielded dates from 2000 BCE to 200 CE in some samples and from 17th-19th centuries CE in others, consistent with later contamination of an older site. Astronomical alignments to the summer and winter solstice sunrises and sunsets have been documented by Barry Fell and Robert Stone; some are unambiguous, others statistically borderline.

A New Hampshire stone site was either built by an ancient transatlantic culture, by a Federalist farmer, or both — and a hundred years of investigation has not settled which.