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A 26,000-year monument hidden at Hoover Dam

Ellsworth Toohey
Jan 21, 2026
∙ Paid

Gary Blakeley/shutterstock.com

Monument Plaza at Hoover Dam features something most visitors walk right over without noticing: a terrazzo floor designed as a celestial map marking the dam’s 1936 completion using Earth’s axial precession — a 25,772-year cycle, Long Now reports.

Artist Oskar J. W. Hansen encoded the exact date by showing which star served a…

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