#000200
New England's Ancient Mysteries
Robert Ellis Cahill
*New England's Ancient Mysteries* is one of Robert Ellis Cahill's popular "Collectible Classics" booklets - short, chatty, well-illustrated surveys of the region's odder history. Cahill, a former Salem sheriff turned prolific chronicler of New England lore, turns here to the puzzles scattered across the landscape: the stone chambers and standing stones of sites like North Salem's "America's Stonehenge," carved inscriptions, Dighton Rock, the Newport Tower, and the tangle of theories - Norse, Celtic, Phoenician, Native American - that try to explain them. Cahill writes as an enthusiast, not an academic, happy to lay out the wild guesses alongside the sober ones. For readers who enjoy roadside mysteries and New England folklore, and who take the speculation with a grain of salt, it is breezy, entertaining fun.
more…less ▴
The author
Robert Ellis Cahill (1934-2005) was a former sheriff of Salem, Massachusetts, who became a hugely prolific popular author, writing dozens of slim illustrated booklets on New England ghosts, witches, pirates, disasters, and mysteries under his "Collectible Classics" series.
The book
New England's Ancient Mysteries surveys the region's enigmatic stone structures and inscriptions - chambers, dolmens, standing stones, and carved rocks - and rehearses the competing theories about who built them and when, from ancient transatlantic visitors to colonial farmers.
How to read it
Read it as folklore and entertainment rather than archaeology: most scholars attribute the stone chambers to colonial-era root cellars and farm structures, but Cahill's gift is for a good story well told.
For more context
For the sober counterweight, see David Goudsward's Ancient Stone Sites of New England and the Debate Over Early European Exploration.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Robert Ellis Cahill
- Place of publication
- New England
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine
verify (New England's Collectible Classics Series)