Stone by Stone by Liz Bryan

Stone by Stone by Liz Bryan

Author:Liz Bryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77203-050-1
Publisher: Heritage House
Published: 2015-06-23T04:00:00+00:00


LEFT—One of many stone constructions overlooking the Red Deer River.

RIGHT—Aerial photo shows the huge extent of the medicine wheel’s rim. RON BARNETT PHOTOGRAPH

ACADIA VALLEY

The medicine wheel in the Acadia Valley, to the north and west of Empress, is particularly notable. While its cairn is today quite mundane, its ring is of immense size—46 metres in diameter, perhaps the largest ever found on the Canadian Plains—and it is very solidly built of large, tightly placed rocks.

Jack Brink of the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton was the first archaeologist to visit the small hilltop site, one typical of the surrounding glacially moulded and unbroken ranchland. The cairn lies on the highest point, with the ring slightly below the apex. The construction was impossible to see in its entirety from ground level. Brink recounts: “As the sheer extent of the outer stone ring came into view it was clear we were facing an enormous stone ring, the size of which I have not seen nor read about in the literature for the Northern Plains.” Only one ring, the Claybank ceremonial circle in Saskatchewan (pictured on page 124), comes close at 44 metres in diameter.

In the Alberta Archaeological Review, he described how his crew counted the ring’s 486 stones and commented on their size. Not the usual cobbles that would fit in a person’s hand, they are huge, some of them so immense he concluded that the ring must have been placed deliberately to incorporate them. He likened the construction in some parts of the ring to a low wall, with each stone specifically selected to fit perfectly with its neighbour.

The wheel’s large perimeter ring stretches around the hill top. COURTESY OF THE ROYAL ALBERTA MUSEUM



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