Written on the wind: Ancient messages and mysteries survive on southern Alberta’s plains – National Post

July 28, 2015

Time travelling through a series of extraordinary southern Alberta sites offers a glimpse into a nomadic culture that existed for millennia before the arrival of the outside world.

The buffalo-hunters of the western grasslands left little evidence of their 10,000 year-long occupation of the plains. Like the wind, they moved unencumbered. Southern Alberta has hundreds of ancient buffalo jumps – like the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Head-Smashed-In near Fort MacLeod – and the extraordinary, but singular, collection of petroglyphs at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park outside Milk River.

There are also 50 surviving medicine wheels (large stone circles), including the Sundial Medicine Wheel, located on a hilltop east of Carmangay. To scientists and Aboriginals alike, the stone circles and the Milk River petroglyphs are mysteries – their purposes lost to time. Only the buffalo jumps have a function that’s understood.

Read More: http://news.nationalpost.com/life/travel/written-on-the-wind-ancient-messages-and-mysteries-survive-on-southern-albertas-plains