Majorville Cairn and Medicine Wheel

The Majorville Cairn and Medicine Wheel (Iniskim Umaapi) is an archaeological site of the Blackfoot Nation located south of Bassano, Alberta. The medicine wheel has been dated to 3200 BCE (5200 years ago) by careful stratification of known artifact types. The medicine wheel sits on top of a grassy hill at an elevation of 918 m overlooking a large area of undisturbed prairie around the Bow River. The structure consists of a round stone cairn, 9 m in diameter, surrounded by a 27 m wide cobble circle connected to the cairn by 28 stone spokes. This arrangement is categorized as Subgroup 6 and of the total 67 known medicine wheels only 3 belong to this category, the other two being the Jennings site in South Dakota and Bighorn in Wyoming. The southern half of the cairn has been excavated and the projectile points found indicate it was in use since the Oxbow/McKean Phase for the last 4500 years. The site was built in layers, with the earliest C14 date from the cairn determined at 3845 ± 85 radiocarbon years before present. Calibrated to calendar years this is 2384 ± 124 years before 1950, although this sample doesn't come from the earliest construction period. The sequence of construction is uncertain and it is not clear that spokes and wheel were built at the same time. Rocks and arrowheads were added to it until contact with Europeans, although there was a gap in its use between 30

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).