{"it":{"id":"NAM-BHW","kind":"site","sub":"Americas","name":"Bighorn Medicine Wheel","place":"USA","lat":44.826,"lon":-107.922,"date":"disputed (INTERPRETATION)","mat":"limestone cobbles","nfacts":5,"tags":["Americas"],"sum":"High in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains, at about 2,940 m, a ring of stones about 25 m across sends 28 spokes into a central cairn. In 1974 astronomer John Eddy published evidence that some cairns point to the summer solstice sunrise and bright stars.","why":"A sacred stone wheel high in Wyoming with solstice and star alignments proposed in Science.","src":[440],"nsrc":2,"yt":"What would it take to date it?","rel":["NAM-002"],"hook":"At 9,640 ft in Wyoming, a ring of stones sends 28 spokes to a central cairn."},"S":{"440":["Wikipedia: Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain National Historic Landmark","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Wheel%2FMedicine_Mountain_National_Historic_Landmark"]},"rec":{"id":"NAM-BHW","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"wheel","a":"altitude","v":"2,939","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medicine_Wheel/Medicine_Mountain_National_Historic_Landmark&oldid=1382537853","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3495"},{"f":"rim","a":"diameter","v":"24.4","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medicine_Wheel/Medicine_Mountain_National_Historic_Landmark&oldid=1382537853","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3496"},{"f":"spokes","a":"count","v":"28","u":"count","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medicine_Wheel/Medicine_Mountain_National_Historic_Landmark&oldid=1382537853","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3497"},{"f":"Cairn O","a":"diameter","v":"3.0","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medicine_Wheel/Medicine_Mountain_National_Historic_Landmark&oldid=1382537853","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3498"},{"f":"Majorville Wheel (comparison)","a":"date","v":"3200 BC","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medicine_Wheel/Medicine_Mountain_National_Historic_Landmark&oldid=1382537853","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"archaeological","id":"M3499"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"height","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"key_structure_dims","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"block_mass","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"levelness","r":"no published levelling survey in free sources"},{"a":"rock_type","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"lab_date_material","r":"no lab date with dated material in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"metals_clamps","r":"no metal/clamp evidence reported in sources opened"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA075","a":"astronomical device","who":"see anomaly_claims","main":"Plains ceremonial structure","ms":"","st":"unresolved","n":"no lab date opened","nl":3}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"disputed (INTERPRETATION)","dm":"historical/stylistic (INTERPRETATION)","lab":"NO","weak":"no lab date opened","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"44.82611","lon":"-107.92167","src":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q6806755)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"Q6806755; no OSM match | W18 retry: refined Nominatim query; WD P625 44.8261,-107.922 is P143-imported (not independent); delta 0.0004 deg","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/334610993"},"src":[{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain NHL","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medicine_Wheel/Medicine_Mountain_National_Historic_Landmark&oldid=1382537853"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain National Historic Landmark","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Wheel%2FMedicine_Mountain_National_Historic_Landmark"},{"id":"VNAM-BHW-3","t":"USDA Forest Service, Bighorn National Forest: Medicine Wheel / Medicine Mountain National Historic Landmark","u":"https://www.fs.usda.gov/r02/bighorn/natural-resources/arch-cultural/medicine-wheel-medicine-mountain-national-historic"},{"id":"VNAM-BHW-4","t":"Towers: Big Horn Medicine Wheel (PDF)","u":"https://sherrytowers.com/big_horn_medicine_wheel.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Eddy, John A. (1974), “Astronomical Alignment of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel”, Science 184 (4141): 1035–1043, peer reviewed; read in full from a scanned copy hosted by researcher Sherry Towers (https://sherrytowers.com/big_horn_medicine_wheel.pdf)","u":"https://doi.org/10.1126/science.184.4141.1035"},{"id":null,"t":"Chapman, Fred (2019), “Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain: Celebrated and Controversial Landmark”, WyoHistory.org, Wyoming State Historical Society encyclopedia","u":"https://wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/medicine-wheel"},{"id":null,"t":"Calder, James M. (1975), “Majorville Cairn and Medicine Wheel site, Alberta”, MA thesis, University of Calgary, abstract read","u":"https://ucalgary.scholaris.ca/items/452963d2-54a2-44d8-a1bc-d27cdc68909d"}],"sum":"Some summer days, visitors walking the path up Medicine Mountain in Wyoming are asked to wait. Forest Service interpreters may close the trail for 45 minutes to an hour while a private Native American ceremony takes place at the top. The people inside the circle are using the Bighorn Medicine Wheel for what it has been for as long as anyone remembers, a place of prayer, and the scientists, tourists and historians who argue over it simply have to stand aside.\n\nThe wheel lies on bare limestone at about 9,640 feet, roughly 2,940 metres, on a ridge of Medicine Mountain in the Bighorn National Forest. It is a rough ring of stones about 82 feet across by the Forest Service's measure; the solar astronomer John Eddy, who surveyed it with a transit and steel tape in 1972, gave about 25 metres, and other measurements give 24.4. A central cairn about 12 feet wide, or about 4 metres in Eddy's figures, sits at the hub, and 28 lines of stone run out from it to the rim. Around the edge stand six smaller cairns. Eddy described five of them on the rim, each an open circle 1 to 1.5 metres across and several courses high, and a sixth about 4 metres outside on an extended spoke to the south-west. Fred Chapman, writing for the Wyoming State Historical Society, notes that the cairns are round, oval or horseshoe-shaped and closely resemble the enclosures Plains people used for vision quests and fasting.\n\nThe Forest Service calls it one of the largest stone medicine wheels in North America. Researchers have counted as many as 150 medicine wheels across Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and this one was the first studied by professional science. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1970, and in 2011 the protected area grew from 110 to 4,080 acres to take in the wider sacred landscape of the mountain. Native Americans have visited this mountain for nearly 7,000 years.\n\nWhite settlers learned of the wheel in the late 19th century. The Native people they asked knew it well, but said it was already there when they came, or that it had been made \"by people who had no iron.\" An ethnologist named Simms studied it for the Field Museum in Chicago in 1902. In 1921 an elderly Cheyenne man named Elk River compared it to the Cheyenne Sun Dance lodge, and the Crow man Flat Dog called it the \"Sun's Lodge.\" In 1922 George Bird Grinnell suggested that the wheel copied a ceremonial lodge laid flat on the ground: the hub was the centre pole, and the 28 spokes were its 28 rafters. Tribal accounts gathered by the Forest Service describe the wheel as the \"altar\" of the Medicine Mountain complex, and many link it to the Sun Dance lodge.\n\nIn 1958 the Sheridan chapter of the Wyoming Archaeological Society excavated the inside of every cairn and the ground between about a third of the spokes. Under the central cairn they found something unexpected: a filled, cone-shaped hole in the bedrock about a metre deep, the kind of socket that could have held an upright pole. Someone had cut it into solid rock near the top of a mountain. If Grinnell's reading is right, that is where the centre pole of the lodge once stood.\n\nThen came the sky. In 1974 Eddy published \"Astronomical Alignment of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel\" in the journal Science and proposed that the wheel worked as a summer calendar. Standing at one rim cairn in 1972, he watched the June solstice sun rise over the central cairn; in 1973 he saw the solstice sunset line up from another. He proposed that lines from a third cairn pointed to the dawn risings of the bright stars Aldebaran, Rigel and Sirius. Snow decided the season. The wheel is usually reachable on foot only from mid or late June to mid-September, so only the summer solstice could have been watched there. Eddy thought the spokes were probably of secondary importance, perhaps added later as a day counter or a decoration. He was careful about his own claims. The rough cairns have no exact centre, he warned, so each line is good only to about a degree, and visitors before the site was protected may have moved stones. The anthropologist Karl Schlesier later linked the star lines to Cheyenne ritual.\n\nThe dating is thin. The only reliable scientific date comes from a piece of wood built into the western cairn, whose latest tree ring grew in 1760. Pottery linked to the Shoshone and Crow and glass trade beads of the early 19th century were found near the central cairn. Charcoal and wood from nearby sites give radiocarbon dates from about 6,550 years ago to modern times, with most datable artifacts between about AD 900 and 1800. The Forest Service gives the wheel itself an age anywhere from a few hundred years to more than 3,000 years. Most archaeologists, Chapman writes, see it as a Late Prehistoric structure built up over several centuries, and the Forest Service adds that the central cairn and some outer cairns may be older than the rim and spokes. A single tree ring says when one piece of wood grew, not when the first stone was set.\n\nFar to the north, the Majorville wheel in Alberta was begun around 3200 BC and added to for some 5,000 years, by James Calder's reckoning; Chapman puts it at about 5,500 years old. Whether the Bighorn wheel grew from that much older northern tradition is open. Chapman writes that its tribal affiliation is a matter of inference, not fact.\n\nWhat makes the wheel compelling is that two kinds of knowledge meet on the same stones. One measures azimuths and star risings to the nearest degree. The other remembers a lodge, an altar and a pole set in the rock. They need not compete. A people who built a lodge of stone on a summit where the sun could be watched rising over its centre at midsummer were joining prayer and observation in a single act. Weighing the old testimony about the wheel's age, Eddy suggested that one phrase might be better translated as \"before the sunlight came,\" or \"to mark the sunrise.\"\n\nPicture the wheel on a June morning before dawn: bare limestone, the 28 spokes faint grey lines on the dark ground, a figure crouched by a rim cairn, and as the light grows in the north-east, the first edge of the sun breaking the horizon directly over the heap of stones at the centre, where a pole may once have risen from a socket cut into the mountain itself.","qs":["How did its builders learn the sky this precisely?","Why build the spokes after the cairns?","What does the mountain mean to the nations who still visit it?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/MedicineWheel.jpg/1280px-MedicineWheel.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MedicineWheel.jpg","title":"MedicineWheel.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"U.S. Forest Service Photo","cap":"Medicine Wheel, a Native American sacred site and National Historic Landmark in Wyoming"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"Limestone cobbles","h":"Made of","s":[170]}],"hs":{"170":["Wikipedia: Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain National Historic Landmark (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Wheel/Medicine_Mountain_National_Historic_Landmark"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/NAM-BHW.webp","w":1280,"h":1034,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/MedicineWheel.jpg/1280px-MedicineWheel.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}