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Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

These are all over the place in Norway (as are they everywhere else, presumably!)

When we moved to the island we currently live on, our address was in a road called 'Solsteinen' (The Sun Stone), but I didn't think anything of it until I realized that the roughly hewn stone serving as the property limit marker was juuu-uuust touched by the sun on Winter Solstice. Aha.

A quick call to the local archaeologist confirmed my suspicion - 'Oh, so you're the new resident there, I'd planned on being in touch - that stone monument has been there for more than 2000 years, is A-listed and please, whatever you do, don't do anything with it. Seriously.'

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The local archaeologist? Incredible

Oh, he works for the county, but happened to live just up the hill from us.

There's so much old stuff around here that he is basically being called out to perform an assessment every time anyone wishes to build anything.

Where we live now, for instance, there are a handful of burial mounds from God knows when (all plundered long ago), lots of old charcoal pits, a couple of late stone age fish traps in the lake in a corner of our farm.

To exaggerate just a little - where we could build our home was basically dictated by where we could find a spot noone had claimed thousands of years ago...

As someone from a place that is less than a century old this sounds incredible!

It is until you try to build something!

(Nothing quite like watching an archeologist go 'Oooh, that's interesting!' during a dig to establish whether you can go ahead building on your chosen spot...)

Isn't that solved by rescue archaeology ? Here in the Czech Republic everything has been settled for many thousands of years - so you basically automatically call the archeologists for any construction, they will check the area, record any interesting findings and retrieve artifacts of interest. Then the are is free to be used for the construction project.

Something like that is happening right now here in Brno:

https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/veda-skoly-po-prioru-zbyla-brn...

A massive construction project & equally massive archaeology operation - mapping the remains of old textile factories, an old channel and rail line, fish storage tanks, a mill, a villa and even a cemetery or two.

The archaeology work is wrapping up in a month or two & then the construction crews will take over the site (they already work in the areas that have been fully searched) to finish the construction project (which includes a 13 meter deep water tight "tub" due to a very shallow water table for the basement levels or 200 meter deep geothermal energy piles, etc.).

it seems like you moved to property on "a road called 'Solsteinen' " .. did it occur to anyone that many special local things might be built close to the stable sun stone? I would even guess that no one built a home or horse barn there because they were not allowed to by the community.. this is modern development.. using up the ancient old area for a new sale. That is the appearance from the description above.

The (immediate) area has been farmed for hundreds of years, so I would guess most old burial mounds etc has been recycled centuries ago. The houses there now are mostly built in the seventies, at which point (luckily!) the local council would NOT let you build upon any ancient structures.

Where I live now - same island, but farther from the natural port and, hence, less attractive land in the old days - we still have a few which noone bothered to remove (to till the land underneath or to use the stones for building walls or foundations).

My kids used to love going playing around those mounds, made for excellent inspiration for pretending games, that!

I suspect most local councils in the UK have an archaeology team and failing that there are a lot of professional consulting archaeologists - a lot (all?) large scale building works often include the need for archaeological surveys and/or remediation.

e.g. Work for what is now the Queensferry Crossing bridge uncovered a 10,000 year old home:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-2...

You're that guy who lives on the northeast island of the Chrono Trigger map, aren't you?

We also have these in Germany, in the region where I live it which is North Rhein Westfalis they are quite a common thing actually. Strongly recomment people check it out if they pass by here some time

> as are they everywhere else, presumably!

They aren't "all over the place" in the US, and I certainly don't have a local archaeologist that I can just call up.

FWIW: The Northeastern US is quite recent with human presence. It wasn't settled until after the last ice age. Pretty much anything old is celebrated because there is so little of anything old.

Ohio was populated with numerous earthworks, the Hopewell Earthworks finally being recognized as a UNESCO world heritage spot after being preserved for years by being used as a golf course. Unfortunately many of these have been lost as European settlers destroyed many of them. This continues to this day as Google is building a data center in central Ohio a top of land that was home to numerous native american burial mounds - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-breaks-gro...

Has no one on Google's datacenter leadership team so much as SEEN a horror movie before?

”You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! Why? Why?” </Poltergeist>

As the other replies note, there are things. Many were destroyed though and so there is nothing to preserve. However much of North America lacks ready access to building materials that will last and so many of the natives built with organic goods that rotted away in a few decades and so there isn't much to find. You can find many flint arrowheads - but that only tells us when (about) it was made and since there are millions of them there isn't much to learn anymore.

Don't take the above as a sign that the natives were uninteresting or stupid. Just that they didn't leave much for us to learn from, both because they couldn't and because what they did was destroyed.

Norway also wasn't populated until after the last ice age. As an American archaeologist, old stuff is also quite common here. The fun examples I like to use are the structures in Tucson older than Rome.

Your "local archeologist" is one of the staff at the state historic preservation society [0], though you'll likely have more luck contacting a local university archeologist if you find anything.

[0] https://www.ohiohistory.org/preserving-ohio/state-historic-p...

> They aren't "all over the place" in the US, and I certainly don't have a local archaeologist that I can just call up… The Northeastern US is quite recent with human presence

Fun fact, New England has at least 71 different stonework “prayer sites” that are all astrologically aligned.

Two of the most notable are King Philip’s Cave (Sharon, MA) with a stone aperture through which a "dagger of light" appears specifically during the winter solstice, and Pole Hill (Gloucester, MA) which has fixed boulders that align with the summer solstice sunrise/sunset and the winter solstice sunrise.

Here is a research paper talking about all of them: https://neara.org/pdf/wantofanail.pdf

There are lots of historical preservationists in New England that you can call up. If you want my help finding one let me know where you are located.

This is really interesting, thank you.

When they built the new High School in my old home town in western CT one of the local archaeologists (day job: science teacher) did some exploration on site and discovered all sorts of stuff - no funding for a proper dig so they capped it and put up a plaque about it (ISTR they put the tennis courts on top since that disturbed it least?)

So, yeah, there's lots of archaeology in New England, it's just that a lot of it is literally buried or otherwise not called out. (And "in the US, 100 years is a long time; in the UK, 100 miles is a long distance" is also Just How It Is...)

> It wasn't settled until after the last ice age.

The UK wasn’t permanently settled until the mesolithic either. There are older artifacts like axes, but no monuments.

Probably because the UK didn't exist until 1707.

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