Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne today announced the designation of a dozen new National Historic Landmarks in recognition of their importance in interpreting the heritage and history of the United States. The landmarks are located in Massachusetts, Ohio, California, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, South Carolina, Missouri, Illinois and Hawaii.

The sites include buildings that mark the evolving architectural style of Frank Lloyd Wright; a quintessential country estate of the Gilded Age; the home of Roswell Field, the legal counsel for Dred Scott in one of the most significant Supreme Court cases in U.S. history; a residence reflecting Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables; and an American Garden City model of an ideal planned community.

including among other things, several FLWs and this :

Fig Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, contains the most complex of the 53 known shell ring archaeological sites on the U.S. southeast coast built by various Archaic coastal cultural groups between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. The property consists of three major rings of shell and three lesser rings attached to the largest ring. The rings are circular walls of shell that define central plazas, which served as places for public interaction, such as feasting and ceremony. The shellfish consumed during feasting events provided most of the building material for the ring walls. Archaic shell rings are unique in precontact history due to their distinctive architectural forms constructed from the purposeful mounding of shell. The property is among the best sites with preserved early large-scale monumental architecture in the United States during this period. It also is significant for its potential to yield nationally significant information about migration, colonization, and technological innovations and adaptations linked to the earliest sedentary settlements over a period of 2,000 years of precontact history.

thanks for this very interesting.....did some googling and saw a bunch of photo's.....good to know
- Skinny 4-06-2007 5:49 am [add a comment]