BIGHORN MEDICINE WHEEL, WYOMING

Perched almost 9,700 feet above sea level on Medicine Mountain in Wyoming's Bighorn Range, the Medicine Wheel is an 80-foot-diameter circular structure made from limestone boulders.

- BY MATT STIRN

Twenty-eight spokes radiate from a central cairn, and six additional cairns are positioned around the wheel's perimeter. While more than 100 similar circular stone monuments have been found throughout the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada, the Medicine Wheel is the best preserved and among the largest. Since the site was first described in 1902 by ethnologist S. C. Simms of the Field Museum, archaeologists have sought to discover when and why the wheel was built. "The Bighorn Mountains have been home to American Indian culture for over 12,000 years," says retired U.S. Forest Service archaeologist Dave McKee. Despite this long history of human connection to the Bighorn Mountains, excavations at the Medicine Wheel have suggested that it might have been constructed just a few hundred years ago. In the 1950s, researchers from the Wyoming Archaeological Society excavating inside the structure recovered pottery and European glass beads dating to the early nineteenth century. Archaeologists also found wood fragments dating to the 1760s within sever