Serpent Mound
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The Great Serpent Mound is a 1,330-foot-long, three-foot-high prehistoric effigy mound located on a plateau of the Serpent Mound crater along Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio. Including all three parts, it extends about 1,370 feet, and varies in height from less than a foot to more than three feet. Conforming to the curve of the property on which it rests with its head approaching near a cliff point, the serpent winds back and forth for more than seven hundred feet and ends with a triple coiled tail. The neck is stretched out off a gentle curve from the seventh coil from the tail, ending with open jaws around the east end of a lengthwise one hundred twenty+ foot hollow oval feature, thought variously to be an egg, the sun, the body of a frog, or merely the remnant of a platform serving to support something. The effigy's extreme western feature is a triangular mound approximately 31.6 feet at its base and long axis. It is the largest effigy earthwork in the world.
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[edit] Origin of the Serpent Mound
The dating of the design, the actual construction, as well as the identity of the builders of the serpent effigy are three questions still debated in the disciplines of social science including ethnology,archeology, and anthropology, with some special interest conveyed today from concerned Native People. Several attributions born of educated opinions have been entered by academic, philosophic, and Native American concerns regarding all three of these unknown factors of when designed, when built, and by whom. These traditionally include the Adena culture, the Hopewell culture and the Fort Ancient culture. However, there is also the possibility of another group of people mentioned originally by missionary John Heckewelder in the 18th century transmitted to him from the Lenni Lenape (later Delaware). This group is remembered in Lenape and Iroquois legend as the Allegheny or Allegewi People,sometimes Tallegewi, and lived in the Ohio Valley in a remotely ancient period, believed pre-Adena, i.e. Archaic or pre-Woodland (before 1200 B.C.E. approximately). Because Native American legend has not been considered reliable by many academics over the last 200 years, the possible influence of an Allegheny nation has never become part of the Serpent Mound literature.
The most current attribution is to the so-named Fort Ancient culture, an Ohio Valley-based mound-building society influenced by the contemporaneous Mississippian society based further south. The Fort Ancient society has been given their title because this later Woodland group inhabited the abandoned ramparts of the very large notched earthworks in Warren County, Ohio commonly called "Fort Ancient." Confusingly, this earthwork is actually the creation of the very early Hopewell culture who built it at least 1000 years prior to the arrival of the so-named Fort Ancient culture. This kind of confusion in terminology stems from Ohio Valley archeological interests being unable to determine, through convention, a standarized language for the academic and public forum.
The Fort Ancient society also built large effigy mounds in the upper Midwest (such as Wisconsin), in the shape of birds and other creatures. However, the fact of burials found in the immediate vicinity of the serpent effigy dating to the ancient Adena society considerably more than 1000 years prior to the Fort Ancient people has left room for much continuing debate.
[edit] The Adena culture
- See also: Adena culture
Historically, the mound has been attributed to the Adena Indians (800 BC-AD 100). William Webb, noted Adena exponent working out of Lexington, found evidence for Kentucky Adena through carbon dating as early as 1200 B.C.E. By inference, this places the date of the Adena graves around Serpent Mound back in time several centuries. Since the many nearby mounds can be assuredly attributed to the Adena culture, the current explanation for age (see below) put forth by the Ohio Historical Society's archeological branch serves more to frame the Serpent Mound as an inscrutable artifact surrounded by differing chronological theories than owning a clearly defined date of origin. The Adena are also renowned for their elaborate earthworks. Unfortunately, an unrecorded number of their gravesites were destroyed before any organized archeological supervision performed correct analysis of their contents. The last of the great exponents of Adena archeology was Don Dragoo of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, whose work was not concerned with Serpent Mound.
In keeping with the chronological inscrutibility the earthwork, recent carbon dating studies place the serpent mound outside of the span of the Adenas. Artifact evidence has been a trait of most other Adena mounds, but with no cultural artifacts found within the mound to date, alternative methodologies emphasizing other possible factors for dating have come to the foreground. From this angle of vision, the mound is either not of Adena origin, or it held a special significance for the Adena or another group before them or after them above the more common burial mounds.
[edit] The Fort Ancient culture
- See also: Fort Ancient
A few pieces of wood charcoal were found in a believed undisturbed portion of the Serpent Mound. The team of Robert V. Fletcher and Terry L. Cameron (under the supervision of the Ohio Historical Society's Bradley T. Lepper with special assistance from Dee Anne Wymer and William Pickard) reopened a trench created by Frederick Putnam of Harvard over 100 years before. The discovery of carbon not in association with artifacts encourages the notion that the Serpent Mound is itself an artifact. However, bioturbation,including burrowing animals, frost cracks, etc., can actually reverse the structural timeline of an earthen mound such as Serpent Mound, shifting carbon left from a later culture on the surface deep into the structure, making the earthwork appear younger. Native folk believed the spirits of the dead came back in the form of those burrowing animals like groundhogs, continually inhabiting the burial mounds. When carbon dating experiments were undertaken on these artifacts, two yielded a date of ca. 1070 AD (C.E.), with the third piece dating to the Late Archaic period some two thousand years before, specifically 2920+/-65 years B.P (before the present). The third date, ca 2900 B.P. was recovered from a core sample well below the prepared surface on which tbe mound was originally constructed. The first two dates place the Serpent Mound within the realm of the Fort Ancient People, a Mississippian culture, but the third back to very early Adena or before. [1]
The Fort Ancient Indians could have been the erectors of the Serpent Mound, or perhaps engaged their efforts in refurbishing the earthwork for their own use much in the same way as people today fix up old houses to be used again like new. A significant symbol in the Mississippian culture is the rattlesnake, which could explain the design of the mound; but as Harvard's Frederick Putnam, first archeologist at the site stipulated, the Serpent cult dates farther back into world history, figuring prominently in prehistoric Mexico, among other places.
To make this point more cogent, this mound, if built by the Fort Ancient Indians, is uncharacteristic for that group. This culture also buried many artifacts in their mounds, something of which the Serpent Mound is, as noted above, devoid. Also, the Fort Ancient Indians did not usually bury their dead in the manner which remains were found in proximity to the effigy.
[edit] Purpose of the Serpent Mound
The Serpent mound is the largest effigy mound in the world. While there are several burial mounds around the Serpent mound site, the Serpent itself does not contain any human remains and wasn't constructed for burial purposes. The Cherokee relate the legend of the Uktena, a large serpent with supernatural appearance and power. The question raised regarding such Indian legend asks whether the ancient native people actually created very large totemic shrines based upon platforms made of earth and stone. Subsequent changes in the form of inheriting cultures or war could conceiveably have deconstructed such a marvelous effigy, leaving merely its platform.
[edit] Astronomical significance
The oval-to-head area of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset and the snake’s coils align with the winter solstice sunrise, the autumnal and spring equinox sunrises, and the summer solstice sunrise. It is thought that perhaps the mound was created as a response to astronomical occurrences. Moreover, William F. Romain, a northern Ohio resident and lettered archeologist also discovered a remarkable array of lunar alignments using the same coils, but indicating a facility of the designer with the considerably longer lunar cycle. A link to this image and others is noted below.
The carbon dating attribution of 1070 coincides with two significant astronomic events: The appearance of Halley's Comet in 1066 and the light from the supernova that created Crab Nebula in 1054. This light was visible for two weeks after it first reached earth, even during the day. There is speculation that the serpent mound was to emulate a comet, slithering across the night sky like a snake. However, it must be noted that Halley's Comet's tail has always appeared as a long, straight line, and in no way resembles the convolutions of a serpent.
However, the Great Serpent Mound also may have been carefully designed in accord with the placement of many stars composing a large asterism of the familiar constellation Draconis (Draco), rendering the theory of either Halley's Comet or the light of the supernova unconvincing. The star pattern of this asterism of Draconis fitting with remarkable precision to the Serpent Mound map is demonstrated in such a manner as to date the design of the serpent to a considerably earlier time,i.e. the highest position of the ancient north star, Draconis-alpha (Thuban). This chronology is formulated through observing the law of precession and the position of the pole star Thuban (which preceded the present pole star Polaris) placed at the geometrical center of the star layout underscoring the serpent form, viz. beneath the seventh coil from the spiral tailing. An image of this and other astronomical information regarding the Great Serpent Mound is available through this link: [[1]]
[edit] Placement
The mound is located on a plateau with a unique cryptoexplosion structure that contains faulted and folded bedrock, which is usually either produced by a meteorite or a volcanic explosion. This is one of the few places in North America where such an occurrence is seen. Though the meaning is grounds for debate, the mound's placement on such an area is almost undoubtedly not by coincidence. Glotzhober & Lepper summarize the dispute in their work: [2]
- Determining exactly what formed the Serpent Mound Cryptoexplosion Structure is a problem that geologists continue to debate. Two main solutions have been offered. Some geologists think the structure is a meteorite or asteroid crater. Others suggest that the structure was caused by forces from inside the earth, probably an explosive eruption of gases derived from a deep magma source in the basement rocks.
Geologists from the Ohio Division of Natural Resources Division of Geological Survey and from the University of Glasgow (Scotland) concluded in 2003 that a meteorite strike was responsible for the formation after studying core samples collected at the site in the 1970s. Further analyses of the rock core samples recovered at the site indicated the meteorite impact occurred during the Permian Period, about 248 to 286 million years ago. [3]
[edit] Recent History of the Serpent Mound
The Serpent Mound was first discovered by two Chillicothe men, Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis. During a routine surveying expedition, Squier and Davis discovered the unusual mound in 1846. They took particularly careful note of the area. When they published their book, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, in 1848, they included a detailed description and a map of the serpent mound.
[edit] Preservation of the Serpent Mound
Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley fascinated many across the country, including Frederick Ward Putnam of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Putnam would spend a considerable amount of his career lecturing and publishing on the Ohio mounds, specifically the Serpent Mound, but when he visited the Midwest in 1885, he found that many of them were quickly being destroyed by plowing and development. In 1886, with help from a group of women in Boston, Putnam raised funds to purchase 60 acres at the Serpent Mound site, which also contained three conical mounds, a village site and a burial place. Originally purchased on behalf of the Trustees of the Peabody Museum, the ownership of the property was granted in 1900 to the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society (a predecessor of the present Ohio Historical Society), and it became the United States' first State park. For his contribution of scientific methods and direction to many of the nascent field's best students, Putnam is widely known as the "Father of American Archaeology."[4]
[edit] Excavation of the Serpent Mound
After raising sufficient funds, Putnam returned to the site in 1886. He worked for three years excavating the contents and burial sequences of both the Serpent Mound and two nearby conical mounds. After his work was completed and his findings documented, Putnam worked on restoring the mounds to their original state.
[edit] The Ohio Historical Society
In 1901 the Ohio Historical Society hired an engineer called Clinton Cowan to survey their newly acquired lands. Cowan returned to them a 56 by 72 inch map that depicted the outline of the Serpent Mound in relation to nearby landmarks, such as rivers.
Cowan also took specific geographical surveys of the area, discovering the unique crypto-volcanic structure the mound sits on top of. He also found that the mound is at the convergence of three distinctly different soil types. Cowan's information, in conjunction with Putnam's archaeological discoveries, have been the basis for all modern investigations of the Serpent Mound.
In 1967, the Ohio Historical Society opened the Serpent Mound Museum, in close proximity to the mound. In addition to the museum, a pathway was constructed around the base of the mound, which is still in existence today.
The museum features various exhibits, including various interpretations of the effigy's form, the processes of constructing the mound, the geographical history of the area, and an exhibit on the Adena people, historically credited as the creators of the mound. The museum shop offers publications on archaeology and American Indians, as well as souvenirs and refreshments.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Serpent Mound State Memorial
- Hopewell Culture National Historical Park
- Ohio History Teachers - Field Trips: Serpent Mound
- Minnesota State University Mankato - Archaeological Sites: Serpent Mound
- The Ohio Historical Society: Serpent Mound
- Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society
[edit] Bibliography
- Fletcher, Robert V., Terry L. Cameron, Bradley T. Lepper, Dee Anne Wymer, and William Pickard, "Serpent Mound: A Fort Ancient Icon?", Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol 21, No. 1, Spring 1996, University of Iowa.
- Squier, Ephraim G. and Edwin H. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington D.C., 1998. This is a reprint of the 1848 edition with a modern introduction by David J. Meltzer
- Woodward, Susan L. and Jerry N. McDonald, Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley, The McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, Blacksburg, Virginia, 1986
