This Israelite Tabernacle site was a pre-Judean pre-Christian Pre-Hindu and pre-Islamic place of Hebrew worship circa 6th Cen.BCE. The mountain stands testifying to the sustained presence of a large group of co-operative cultures being Hebrew-Phoenician-Greek & Iberian seafarers which ascended the Rio Grande and upon seeing the mountain chains closing in Northward as the river widens onto the plain (where Belen Los Lunas and Albuquerque sits today) they followed the Rio Puerco tributary up to parking their ships at a cataracting (today called the 'Arroyo Garcia') below a defensible position, establishing an agricultural colony with a pottery making village 5 miles back downriver on the plain extending SE (which then subsequently was used as burial chambers by Native Americans, sometime from 1350 to 1780, known for their painted layers of Kiva Art).
It is evident that they were here long enough to build up a store of provisions, while having extensive communicative interaction with an indigenous people resulting in hundreds of petroglyphs on the lower 1/3rd of the fortified mountain and surrounding the butte (one of them an as yet unknown foreign word sounded into Greek is found written beside its drawing!), apparently they co-existed for some time. Whether any mining or smelting was done by them is as yet unestablished, and if made may find a connection to the mineral rich area as their prime motivation.
The Tabernacle proper for convening or congregating and as a "clean place" (for food preparation) was set amid the shoulders of the mesas slightly concave flat top on its most level area, being an open-end rectangle of deeply inset flat rocks doubled up in parallel and outlining it in a double perimeter.
The inside long axis to the South aligns with a hole bored at the highest point of the hill near the Altar for grounding a staff casting its shadow mid-day on the winter solstice (7th of the 8 points in an ancient Celtic solar year). Thereon viewing the Moon along its Western perimeter aligns the open end 2 posts to the 5 degrees N&S variation of the Metonic cycle determining the 19 year repetition of eclipses in the Hebrews Luni-Solar Calendar.
There are a dozen or so 'garrison' guard posts in ruins (considered 'pit houses') that line the plateaus outer edges at strategic lookouts and similar larger enclosures within them (for food storage), connected by pathways that make for interesting overall symmetry. The Altar inscription is perpendicular to the course of the River aligning with the Equinox sunrise which then reflecting intensely Illuminates the Altar with an arrangement of massive boulders beneath apparently for sundrying meat.
Another set of Solar alignments observed yearly can be found at a Phoenician Latitude Demarcation of three long stones with a small pillar within a circle of rocks inset between the Tabernacle and the extreme North end opposite the Altar (that's up and to the Right upon entry onto the plateau).
There is located a Zodiac star table which shows the Sun and Moon (in eclipse) and 5 visible Planets in an alignment that forms the ancient Hebrew "YaH" icon! This is the name of the LORD as usually it was written by the Hebrews, considered a conjunctive of the first Yud (Ye) and final Hey (aH) letters, according to this it is abbreviating the intoned 7 vowels (or aspirations) being the wandering "stars" among the Alphabet letters drawn of the fixed stars of the Zodiac being the consonants. Our Weekdays still preserve this idea as SUNday MONday (like MONth "a Moon")... through SATURday. These being sounded in order of magnitude as the successive vowel sounds from highest to lowest, are an arpeggio scaling the 7 tones as "i, e, u, o, uh, ah, uh-ah".
Many of the petroglyphs seen here have their identification with ones found in the Northern Sinai peninsula Southern Negev and along the Dead Sea rift, one such nearby that- shows a Priest bending toward the 'Covenant tables' glyph and pointing toward the actual "Decalogue" stone!
This 80 ton Andesite Basalt boulder at the lower Left of the Gateway 1/3 up the path, has in its prepped surface the oldest copy of the Decalogue known to exist, written in a Paleo-Hebrew similar to that of Tel Dan (9th Cen BCE) but not even that fancy! "Old Aramaic script" letters from 850 BCE might be a safer ultra conservative view but it's OLD, the writing can in no way be construed as "recent" for it's particulars were only 'recently' discovered and one letter still is yet to be found anywhere else!
Remember that it was only after the Paleo Dead sea Scrolls were publicized that this was generally able to be translated, and those early scrolls and fragments first designated "CD" were first thought to be "Coded Documents"!
Its carefully chiseled inscription is an abridgment of the Exodus text recited from memory (!) with one diacritical error (^), one misspelled word by one letter (K for Q), and two with an added vowel (A and E). Otherwise an amazingly concise labor of love, as it's very hard to write with a chisel in stone like that!
4 letters along the Right edge are broken off its original 216, and though re-located (upon the mantelpiece of a local who hails their seeming '3 signs' as "Alien writings") it hasn't been as yet recovered and so remains 'missing' (this may yet prove beneficial for further date verification of it by microscopic tool residue). Two others of this scribes writings known to have been here before were removed by would be scholarship, and also have not yet been pursued for retrieval.
The worst news is what I first noticed on arrival at this 'most significant mountain of the Americas': The first line of 6 words identifying the covenant giver as "I-am YeHUaH your-God Which Brought-out You From-a-House" has been effaced with a pick-axe! Only one word (the 5th of that top line 'brought-out') has been almost eradicated, that was more than enough to bring on this response!
Going on 2 years later we're only 15 miles away having sight of it from behind our homebase of operations, and have made countless surface assessments there (the area between this and the Pottery Mound pends this seasons activity). Thus far the mountains environs have come to be well documented, and more pages of that are shortly to be brought up here, as we've since found several additional features previously overlooked as not obviously apparent, being paths and encampments, even a few unexplored caves! Add to that the best images depicting the agricultural furrows radiating out from the Cataract at the confluence of the River and now long extended Arroyo -these being photos from the very first photo-shoot still as yet not posted here (as being so remote our slow dial-up connection also frequently knocked off-line cannot upload them)!
As concerns "Pottery Mound"