Oley Hills Site

The Oley Hills site, or Oley Hills stone work site, located in Berks County, Pennsylvania, is an enigmatic complex of snaking dry stone walls, carefully shaped rock piles or cairns, perched boulders, and unusually shaped natural boulders. It is possible to see animal and human forms in some of the rock piles and boulders, but whether those images were intended by the builders or are phenomena of the imaginations of modern observers has not been demonstrated. The site boasts other features such as an enormous "split-wedged boulder," a split boulder with another stone wedged into the split.

When the complex was built and who built it is not known. The complex is large and elaborate, at 46 acres (190,000 m2) in the central site alone, with many outliers along the ridge, as shown by the work of Norman Muller, conservator of Princeton University Art Museum, who argued it was thus unlikely to have been the product of a field clearing operation. Muller argued instead that the site was the product of Native American ceremonial practices. It may be an example of the ceremonial stone landscapes described by USET, United Southern and Eastern Tribes, Inc. in their resolution on the topic.

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