Serpent Mound

This article is about the site in the USA. For the one in the UK, see Skelmorlie.

Great Serpent Mound
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark
The Great Serpent Mound - an ancient Native American effigy in Adams County, Ohio.
Nearest city	Peebles, Ohio
Coordinates
NRHP Reference #	66000602
Added to NRHP	October 15, 1966

The Great Serpent Mound is a 1,348-foot (411 m)-long, three-foot-high prehistoric effigy mound on a plateau of the Serpent Mound crater along Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio. Maintained within a park by the Ohio Historical Society, it has been designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of Interior. The Serpent Mound of Ohio was first reported from surveys by Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis in their historic volume Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, published in 1848 by the newly founded Smithsonian Museum.

Researchers have attributed construction of the mound to three different prehistoric indigenous cultures. Although it was once thought to be Adena in origin, now based on the use of more advanced technology, including carbon dating and evidence from 1996 studies, many scholars now believe that members of the Fort Ancient culture built it about 1070 CE (plus or minus 70 years). There are still anomalies to be studied. Serpent Mound is the largest serpent effigy in the world.

Description

Ohio historical marker

Including all three parts, the Serpent Mound extends about 1,370 feet (420 m), and varies in height from less than a foot to more than three feet (30–100 cm). Conforming to the curve of the land on which it rests, with its head approaching a cliff above a stream, the serpent winds back and forth for more than eight hundred feet and seven coils, and ends in a triple-coiled tail. The serpent head has an open mouth extending around the east end of a 120-foot (37 m)-long hollow oval feature that may represent the snake eating an egg, though some scholars posit that the oval feature symbolizes the sun, the body of a frog, or merely the remnant of a platform. The effigy's extreme western feature is a triangular mound approximately 31.6 feet (9.6 m) at its base and long axis. There are serpent effigies in Scotland and Ontario that are very similar.

Origin

File:Serpent Mounds sketch.jpg

Engraving based on a sketch of the Great Serpent Mound

The dating of the design, the original construction, and the identity of the builders of the serpent effigy are three questions still debated in the disciplines of social science, including ethnology, archaeology, and anthropology. In addition, contemporary American Indians have an interest in the site. Several attributions 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.

Over the years, scholars have proposed that the mound was built by members of the Adena culture, the Hopewell culture, or the Fort Ancient culture. In the 18th century the missionary John Heckewelder reported that Native Americans of the Lenni Lenape (later Delaware) nation told him the Allegheny people had built the mound, as they lived in the Ohio Valley in an ancient time. Both Lenape and Iroquois legends tell of the Allegheny or Allegewi People, sometimes called Tallegewi. They were said to have lived in the Ohio Valley in a remotely ancient period, believed pre-Adena, i.e., Archaic or pre-Woodland period (before 1200 BCE). Because archaeological evidence suggests that ancient cultures were distinct and separate from more recent historic Native American cultures, academic accounts do not propose the Allegheny Nation built the Serpent Mound.

Recently the dating of the site has been brought into question. While it has long been thought to be an Adena site based on slim evidence, a couple of radiocarbon dates from a small excavation raise the possibility that the mound is no more than a thousand years old. Middle Ohio Valley people of the time were not known for building large earthworks, however; they did display a high regard for snakes as shown by the numerous copper serpentine pieces associated with them.

Radiocarbon dating of charcoal discovered within the mound in the 1990s indicated that people worked on the mound circa 1070 CE.

Adena culture

Main article: Adena culture

Historically, researchers first attributed the mound to the Adena culture (1000 BCE - 1 CE). William Webb, noted Adena exponent, found evidence through carbon dating for Kentucky Adena as early as 1200 BCE. As there are Adena graves near the Serpent Mound, scholars thought the same people constructed the mound. The skeletal remains of the Adena type uncovered in the 1880s at Serpent Mound indicate that these people were unique among the ancient Ohio Valley peoples. It was more than 45 years before scholars paid sufficient attention to the Adena studies.

The Adena culture did build some nearby mounds, so for more than 125 years, many scholars thought they created the Serpent Mound as well. The Adena were renowned for their elaborate earthworks and their creation of "sacred circles" as part of their cosmology. An unrecorded number of their gravesites throughout the greater Ohio Valley were destroyed before any organized archeological supervision performed correct analysis of their contents.

Carbon-dating studies published in 1996 of material from the mound appeared to place the Serpent Mound construction as later than the span of the Adena. This suggested that a people subsequent to the Adena may have built or refurbished the site for their own uses and purposes. Although a characteristic of excavation at most Adena mounds has been discovery of related artifacts, to date no cultural artifacts have been found within the Serpent Mound. This study and its inferences drew the attention of many experts and is further discussed below.

Fort Ancient culture

Main article: Fort Ancient

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Squier and Davis's map from Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1848

Scholars previously thought that the Fort Ancient culture (1000-1650 CE), an Ohio Valley-based, mound-building society, constructed Serpent Mound about 1070 CE. The Fort Ancient culture was influenced by the contemporary Mississippian culture society based along the mid-Mississippi River valley with its North American center at Cahokia (in present-day Illinois). The Mississippian culture had regional chiefdoms as far south as present-day Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as extending to western North Carolina and north to the Great Lakes area.

The Fort Ancient society, a protohistoric group, was named because they inhabited the ramparts of the large notched earthworks in Warren County, Ohio, commonly called "Fort Ancient". The earthwork had been built, however, by the early Hopewell culture (200 BCE-500 CE) at least 1,000 years prior to the arrival of the Fort Ancient culture. The Hopewell culture had abandoned the earthworks and disappeared long before the Fort Ancient peoples arose in the area.

In 1996 the team of Robert V. Fletcher and Terry L. Cameron (under the supervision of the Ohio Historical Society's Bradley T. Lepper) reopened a trench created by Frederic Ward Putnam of Harvard over 100 years before. They found a few pieces of charcoal in what was believed to be an undisturbed portion of the Serpent Mound. However, bioturbation, including burrowing animals, frost cracks, etc., can reverse the structural timeline of an earthen mound such as Serpent Mound. It can shift carbon left by a later culture on the surface to areas deep within the structure, making the earthwork appear younger.

When the team conducted carbon dating studies on the charcoal pieces, two yielded a date of ca. 1070 CE, with the third piece dating to the Late Archaic period some two thousand years earlier, specifically 2920+/-65 years BP (before the present). The third date, ca. 2900 BP, was recovered from a core sample below cultural modification level. The first two dates place the Serpent Mound within the realm of the Fort Ancient culture. The third dates the mound back to very early Adena culture or before.

The Fort Ancient people could have been the builders of the Serpent Mound. Alternatively, they may have refurbished the earthwork for their own use in the same way that people today fix up old houses to make them suitable for occupation again. The rattlesnake is significant as a symbol in the Mississippian culture, which would help explain the image of the mound. But there is no sign or indication of a rattle.

If this mound was built by the Fort Ancient people, it was uncharacteristic for that group. For example, the mound does not contain artifacts, although, like the Adena people, the Fort Ancient culture typically buried many artifacts in its mounds. In another difference, the Fort Ancient people did not usually bury their dead in the manner of the burials found in proximity to the effigy.

One of the only other effigy mounds in Ohio, the Alligator Effigy Mound in Granville, was carbon dated to the Fort Ancient period.

Current theory

The so-called "Fort Ancient Culture" has been disassociated from the Fort Ancient earthwork in Warren County, Ohio, and is not known to have built large earthworks. Indeed, it has been misnamed a culture and is now understood more as an interaction phenomenon involving multiple ethnolinguistic groups that came together in the Ohio Valley in the Late Woodland Period, between 500 CE and 1200 CE. Fort Ancient Culture is neither a fort, nor ancient, nor a culture.

This causes the Fort Ancient designation to be problematic, because as an unreal entity, the so-called culture has no clear descendants. Adena, on the contrary, is strongly identified from archaeology, genetics, and historical linguistics as Algonquian, its descendants being the Anishinaabeg, the Miami-Illinois, the Shawnee, the Kickapoo, the Meskwaki, and the Asakiwaki.

An eight-member team led by archaeologist William F Romain has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The team found much older charcoal samples in less-damaged sections of the mound. The investigators conjecture that the mound was originally built between 381 BCE and 44 BCE, with a mean date of 321 BCE. They explain the more recent charcoal found in the 1990s as likely the result of a "repair" effort by Indians around 1070 CE, when the mound would already have been suffering from natural degradation.

Purpose

Late Testanian Period graves at the site suggest the earthwork served a mortuary function, and that this was the principal nature of the site, directing spirits of the dead from burial mounds and subsurface graves northward, not a place to conduct large ceremonial gatherings as has been suggested by tourism/promotion interests.

Astronomical significance

The spiral tail at the end of the Serpent Mound

In 1987 Clark and Marjorie Hardman published their finding that the oval-to-head area of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset. William F. Romain has suggested an array of lunar alignments based on the curves in the effigy's body. Fletcher and Cameron argued convincingly for the Serpent Mound's coils being aligned to the two solstice and two equinox events each year. If the Serpent Mound were designed to sight both solar and lunar arrays, it would be significant as the consolidation of astronomical knowledge into a single symbol. The head of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset and the coils also may point to the winter solstice sunrise and the equinox sunrise.

If 1070 CE is accurate as the construction year, building the mound could theoretically have been influenced by two astronomical events: the light from the supernova that created the Crab Nebula in 1054, and the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1066. The supernova light would have been visible for two weeks after it first reached earth, even during the day. The Halley's Comet's tail has always appeared as a long, straight line and does not resemble the curves of the Serpent Mound. Halley's comet appears every 76 years. Numerous other supernovas may have occurred over the centuries that span the possible construction dates of the effigy.

A depiction of the serpent mound that appeared in The Century periodical in April 1890

The Serpent Mound may have been designed in accord with the pattern of stars composing the constellation Draco. The star pattern of the constellation Draco fits with fair precision to the Serpent Mound, with the ancient Pole Star, Thuban (α Draconis), at its geographical center within the first of seven coils from the head. The fact that the body of Serpent Mound follows the pattern of Draco may support various theses. Putnam's 1865 refurbishment of the earthwork could have been correctly accomplished in that a comparison of Romain's or Fletcher and Cameron's maps from the 1980s show how the margins of the Serpent align with great accuracy to a large portion of Draco. Some researchers date the earthwork to around 5,000 years ago, based on the position of Draco, through the backward motion of precessionary circle of the ecliptic when Thuban was the Pole Star. Alignment of the effigy to the Pole Star at that position also shows how true north may have been found. This was not known until 1987 because lodestone and modern compasses give incorrect readings at the site.

Cryptoexplosion Structure

Shatter cones associated with the Serpent Mound cryptoexplosion structure. Scale in mm.

The mound is located on a plateau with a unique cryptoexplosion structure that contains faulted and folded bedrock, usually produced either by a meteorite or a volcanic explosion. In 2003 geologists from Ohio State government and the University of Glasgow (Scotland) concluded that a meteorite strike was responsible for the formation. They had studied core samples collected at the site in the 1970s. Further analyses of the rock core samples indicated the meteorite impact occurred during the Permian Period, about 248 to 286 million years ago.

This is one of the few places in North America where such an occurrence is seen. While some scholars speculate that prehistoric Native Americans may have placed the mound in relation to this geological anomaly, others think there was nothing visible at ground level that would have captured their attention.

Recent history

File:Serpent Mound CTA 1B H1025 2a mini.jpg

Serpent Mound postcard

The Serpent Mound was first mapped by Euro-Americans as early as 1815. In 1846 it was surveyed for the Smithsonian Institution by two Chillicothe men, Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis. Their book Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), published by the Smithsonian, included a detailed description and map of the serpent mound.

In 2015, the site was vandalized when an Ohio man drove a pickup truck on several of the site's mounds. He has since been arrested and charged.

Preservation

Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley fascinated many across the country, including Frederic Ward Putnam of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Putnam spent much of his career lecturing and publishing on the Ohio mounds, specifically the Serpent Mound. When he visited the Midwest in 1885, he found that plowing and development were destroying many of the mounds. In 1886, with help from a group of women in Boston, Putnam raised funds to purchase 60 acres (240,000 m²) at the Serpent Mound site for preservation. The purchase also contained three conical mounds, a village site and a burial place. Serpent Mound is listed as a "Great Wonder Of the Ancient World" by National Geographic Magazine.

Originally purchased on behalf of the Trustees of the Peabody Museum, in 1900 the land and its ownership were granted to the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society (a predecessor of the present Ohio Historical Society).

The Ohio Historical Society designated the Arc of Appalachia Preserves system, a project of Highlands Sanctuary, Inc., as the managing agency of Serpent Mound

Excavation

After raising sufficient funds, in 1886 Putnam returned to the same site. He worked for four 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.

Serpent Mound Museum

Main article: Ohio Historical Society

A digital GIS map of Ohio's Great Serpent Mound, created by Timothy A. Price and Nichole I. Stump in March 2002

In 1901 the Ohio Historical Society hired engineer Clinton Cowan to survey newly acquired lands. Cowan created a 56 by 72-inch (1,800 mm) map that depicted the outline of the Serpent Mound in relation to nearby landmarks, such as rivers. Cowan also made specific geographical surveys of the area, and he discovered the unique cryptoexplosion structure on which the mound is based. He found that the mound is at the convergence of three distinctly different soil types. Cowan's information, in conjunction with Putnam's archaeological discoveries, has been the basis for all modern investigations of the Serpent Mound.

In 1967, the Ohio Historical Society opened the Serpent Mound Museum, built near the mound. A pathway was constructed around the base of the mound to help visitors. The museum features exhibits that include interpretations of the effigy's form, description of the processes of constructing the mound, the geographical history of the area, and an exhibit on the Adena culture, historically credited as the creators of the mound.

Serpent Mound State Memorial is currently being operated on behalf of the Ohio Historical Society by the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System. It is a non-profit organization specializing in the preservation and protection of native biodiversity and prehistoric aboriginal sites in southern Ohio.

See also

• Hopewell Culture National Historical Park
• Mound builder (people)
• Indian Mounds Park (disambiguation)
• Crooks mound
• Spiro Mounds
• Glades culture
• Nazca Lines
• Cahokia

Further reading

• 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. Reprint of 1848 edition with a new introduction by David J. Meltzer.
• Woodward, Susan L. and Jerry N. McDonald, Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley, Blacksburg, Virginia: The McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, 1986

External links

• "Serpent Mound State Memorial", Ohio State
• "Hopewell Culture National Historical Park", National Park Service
• Ohio History Teachers - Field Trips: Serpent Mound
• "Archaeological Sites: Serpent Mound", Minnesota State University Mankato
• "Serpent Mound", The Ohio Historical Society
• Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society
• Scientists try to unlock Serpent Mound secrets