The Mystery of New England's Many Stone Chambers
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- Опубліковано 18 лип 2021
- Sorry its been a while since my last upload, I really wanted to put my best effort into this one.
There are hundreds of stone chambers out in the woods of New England & New York. I made this video to cover a few of the theories behind their presence.
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Further Reading/References:
www.onlyinyourstate.com/conne...
www.strange-new-england.com/20...
www.strange-new-england.com/20...
www.uptonma.gov/historical-co...
www.ancientpages.com/2017/10/...
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
www.showcaves.com/english/usa...
www.milforddailynews.com/arti...
stonewings.wordpress.com/2012...
thestonetrust.org/master-clas...
www.richardcassaro.com/new-en...
northernwoodlands.org/article...
archive.boston.com/news/local/... - Розваги
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My grandfather spoke of dwarf legends, but insisted logically it was a food cache storage site. It means the world to me that you filmed inside
I like the Dwarf legend explanation best! :D
little people/ moon eyed people/ hulderfolk....
the dwarves were just not home, i would know that as i am one myself
Maybe some were ice houses.
Reminds me of the Pukwudgie legend
You really nailed the "I'm alone in the woods let's walk like a regular person"-walk
That was truly incredible
the funny part is this chamber is BARELY in the woods.
I usually hike solo listening to music and definitely do this every time I pass pepple.
My internal dialog: Dammit he knows!
Some of those might be spring houses. Spring houses are marvelous! They provided a source of fresh water, kept clean by surrounding the head of a spring with a structure. And, the shallow water in the bottom was very cool as it came out of the earth. It was a source of free refrigeration. You could put crocks of fresh food, milk, butter, meat, etc. in the water. Not deep enough for water to come over the edge. The food was kept cool.
In hot weather, the spring house was the coolest place in town! You could hang out in there and stay cool and drink fresh, cool water right from the spring!
That's what I was going to suggest was that they might be water cisterns!
Shauberger taught that by covering the spring, it will keep flowing and not dry out
We had a spring "house" on our property. That's what it looked like.
If you wanted that wouldn't you aim the door at the winter solstice's sun?
Some caves at the bottom of hills have very cold air because the air goes between the broken up rocks in the hill, and cools as it descends. If they're dry, they might be ice storage. The ice cellar at Gadsby's Tavern in Alexandria, VA is beehive shaped. If they're wet they could be spring houses. The only spring house I've seen was wooden with a concrete foundation and had a spring running through it, not out of it - but maybe it was named after caves like this that were built over springs.
It's good to see that someone hikes the same way I do!
Jog like the orcs of Isengard
As kids growing up in rural/suburban Connecticut in the 1970s, the woods were totally crosshatched with stone walls. We'd rearrange stones into a ring, dig down about a meter, make a bit of roof. We called them "rock forts" and we camped out in them. Sometimes making a fire pit adjacent.
yes, they are still there.
Still no concrete information on the stone walls that line the forests endlessly throughout the north east US. They are everywhere in plain sight, yet no one ever questions them. Most I've heard is they were created by the farmers who cleared the forests during the Great NorthEast Mass Sheep Farming Era. All the trees were cut from New Jersey to main and all the stones cleared from landscape and stacked so Sheep could graze. But that doesn't seem right with me. No record of such deforestation and stone clearing. And that much Sheep would be insane nowadays, let alone back when America was like 100,000 people😂
@@mobaj1147that farmer theory fails to answer why intact soil samples read to be 600 years old.
@@mobaj1147 I was told it was native american so we shouldn't move them. others told me it's both old farms and vanity.
We used to call the one in Thompson Connecticut the Indian tomb back in the 70s.
This video was great, a lot more in depth than some of your previous ones and the story telling aspect was on point. Keep it up man, I never get tired of these.
hey, thanks so much! Appreciate it!
Amen!
Lived in NH all my life. Never seen or heard of these. Now I have something new to look for haha
Check out America's Stonehenge in Salem NH
There is on in my home town. On top of a hill, its actually in my ild coworkers property.
I live in West Central NH, just around the base of Mt. CARDIGAN.
These are all over New England.
I have a book or two about it, one is called MANITOU.
check it out.
Check out the beehive hut in danville nh if you can find it
I think the early settlers of New England realized there was a large amount of stones in the top soil, and as they built their farms, they cleared out this land. Some of those stones were used for property walls, and others were used to make root cellars, to protect natural springs, etc.
I live in MA, and have seen many of these. They were thought to be "root cellars" (for the storage of root vegetables over the winters); the problem with this is that none of them are near any human settlements. The most impressive one is "Mystery Hill" in Salem, NH-that one has some carvings suggestive of Phoenican styles.
Not so. I used to know a really nice root cellar whereabouts in Rockport, Massachusetts
The thing is, if they were root cellars, they'd be for farmers who's farmsteads have likely long since vanished. A lot of old farms even back ~50-60 years ago are long gone now.
Could've been traps for animals. There might have been a one-way door or something.
@@ryelor123 not a chance
Yeah, Mystery Hill is more than a root cellar set up, for sure. The sound chamber thing, the rocks set up around it and the size. Not just a little cave set in the ground.
I’ve lived in New England since 1961 and have seen many root cellars and ice houses, both on historic properties and in the forest. There is a lot of evidence that the more complex chambers and stoneworks can be attributed to indigenous peoples and cultures as far back as the recession of the last glacial maximum.
Nothing indigenous about earlier migrant groups. The entire species came from Africa. To say otherwise dehumanizes other homo sapien sapiens
I grew up in Montana in the Forest Grove area, a now abandoned gold rush town. I was acquainted with a farming/ranching family of the name Lundeen, I believe the matriarch was Ida and her husband was Jim. I was privileged to be included on a tour of a sheltering rock ledge deep in a gully with a freshwater spring at the bottom. Along the ledge were many Indigenous pictographs made with natural pigments. There were also symbols which visiting archaeologists had found and (confusedly) attributed to a Scandinavian presence because the images (a series of cross-like figures that appear in succession to tumble across the space, human-like figures throwing spears at animals and other ‘humans’ with large round or oblong shields) are similar to those found at Neolithic sites in Norway etc. Just a fun story to share with you! I think you are very interesting and you made me smile. Thank you! ❤
Ah, you obviously work for the Ministry of Unusual Walks. Very good. Carry on.
That ending was so cool. You're a great storyteller, keep it up man!
Thank you!
The miniture mining light was everything! The song “High ho” started going through my mind the minute you entered that cave lol! Would LOVE to see the sunlight during a summer solstice light one of these up!
Just seeing this now, we live right near the Uxbridge one and walk to it a lot. What stands out about that one is the opening in the ceiling makes it look like a great shelter for having a small fire inside it but not so great for storing food.
Could've been used for drying lumber or stuff related to furs. They might've been like a small oven
These stone chambers live rent free in my head, I think they're so cool/mysterious, and then i think about this video and having wet socks/shoes on. That's dedication dude, this is one of my fav videos had to give it a rewatch.
2:43 is an amazing shot, also it's really clever the framing of the narration. A guy stumbling upon this in the woods and following his curiosity. Really causes buildup and climax of curiosity near the end. It's like watching someone go down a historical rabbit hole.
This took one took alot of work with the cameras, I would not want to spend more than 5 mins in that upton chamber haha too spooky big and wet.
😂 this is awesome 🤣
"Alright men! let's march ourselves hundreds of miles deep into these woods, build like 400 little hutts, and then get the hell out of here forever! HOP TO IT!"
I can't 😂
Probably for tanning hides. It smells bad and part of the process can involve smoking them. Also could've been used for smoking food. The water on the floor is probably due to soil compaction due to people walking in there all the time.
funny
As a child, one of those would be my DREAM “playhouse”. Oh man, it’s truly what I would fantasize about.
Such a cool video. Never would have thought that second person narration would work so well for an informational video.
Man keep doing what your doing! It's awesome! It got me looking into my towns history and intresting stories!
I grew up and still live in NW Connecticut. These things are all over and so fun to explore! I've had friends find old skeleton keys in the walls of these bad boys and in the front of old stone walls outside cemeteries! So much cool history to unravel.
This is actually a really well, thought out video! Nice job, it was a pleasure watching
Your video was very unique! Thought-provoking AND humorous. Well done.
This was wonderful! Thank you! As a retired teacher, this could have been used in as a lesson in writing informational text. I loved your technique.
love this video... wish i was brave enough to go in the caves 😱 thx 4 filming 💡
The similar underground chambers we have in Britain and Ireland weren't built by monks- they are mostly prehistoric. Racists have often been guilty of playing down the technical achievements of indigenous peoples. My guess would definitely be that they're a mixture of Native American structures and colonial root cellars, but that previous generations were reluctant to acknowledge that Native Americans built them.
Native North American people didn't build a lot of stone structures in the North East of the continent, as there was plenty of wood for building, but in the South and West, where there are fewer forests, it was much more common- e.g. at sites like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. Native American people in the NE would be more likely to use stone for building structures when it would have particular benefits- e.g. for underground chambers, where wood might rot and lead to a cave-in. Corbelling evolved separately in many arts of the world, and there's absolutely no reason Native American people couldn't have developed the technique.
Either that, or it was Hobbits all along.
There's racists on all sides of these issues. There isn't any clear thinking on these things. The people who think everything was ceremonial or tombs are wrong about that as well. The reality is that these caves were probably built for tanning hides or drying food. People today have no idea how difficult it was to get clothing back then. There were no factories to mass produce textiles and wooden structures were too important to be used for tasks that would render them unfit for occupation especially due to the poisonous residues organic combustion. Building a house out of trees was very difficult back then.
I can imagine that at some point hunters probably used some of them as temporary shelters if they got stuck out in bad weather or decided to overnight out there and continue hunting the next morning.
Really great and fascinating video. You did a great job of summarizing the info. I live in the PNW so I've never seen these.
Thanks so much, means a lot! Glad I could show off how cool they are!
@@DimeStoreAdventures Except - Vikings. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_colonization_of_North_America
@@audasthe vikings never made it to new england though. Only canada.
You are really nailing your videos. Love this channel.
And here I was 2 days ago wondering where you went. And now I notice that you posted 3 days ago. What am I even doing.
Nice chambers and thanks for showing me something new.
I went to college in Massachusetts and saw these on a hike. I always wondered about the long stone walls found in the woods all over New England. Thanks for doing this video.
The stone walls are a separate thing. That's from farmers plowing their fields. They had to clear the land before they could plant, so they plowed the rocks to the edge of their field and piled them there. Since the rocks had to be cleared anyway, they used them to mark the property line.
Your stride cracks me up.
Very cool, I’ve been exploring and finding similar chambers in the lower Hudson valley, also with cairns on nearby hills, also with solstice alignments.
any resources you have on finding these in hudson valley?
Putnam County is full of em. Outside of Cold Springs and Beacon.
I saw one near the AT around East Fishkill, very cool
I thubk many of the stone walls and What they did with the remains of castles:temples they destroyed
@@timmystool3349 I wish it was that exciting, it’s mostly old farmland and the walls delineated one farmers field from the next
I know of a similar 2 room chamber built behind a crevice in a large rock along the Potomac river. We used to go in there to party as teens in the 70's. It was a mess with broken glass at the time.
It was not rock lined like that, but had rectangular rooms cut into the earth.
The rumor was that it had been a stop on the Underground Railroad to hide escaping slaves heading north.
I know this is going to come as a shock to you, but the underground railroad probably had more to do with unethical human trafficking and less to do with charitable works. There's a reason why all the stories involve young girls and young women. They were clean of syphilis and thus valuable for certain services for men.
@@ryelor123 That's random but thank you for teaching me something new today. Fair to say not much has changed, eh? Just the systems and how human trafficiking goes on very much so to this day unfortunately.
Listen to what this girl says she knows because she was human traffic by the underground railroad and forced to deepthroat bj the whole way a whole new meaning to working on the railroad. @@vividvisions693
underground railroad didnt mean under the earth, it meant secretive, hidden out of plan site these were not used to hide slaves, especially this far north, they were for storage
as interesting as it was, you didnt offer any facts, also note they were for storage.
you know id really like to see a found footage film from you now. youre really good at walking into random mysterious scary places without a care in the world.
ideally, narrated in the same exact style even when the ghosts happen
You deserve way more views and subscribers. That was so engaging.
As a kid i remember finding one in the woods in weymouth, ma . Years later went back and it was gone and apartment complex were built on the spot.
Awesome video. I didn't quite get what you meant at the end when you said a strobe shined between the chamber and cairn pointed up to the Pleiades? How would a line between two points on the ground point directly up? Could you clarify that for me? Thanks!
The line wouldn't point directly up it would point toward the horizon. He didn't show us the cairns but he mentioned they were on a hill on private property and he showed us the hill. From the mouth of the chamber their outlines would form peaks and notches along the top of the hill. As the Pleiades constellation rose over the horizon, certain stars would appear to rise from those points. Keep in mind the Indians in Massachusetts regularly burned the forest undergrowth, so these types of things would have been more visible than they are now.
I have a book all about these chambers called Manitou, by James Mavor Jr and Byron Dix. The authors spent years researching and visiting several sites and took all kinds of measurements and made maps and diagrams. They found that many of the sites had a similar arrangement. Some type of chamber or observation point in a valley or on a hillside, and on a ridge or hill along the horizon a series of stone mounds or walls that roughly lined up with things like the Summer/winter solstice sunrise/sunset, or various stars and constellations. They used archaeoastronomy to estimate when the alignments would be perfect. I think at the Upton chamber they found that the Pleiades lined up with the cairns on the hill around 700-800 AD.
I just love how he was able to find a nearby chamber to do this video with.
Quickly falling in love with your channel--keep up the content!
Great video entertaining and informative I'm so glad I found it. Thank you
I’m going to start hiking like that from now on 😂 Another fantastic video!
excellent video dude. I've been watching your stuff over the last day and you've definitely earned a new sub. I wonder if the Goshen mystery tunnel is classified as one of these things? I remember that being a pretty famous one I heard about back when I lived in New England.
Wow didn't expect to stumble upon this gem
You have a unique and fun way of making extremely well researched documentaries. Do one on the Newport tower. Who made it.
mEsOpOtAmIaNs
Templar, i m o .
I could show you some things in NH that would blow your minds
show me I want to find crystals so bad legit so bad
I found one of these in Andover, NH that I always used to hang out in as a child. It was beautiful and went very very deep. Deeper than I'd like to share, and overlooked a well known pond in the area. Still go there every once in a while to unwind.
You do such a great job ! Thanks young man
Incredible story-telling art - subscribed and liked!
The ones I have been in always have water - the floor is sloshy with water. . They have a rounded construction of rocks or rocks and bricks. The spring entrance appears to be a way to keep something cool. I even wondered if they were a type of bathing house. This is a great topic and I would love to learn more about
I love the artistic sloshing at the end of the video. Bravo!
me: Upton chamber? What's Upton Chamber?
Ton Chamber: Nothing much, what's up with you?
Thank you 😂
Wicked, I haven't spotted many structures like these while out metal detecting but I'll have to keep my eyes out. Hate to fall down one I hadn't noticed!
i remember going to mineral moutnain in leverett MA with my dad when i was a kid, there's a bunch of these up there, along with a hippy community and a pretty big buddha carved into a rock face. i hope all that's still there!
It is :-) but we are struggling to protect some of the lands with lesser known structures and cairns against logging :-(
Wow, this is the first of yours I've seen, and you can bet your ass I'm staying! Very well done!
Thanks! Glad you liked it!
Hiding places, that seemed tiny were sometimes used by the underground railroad, theres also root cellars, springs, and basic storage.
Great video really captivating!👏
I definitely got chills when you described the connection between the cairns, the Upton chamber, and the Pleiades. very very cool. the Upton Chamber, and those who may have built it, reminds me of Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma. there, people from the indigenous Caddoan culture group built structures on top of burial mounds that similarly utilize light entering chambers to map out or display effects based on celestial movements. it is incredibly cool to visit on the summer solstice.
In Millbury Massachusetts there is a rock tower in Millbury center . I believe it used to be higher .so they could see the Black Stone river .
I live in Massachusetts. Thank you for going into one of those so I can finally see what’s inside. I couldn’t go in without being reminding of the game Amnesia.
I have found one of these in Ledyard and North stonington CT. Done very similar to those of course not is large is uptown’s . I have two short videos on them. Great video! 🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆
One thing we have a lot of in New England is rocks, and there were many farms that no longer exist. Witness the fieldstone walls running through the woods everywhere. There were so many rocks pulled from fields during plowing, that I’m sure people sat around thinking of creative stuff to do with them.
So very true, and more true than you perfectly described. The glaciers left millions of them in the soil, and as the fields were plowed, they were used as walls delineating property lines, foundations, and walls of homes, barns, bridges, roads, etc. They are everywhere in the NE
I think the old Yankees saying was 'waste not, want not. ' :)
Hey I live in CT and have done some work at the Gungywamp site in Groton CT. It is known for its rock/stone cellars. About 2 years ago we found stone carvings that look like Chi Rhos near the stone mounds and cellars. Which is evidence towards Irish Monks. More work is being done by Vance at the State Archeological Society to verify these claims but things were looking promising! Just found your content today and absolutely love it!
Hey Joel was there any follow up to those carvings? Super cool!
What kind of chi rho? Because Natives did commonly use a cross in a circle as a religious motif, themselves. It'd be hard to know of it's a Native motif, or not, unless I saw one. I looked it up & found mention of something similar in an article, but the pic of the carving wouldn't load in.
@@MrChristianDTthere’s almost nothing at that site that points to anything but a long used (literally thousands of years) Native American ceremonial site and one time colonial farm settlement.
I went on a small private tour 30 years ago with an archaeologist at Gungywamp. We had permission bc it is on private land. We saw the Chi Ro carved in the rock. We also saw cairns. We went in a rock cellar which had a slit window on one end. I was told at the equinox or solstice the light passing through the slit would illuminate an doorway to the right of the entrance, which was very small.
Great video
As a new englander you’ve answered questions I’ve always had
Found this video on reddit. I live in MA and have never seen any of these. I'll start looking for them!
Freaking awesome! But I’m really sorry about your lack of long rain boots of some kind.
Found one of these while hiking near the small city of corinth in upstate NY. Very large chamber after a 50ft narrow passage way that snaked back and forth. Took my metal detector with me and had no evidence of metal anywhere inside.
There is allegedly one in Mill Creek Park in northeast Ohio, but it got too locally famous & the park rangers didn't trust it, didn't want anyone getting hurt trying to explore it & didn't want some aggressive animal that could hurt guests moving into it, so they had the entrance sealed off. But, the only known stone cairns in the area are in a completely different county, in the Grand River Nature Preserve.
Native Americans used corbaling all over Mexico. The Maya arch is a corbal arch.
See Graham Hancock's Before America.
It's so fasninating to see inside of these chambers and imagine them as they were used in the past..
Ayy pretty awesome that you were in my little town! Oneco CT! I've always wondered about the chamber in the woods!
Seriously fascinating - never heard of these structures. Quality production and intriguing content ✌&🤟
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!
Always thought they might be due to New England farmers who in clearing fields often ended up with huge amounts of glacial rocks. Usually the rocks were used to make fence walls, but what if they wanted to do something more interesting or useful.
As someone who has been suffering from chronic lyme and bartonella for many years in the North East, watch out for ticks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, laying in the leaves is not advisable! Hope your Lyme is lessening. I had it back in 2016, along with Babeseios.
You've outdone yourself with this video. Excellent job, DSA!
Thanks a ton!
Any chance of a complete list of sites? I find it extremely hard to find lists of these sites. Normally they only.list the 5 major ones i.e gungywamp, american stonehenge etc
you just have to dig deep and try to find as many clues to as many as you can. even NEARA Doesn’t have a full list. but personally as someone who has looked for them myself I think it is awesome that (likely) no one person has the coordinates to all of them . especially if they are of sacred origin… which I definitely believe for at least some I have experienced.
These are so cool, I'd love to see them in person! I bet they have more than one explanation, and were built by more than one people group. Things quite often turn out that way when people try to find one catchall explanation for a lot of varying things and forget for a while that humans copy (or come up with) other humans' styles and techniques for all kinds of purposes.
And one technique found to work by one people could also be independently adopted by another. Or something built by one group can be repurposed by another.
@merrygoldberry If you Google “Gungywamp”, it’s part of a nature preserve. You can schedule a tour of the chamber sites. It’s quite easy. I did it last summer.
Found u on Reddit, northeaster here, this is seriously cool
outstanding. here for more.
How close to an alignment are they? Direct north/south, or magnetic north?
You’re the bravest man on the internet I’ve seen . There is no way for any reason or amount of money I’d go in there . ❤
SOUND Heals. GO back n' check out the Acoustics!! 🌻 ..Ireland and Scotland have many too. Documented healing sound chambers.
Free healing .. Can't have that?!!
Light from solstice adds ✨️
Um...the aboriginal peoples who lived in the area could easily have built them. There weren't just pre-Columbian Europeans. There were pre-Columbian indigenous tribes. These sites could easily have been picked clean of artifacts over the centuries.
What is the orientation of these entrances? Is it the same for all,/most? What are they near, any common traits? Are there stone walls near them, carns? What are their orientation?
This was really cool!thank you
I was shown one of these, along a dirt road in central western Massachusetts. It was built into the side of a hill; the floor was about 3 feet below the entrance, and was of dry hard packed earth. The chamber was a beehive shape, neatly lined with stones which arched over to form the roof, and just high enough to stand upright. None of the locals had any idea how old it was, or for what purpose it was made.
Of the similar things I have encountered I can list root cellar, spring houses, temporary corpse storage(to await spring thaws) what ever the name for such things would be, livestock stableage, and one that may have previously been something else but had in the mid 1800s was used to store summers farming implements.
Great video I live in Vermont and I'm very interested in visiting these places.
What an interesting video. Well done! Hard to believe that they could have been created 600 years ago and align with the summer solstice and light the chamber and water.
I find it sad that most of the theories couldn't fathom the obvious that this is probably native american, as if they somehow couldn't pile stones.
I believe that they probably at least had a basic understanding of stacking stones. They were somewhat intelligent.
Probably because native Americans have never been observed doing these types of things...
American Indians were nomadic people. Why would they build a stone structure in the ground?... Wrong.
American Indians were not nomadic in the northeast. Most that we know of native Americans comes from an effort during the 1800s of natives in the Midwest, far after native Americans in this area were mostly wiped out. The US government even moved other native groups from the south to this region, so the nomadic lifestyle portrayed in movies is mostly based on documenting displaced and homeless peoples. Even when the original settlers from England and Netherlands settled in the northeast, the natives had been going through 50+ years of disease/pandemics, so the pilgrims basically landed in a post apocalyptic society.
Basically no one ever documented the natives that lived in this area in the height of their society.
They were nomadic after people/entities kicked them out of their homes and lands.
Great video! I come across random things in the woods too. There’s a “cave” near the Fall River Freetown State Forest, at least, I thought it was a cave. I’ll have to go back and see if it’s one of these underground….things. Also, very brave of you to walk in the water with just sneakers!
We have them here in Northern Massachusetts as well. i was always told they were for water or, like you said, root cellar.
I was born and raised about a mile from the Upton cave. I knew there was one in town but I didn't know where until I was older. It was actually located on private property originally and when the owners passed away they donated it it is now called heritage Park if I remember
great video thanks
There is really impressive one of these in Oakdale CT (montville) near where I grew up. It has about a 6 foot ceiling and goes back about 25 feet from front to back. The doorway is a good 4-5 foot wide. There's a big flat stone over the entrance and a circle of stones for a fire pit right in front of the entrance. theres a little hole in the ceiling between that entrance stone and the rest of the chamber probably for light to come in and or to help smoke exhaust when it blows in. There are some walking paths back there hopefully still pretty well kept up. It's about a twenty minute hike from the nearby streets.
Amazing video
gungywamp in groton connecticut is another example, especially with the whole equinox thing.
There is also a stone chamber near the Bruce Freedman rail trail in Acton, MA.
As someone who has Native and Irish ancestry, I've always heard of stories of what sounded like Irish people in the North East a long time ago, and stories of what sounded like Irish people sailing possibly into Eastern Canada/ Northeast US. Idk. I think its plausible and needs to be investigated
The Upton chamber looks like many Irish domed burial chambers, the most famous of which is Newgrange, built 5,200 years ago (3,200 B.C.) which makes it older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza. The 19m passage (62ft) leads into a chamber with 3 alcoves. The passage and chamber are aligned with the rising sun on the mornings around the Winter Solstice. Like the Upton chamber, Newgrange's chamber is filled with light but on the Winter Solstice.
I thought the same thing! Very similar.
I think they were for tanning hides. That would be an essential 'industry' of people many hundreds of years ago and a large chamber that can be heated and smoke the hides could be useful. Due to the survivor bias, we only see the stone ones and not the wooden ones.
There are mysterious stone lines chambers & circles in Groton, CT on Gungywamp rd. I saw them years ago very mysterious. Would love to see a real folklorist do a dive into their story👍