A five-thousand-year-old stone wheel with 28 spokes, still receiving offerings
On a ridge above the Bow south of Bassano lies a stone cairn nine metres across, ringed by a cobble circle 27 metres wide, with 28 stone spokes running out from the middle to the rim. It is a Blackfoot site and the Blackfoot name is Iniskim Umaapi. Dated by the artefact layers inside the cairn to around 3200 BCE, which would make it roughly five thousand years old and older than Stonehenge, it was not built in one go: the cairn was raised in layers and the material in it covers some 4,500 years of use, with a gap of roughly a thousand years in the middle of that, and people were still adding stones and points to it up to European contact. You will see it called Canada’s Stonehenge, an argument that it is an open-air sun temple; that came from a chemist working well outside his own field, and no archaeologist has stood it up. THIS IS A SACRED PLACE AND IT IS STILL IN USE. Sweetgrass, sage, willow, cloth and tobacco are left here. It sits on grazing lease land at the end of a designated road: stay on the road, take nothing, move nothing, photograph nothing that is an offering, and understand you are a guest.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
