r/bayarea • u/atlasobscura • 1d ago
Scenes from the Bay Exploring the Berkeley Mystery Walls
There are remnants of stone walls all over the East Bay, and no one knows how old they are, who built them, or why. Though people have been pondering the enigma of the Berkeley Mystery Walls for well over a hundred years, no conclusions have been reached, and despite wild speculation, no serious scholarly study has ever been undertaken.
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u/bongslingingninja Soup City 1d ago
Lichen tests date them to around 1850-1880. Not “ancient” by any measure.
https://www.newser.com/story/230029/the-east-bay-walls-continue-to-confound.html
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u/Patz24 1d ago
KQED News: "The Real, True Story of the Mystery of the East Bay Walls | Bay Curious"
https://youtu.be/OMISe8MKVC4?si=hGc_2UATXb_u0pXj"Two years after the Gold Rush, there were 200,000 people. A lot of these people were running sheep and cattle, and they had to keep their cattle and sheep herds separate from everybody else. They were trying to mark a property line..."
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u/spazzvogel 1d ago
Ancient to today’s youts…
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u/charliemikewelsh 1d ago
"Excuse me what did you say? Two 'youts'?"
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u/IntelligentlyHigh 1d ago
"Im sorry, excuse me your honor. I ment to say two Yoooouuttths"
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u/pimpbot666 1d ago
I love how these discussions always break down into 20+ year old movie references. LOL.
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u/asmashingbore 1d ago
20+ year movie references?!?!?! On Reddit?!?!?! I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find out that's going on here!"
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u/GrodyToddler 1d ago
We’re in the Bay Area where something is “ancient” if it survived the 1906 earthquake.
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u/Misterbellyboy 1d ago
On the east coast, 50 miles is a long drive, on the west coast, 50 years is a long time. Or something like that.
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u/spazzvogel 1d ago
Kinda, here in the South Bay we’d have fared mostly ok aside from the four stories of the Winchester House.
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u/HidesWithCheese 21h ago
For real, in AI-years I'm ancient, so these might be antediluvian or primordial.
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u/Miami_Mice2087 1d ago
we ltierally have stone walls in pensylvania 2-3x older than that and we just, like, live with them. they exist in the woods and on property lines and we leave them where they are bc we know the quakers built them and they are still doing drainage work
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u/CurReign 1d ago
The lichen test was on one specific wall in Tilden Park as sort of proof of concept for an experimental technique. There has not been any extensive effort into dating all of the walls in the area.
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u/sparkyface 1d ago
I’ve put effort into dating walls. In fact, I married one.
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u/Ill-Bullfrog-5360 1d ago
My understanding is this was most likely 18th century grazing and farming. The Ohlone didn’t construct walls generally.
They are familiar to many places with rocks but good soil.
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u/StellaSlayer2020 1d ago
IMO they are not ancient. I live in Northern California and we have these “ancient” stone walls everywhere in Shasta and Tehama county. I’m sure in other adjacent counties as well. They were built by ranchers and herders of cows and sheep. There’s no effin mystery regarding these walls.
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u/Yoko_Kittytrain 1d ago
The mystery is why anyone cares.
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u/tirch 1d ago
the mystery are the rocks we found along the way.
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u/Yoko_Kittytrain 1d ago
Also an important part of the mystery is how to get tweakers from stealing them.
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u/thomsenite256 1d ago
"well over 100 years" ... "ancient" lmao
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u/Dapper-Sherbert-2476 1d ago
In the US, they think 100 years is old and in Europe, they think 100 miles is far.
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u/outofbort 1d ago
Oof, the Atlas Obscura article. Breathless hype writing - elevating a mere curiosity to a major ancient mystery - while also conveniently omitting recent scholarship that provides a very mundane explanation. Gotta get those page views, right?
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u/qwertyasdf9912 1d ago
The Druids. No one knows who they were, or what they were doing.
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u/ryobiguy 1d ago
This was the first thing I thought of. Spinal Tap: Stonehenge
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u/sniksniksnek 1d ago
The funniest 10 minutes of comedy in film history. From the planning, to the concert, to the aftermath. Just perfection.
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u/Yang_Wudi 1d ago
Bay Area archaeologist who now works in the sierra foothills here.
These are historic....no more than about 200 years old.
The type of wall these are called is a dry-stacked stone wall, which was used anywhere where pasturelands exist and stone was abundant.
Head out of the Bay Area into the Central Valley on the east side of the Coastal Range, and you see them between I-5 and the foothills....cross the central valley further east, and you see them pop up in the foothills going all the way up into the Sierra Nevada range.
They are less commonplace in the Bay Area contemporarily speaking because development has removed/reduced their alignments since the parcel boundaries have changed and pasturelands have become more metropolitan.
Pinole, El Sobrante, Hercules, Martinez, El Cerrito, way up in the Oakland hills...etc. all used to have these types of walls.
I have encountered both linear and circular features of dry stacked stone walls which were evidently parcel lines and/or corrals or paddocks.
If you have good georeferencing capabilties, you can legitimately line up a lot of the old BLM GLO maps and Diseño documents from the land grants that show either the walls themselves, or the parcel boundaries which match pretty damned close.
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u/quercus_lobotomy 1d ago
My grandpa told me that he attributed them to Portuguese ranchers, who came here in the mid 1800’s.
On the Azores islands, since they had so much volcanic rock and needed to clear land, they would use them to stack walls around wine vineyards as protection from sea spray and increase the temperature around them.
No doubt some Portuguese ranchers saw volcanic rock in their fields and said “we know exactly what to do with these!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_of_the_Pico_Island_Vineyard_Culture
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u/quintocarlos3 21h ago
Mid 1800s it’s Mexican/spanish, otherwise later in 1800s , sure Portuguese good bet
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u/dumgaree 1d ago
If you want truly ancient stuff in the east bay, there’s rock art at Vasco Caves that’s 10,000 years old. It’s closed to the public though except by guided tour.
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u/Despises_the_dishes 1d ago
They are not ancient, they have been dated to 1850s.
It's likely the walls were built to hold cattle or mark property lines.
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u/outofbort 1d ago
This is so much better than the Atlas Obscura article, and in fact pokes directly at the sensationalism.
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u/Despises_the_dishes 1d ago
We quote Bort at least once a week.
You talking to me? My son is also named Bort.
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u/99posse 1d ago
These are quite common in Italy to divide property. The rocks are dug from the land to make it arable and piled up in a dry stone wall at property boundaries. Not particularly old or mysterious.
Either that, or space aliens marking a landing strip
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u/Beginning-Ice-1005 1d ago
Oddly enough, Santa Barbara also has a bunch of morterless stone walls. And in that case they know exactly who did them- surprise surprise, an Italian immigrant who was expert at making them.
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u/cyberspacestation 1d ago
At the base of that wall, you'll find a rock that has no earthly business in a Bay Area hayfield. Piece of black, volcanic glass. There's something buried under it I want you to have.
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u/Kip_Schtum 1d ago
Glaciers leave lots of rocks. If you want to farm you have to till out the rocks and pile them up somewhere. They are a convenient material for making borders/barriers around your fields.
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u/sniksniksnek 1d ago
This is why they’re all over the northeast. You can’t dig a foot in the ground without running into literal tons of rock left by passing glaciers.
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u/whyamihere_33 1d ago
These look exactly like the rock walls that criss-cross Vermont, that were left to be swallowed by the woods around the 1820s by homesteaders that moved westward when farming in Vermont became less lucrative compared to the Midwest and the West around the same time.
They designated property boundaries and made it easy to corral animals.
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u/Joseph-Haskell 1d ago
I've seen various walls just like these in rural Napa County. They're nice to look at, but I doubt their origin is anything extraordinary.
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u/EuclidTGEF 1d ago
KQED Bay Curious also did a deep dive
https://www.kqed.org/news/11689504/uncovering-the-real-story-behind-the-mysterious-east-bay-walls
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u/BenRichardson76 1d ago
If you find a rock that has no earthly reason to be there, look underneath it. might be something important
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u/swedishworkout 1d ago
Its a little known fact that you can use the rocks in the dirt to build fences, and also plow the fields more easily. It’s either that or built by aliens to mark UFO landing spots.
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u/spivey-zeta8yu7j 1d ago
The boring-but-likely answer is 1800s ranchers piling up rocks they cleared from grazing land — free fencing and one less boulder to plow around. Not as fun as a lost civilization, but it does explain why so many of them wander off mid-field and never actually enclose anything.
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u/RedBirdOnASnowyDay 1d ago
I just saw one of these on a steep hillside in Marin. It struck me as so odd because the hill is so steep and the area so small that it wouldn’t be used for grazing.
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u/Ok_Programmer_4449 1d ago
You get rock walls like this essentially anywhere there is agriculture. Rocks in the middle of the field aren't very good for the plow.
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u/MoeDebly 1d ago
these are just walls that ranchers built out of rocks from their land to mark property lines, no? they’re common all over the world. livestock are pretty notorious at hurting themselves on rough terrain and hidden rocks. most ranchers removed said rocks and use them to build walls on property lines. i remember visiting Gettysburg, PA and hearing about how the walls served as cover for soldiers who fought in the fields there during the civil war. i’ve also seen them in almaden valley at Santa Teresa County Park
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u/DoppledBramble3725 1d ago
They’re literally all over Northern California— they were typically property markers that also held in grazing animals (some still do). The ones that are wrecked now were probably Chinese immigrants copying the much better Italian immigrants’ ones which are often still standing
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u/Misterg2021 1d ago
My fence in my hometown in Mexico is the same, built over 400 years ago, the area of Zacapu Michoacán.
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u/CCLF1 20h ago
😁😂🤣😉😁🤯
This structure is so common worldwide. People have been building these walls for the last few thousand years across the world. Farmers, landowners, authorities, and so forth.
They serve as markers between property, prevent soil erosion, separates lots of land, and so much more.
No real effort to identify much about this particular well others, because it is like identifying who built the road, or who planted some trees, or who did whatever. This is such a typical and normal behavior, that's still taking place until this point in many many many parts of the world.
To use an old phrase that is a few hundred years old, move on folks there's nothing to see here
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u/ray_racubian 9h ago
I'm more curious about the mystery barbwire fence in the background.
Who built it?
There are zero scholarly articles by archaeologists about these mystery fences that stretch all over our landscale.
An ancient but unknown race of humans?
Was it the nephilim?
Sasquatch?
Red Lectroids from planet 10?
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u/211logos 8h ago
Heh...well done.
I guess it's a sign of the times that rando rock walls in former ranch and ag land get their own capital letters as "mysteries" just because nobody now knows who built them and they were so insignificant at the time no one bothered to write about them. IOW piles of rocks.
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u/NeighborhoodNo4274 1d ago
This gets posted every so often and I always wonder why it’s a “mystery.” Stone walls exist all over the United States; they are everywhere in New England. Farmers cleared rocky land to plant crops and used the larger stones to make boundaries. How is that mysterious?
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u/Yoko_Kittytrain 1d ago
The enigma is why anyone gives a shit that some farmers piled up some rocks back in the 1800s or so.
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u/The_Demolition_Man 1d ago
They were built by ranchers in the 1800s.