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We have found new evidence that links the Tower to pre-colonial builders! Click here to see our preliminary findings...
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Welcome to the Chronognostic Research FoundationDo you like mysteries? If you’re like us, you do, but you like solutions even more. When you read a mystery novel by John Le Carré, Sue Grafton or Tony Hillerman, you want to find out by the end of the story who committed the murder and why.The mystery novel is fairly straightforward, because it is fiction. The author controls the material, planting clues, creating the story’s twists and turns, and finally providing the solution to the crime. But history’s mysteries are different. We in the present have no control over events that happened in the past, and we often don’t know why things happened, or who caused them. If we’re asking questions about the recent past (the 1930s, for example), we can examine a wealth of materials for clues: newspapers, magazines, government records, church-related documents, genealogies, wills, private diaries, photos and other film records, even radio broadcasts. And we can interview people still living, who were alive in the 1930s and can tell us what they saw, heard, read, and experienced. But the further back in time we travel, the fewer and more puzzling become the clues - if they exist at all. No one is alive who can tell us, for instance, who exactly made the great art that adorns the walls of the caves at Lascaux, France. And, since the human species didn’t even exist 65 million years ago, no one can ever tell us from personal experience what the great dinosaurs looked like or how they lived in their landscapes. When the Chronognostic Research Foundation was established in 2004, we modern humans had some advantages earlier researchers never had. Technological advances and refinements have given us researchers in the present some awesome tools to use in our historical detective work. C-14 dating techniques allow us to assign quite accurate dates to organic artifacts such as bone and pottery. Dendrochronology provides analysis of tree rings to help date wooden objects such as house beams and ship timbers. Diving equipment and remotely-operated vehicles allow us to plumb the depths of the seas in search of old shipwrecks and new deep-sea ecosystems. And geophysical techniques such as ground-penetrating radar let us peer beneath the earth’s surface before we even lift a shovelful of soil, so that we know where to dig before we start. Now consider the Internet. It not only allows you read this page but lets many of us travel the world in the comfort of our desk chairs, to view high, round towers in Ireland, cathedrals in France, windmills in Portugal, ancient manuscripts in Turkey, lighthouses on the shores of the South China Sea. A remarkable tool indeed! With these tools at its disposal, the Chronognostic Research Foundation is tackling its first historical mystery: Who built the stone tower in Touro Park, Newport, Rhode Island? With the gracious permission of the Newport City Council, from October 15 to November 15 we’ll conduct an archaeological excavation of sites we found in the park during our geophysical studies of the past three years: possible building foundations and a rocky area near the Tower. The Tower itself, though completely visible and beautiful, is mute; we can only hope that its neighbors underground will be more talkative and tell us their tales from the past, and the tale of the Tower. On these pages we’ll provide you with the paper trails we’ve followed through libraries and historical societies: archaeological reports and scientific conference papers, old Danish poems and even older Icelandic sagas, 17th-century wills and marginal notes. You’ll see maps and charts. You can browse through photos of towers, houses, churches, industrial sites, windmills, and lighthouses, and we’ll give you some choices of wallpaper for your computer screen. There will be references aplenty, and web links to the many good people out there in cyberspace who furnished us with information. Finally, when excavation begins in Touro Park, we’ll provide daily updates of the work in progress, in text, still photos, and video. The Chronognostic Research Foundation begins its first project with no agenda, only the historical questions: Who built the Newport Tower? When was it built, and for what purpose? We won’t know until we dig. Won’t you join us?
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