Rock of Ages

Archeology in Rockwall

Comments (0) By Shannon Sutlief Thursday, Oct 21 1999

The skeptics among us might be tempted to dismiss an archaeological find making its premiere at Dallas' suspicious-phenomena clearinghouse The Eclectic Viewpoint; it's just too easy to think of it as the doings of the far-out, the paranoid, or the just plain crazy. But it's too hard to resist a good story, especially one that combines elements of Stonehenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark with the legend of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and his search for the Seven Cities of Gold. It's especially hard when the story involves a tale that began in North Texas in 1851 when a settler ended a dispute over the land's name when, while digging a well, he uncovered a rock wall and a series of underground rooms.

Forget Quivira -- Rockwall is really the lost city of Atlantis.

Details

October 22

7:30 p.m.

$20

On October 23, he will lead a bus tour of the excavation site, $50

(214) 706-3630.

Richardson Civic Center, North Central Expressway and Arapaho

More About

The town's name was settled -- Rockwall, of course -- but a Pandora's box was opened. Early researchers decided the wall was a natural formation created by a fault line, but it was later discovered that the Balcones Fault doesn't reach Rockwall. Now, almost 150 years after the wall's discovery, John R. Lindsey plans to release information that the wall was man-made, a conclusion that The Eclectic Viewpoint director Jim Turner breathlessly calls the "first public announcement of one of the most important archeological discoveries of the millennium."

Lindsey says his seven years of research and excavation prove the rocks in the 50-foot-deep wall were laid in a brick-like manner with windows and pictographs. He also says the 4-mile-by-7-mile wall was arranged by humans in The Golden Section, an ancient construction ratio, and composed of stone not identified by geologists. Though facts alone should be enough to stir interest, the real revelation here is the age. Lindsey believes that the layers of blue shale between the walls proves the site was built before the last Ice Age flood that covered most of Texas with what is now the Gulf of Mexico. This dates the wall at about 12,000 years old, 1,000 years older than Stonehenge.

However, the wall's history doesn't end with the flood. Lindsey named his investigation The Quivira Project, because he believes the site is actually the city of Quivira, the land Coronado spent many years searching for but never found; it had been buried thousands of years before during the flood. And how did Coronado and his contemporaries hear of this long-buried city? Well, Lindsey won't say until his premiere lecture and slide presentation. Start holding your breath.