Lake Michigan Stonehenge? Man-Made Formation in Great Lakes Remains a Secret

Scott Way
May 14
4 min read

Updated: May 15

Lake Michigan Stonehenge — Photo - Dr. Mark Holley / Lasco Press

Beneath Lake Michigan’s Surface Lies a 9,000-Year-Old Mystery Older Than Stonehenge

In 2007, Dr. Mark Holley, an underwater archaeology professor at Northwestern Michigan University, discovered a strange prehistoric site beneath the waters of Grand Traverse Bay in Lake Michigan.

Suffice to say what he found bore a similarity to a famous landmark, which only created more questions than answers.

While conducting a sonar scan, Holley identified a deliberate arrangement of large stones on the lake bed, which has since been dubbed "Michigan’s Stonehenge" in a sensationalist ode to the British site. The media made up the moniker, and the name has stuck.

The formation sits 40 feet below the surface and consists of a winding row of stones stretching for over a mile. It culminates in a perfect hexagon, much like the true Stonehenge in England. The boulders vary in dimension from basketball-sized to as large as a car. Their layout shows they were intentionally placed. But why? And by whom?

One particular stone stands out more than the others. It measures 3.5 feet tall and 5 feet across and features the carved image of a mastodon. Given its proposed age and location, its lead scientists to explore the possible connection between early humans in North America and the prehistoric megafauna that once roamed the Great Lakes region.

Mastodons roamed North America during the Pleistocene epoch from roughly 2.6 million to 10,000 years ago, but modern humans only entered North America about 12,000 years ago. It's believed humans spread across the continent primarily from the west, eventually migrating into the Great Lakes region over centuries. That puts the timeline for the stone's carving at about 9,000 years ago, shortly after the end of the Ice Age during the early Holocene period. At that time, the site now submerged in Grand Traverse Bay was dry land. If the timeline is correct, that would make the stone formation in Lake Michigan nearly twice as old as England’s Stonehenge, which dates to approximately 5,000 years ago and was constructed during the late Neolithic period.

To protect the site and its ancestral ties to local Indigenous communities, Dr. Holley has informed the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians about the discovery but is keeping the exact location of the stone formation a secret. The underwater location allows for only gradual progress but, given the connection to a time period with little archaeological evidence remaining, the academic research is sure to ramp up. Dr. Holley and other scientists have also begun exploring possible connections to other nearby stone structures, hoping to establish a link with another group in North America.

A connection to other rock structures is not as far fetched as you might think. As it turns out, there are similar stone formations in nearby Lake Huron.

Dr. John O'Shea from the University of Michigan has studied a rock formation in Lake Huron that sits 120 feet below the surface along the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, a rise in the lake floor that runs its entire length from Alpena, Michigan to Amberley, Ontario. This rock assemblage, dating back 9,000 years, is believed to have been used for ancient hunting practices, possibly as a 'drive line' to push herding caribou. There is another rock formation on Beaver Island, the largest island in Lake Michigan, which features ancient stone formations on its west side along the Reddings Trail and includes a circle of glacial boulders, some marked with inscriptions.

It's worth noting that Dr. Holley wants to make it clear that there is no actual correlation between the Lake Michigan formation and Stonehenge. According to Dr. Holley himself, "there is not a henge associated with the site and the individual stones are relatively small when compared to what most people think of as European standing stones. It should be clearly understood that this is not a megalith site like Stonehenge... The site in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long line of stones which is over a mile in length."

So what was the stone formation in Grand Traverse Bay built for? Dr. Holley believes the site, just like the one in Lake Huron overseen by Dr. O'Shea, "may be a prehistoric drive line for herding caribou" and "may have served a similar function to the one found in Lake Huron."

A drive line was a practice used by ancient hunters to coax herding animals into preferred locations for hunting. The U.S. National Park Service describes a caribou drive by explaining that "hunters learned that the movement of caribou could be influenced by something tall, erect, and human-like on the open tundra. Using this knowledge, they made stone people (iñuksuk), by standing elongated stones on end or by piling up rocks and topping them with willow branches and bits of cloth that fluttered in the wind. Nunamiut Eskimos arranged these scarecrow figures in two gradually converging rows, sometimes up to five miles long. When a herd of caribou approached, the iñuksuit (plural for iñuksuk) helped to funnel them into a lake, a river, or a corral where they could more easily be killed."

If that's the case, massive caribou herds once roamed the dry land where the Great Lakes now reside, and one of North America's most popular boating destinations wasn't anything like the liquid playground that we know today.

So, if you happen to drop anchor in a quiet bay and notice a line of stones culminating with a perfect hexagon, you might be fishing where the caribou once roamed and early humans used spears instead of fishing rods.

You can watch a documentary about the Grand Traverse Bay site below:

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