Pynchon? I'd Like to Ogham and Kissham! (M&D, p. 600)

[Charles F. Albert]

This "America's Stonehenge" is just up the street from my hovel. 
Don't miss it on your way through southern N. H. Highly recommend the 
"Stonhenge Burger w/ cheese", an exceptional value at $7:00.
Prepare, however, to be underwhelmed by the arguments presented there 
as to the origins of the site. Those of you who are considering 
booking rooms at the local Red Roof should be aware that these 
Harvard sharpers have an axe in it, having served as consultants to 
the proprietors.
Better to stay in Salem and shop and bet the ponies at Rockingham.
love,
cfa, who will gladly book a tee time at one of the local (and quite 
affordable) golf courses that abound here

> Concentrating on one site in particular, Mystery Hill in southern New
> Hampshire, he builds his case for the Celts as early visitors to
> America. The site is a smallish stone shelter, built with
> post-and-lintel construction (not a common Amerind technique), atop a
> hill, surrounded by stone plinths that seem to act as astronomical
> markers. Standing in the center of the site and sighting down toward the
> markers, points toward various astronomical phenomena--solstices and
> equinoxes and all that. It appears to be an astronomical observatory,
> similar in style and purpose to Stonehenge. What is compelling about the
> site, and what argues against it as a _native American_ construction, is
> the Ogham inscriptions Fell and others  claim to have found on many of
> the plinths and in the shelter itself.
> 
> Ogham, (also spelled Ogam) is a family of paleographic alphabets, coined
> by the Celts, and especially adapted for quick-n-easy marking of stone.
> It appears to have evolved out of a sign language used by the Druidical
> class for hidden and silent  communication--fingers pointed up or down
> signify different consonants, and you fill in the vowels, much as in
> ancient Hebrew. The fingers evolved into straight-line scratches or
> chips out of the stone. Simple but effective.
> 
> Now, I'm operating in a total vacuum here. What I *don't* know about
> ancient anthropology and paleographic inscriptions and Celtiberian
> astronomy is pretty much everything there *is* not to know. Once on my
> way to a Maine vacation I made a side trip to see "America's
> Stonehenge," as it's billed on the roadsigns, and to my utterly
> unschooled eyes it all seemed simultaneously very interesting indeed and
> highly, highly suspicious. The source of my suspicion is basically that
> nobody else I've ever come across has ever claimed that the Celts
> visited North America. It's only this book and Mystery Hill and a few
> other archeological sites. If the theory were commonly accepted, you'd
> think all this Columbus-versus-Leif-Erickson nonsense would have been
> knocked into a cocked hat.
> 
> So I throw this out to all you Anthro./Soc. types: How seriously are
> Barry Fell and the Celts-visited-America theory taken in your field? I
> mean, I Wanna Believe, you know? Some of the evidence he presents
> *seems* extremely convincing. But I can't help being skeptical, like the
> next step is Pyramid Inches and Piltdown Man and runestones.
> 
> Criminy--the word "Vineland" just popped into my head, and I think I'd
> better go lie down.
> 
> Harrison "Merry Beltane to yez!" Sherwood
> 
>