An 855-foot stone wall sits on top of a Georgia mountain, and archaeologists still argue over who built it.
The Cherokee said it was already ancient. They blamed a people who could not see by day.
Fort Mountain rises 2,850 feet in the Blue Ridge foothills near Chatsworth, Georgia. A dry-stacked stone wall zigzags along its summit for 855 feet, with no mortar and no clear military purpose.
In 1797, naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton published an account from Georgia settler Colonel Leonard Marbury. Cherokee tradition held that when their ancestors reached these mountains, a moon-eyed people already lived there, a race said to be blind in daylight.
Geologist George Little examined the wall in 1879. Archaeologist Philip E. Smith surveyed it again in 1962 and traced it back nearly two thousand years. Who piled those stones, and why, is still not settled.
