Serpent Mound
The Great Serpent Mound is a 1,348-feet-long, four-feet-high prehistoric effigy mound located in Peebles, Ohio. It was built on what is known as the Serpent Mound crater plateau, running along the Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio. The mound is the largest serpent effigy known in the world.
The first published surveys of the mound were by Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis, featured in their historic volume, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, that was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution.
The United States Department of Interior designated the mound as a National Historic Landmark in 1966. The mound is maintained through the Ohio History Connection, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving historical sites throughout Ohio.
Description
Effigy mounds have been constructed independently by several cultures. The significance of Serpent Mound is based on its size and historical relevance. Made up of three parts, Serpent Mound extends over in length, varying from to more than in height. The mound stands with a width varying between based on the section. Serpent Mound conforms to the surrounding land, as it was built on a bluff above the Ohio Brush Creek. The mound winds back and forth for more than eight hundred feet, with its tail coiling in seven areas throughout the mound. The mound features a triple-coiled tail at the end of the structure, often viewed as a benchmark of the mound. Yellowish clay and ash make up the main constituents of the mound, with a layer of rocks and soil reinforcing the outer layer.The Squire and Davis interpretation of the structure is that of an open-mouth head of a serpent nearly engulfs a hollow oval feature that faces the east and is long. Squire and Davis believed the oval feature may represent an egg, with an apparent depiction of the snake consuming it. Archaeologist J.P. McLean identified the mound as the body of a frog. The western side of the effigy features a triangular mound approximately at its base and long axis, reminiscent of other existing serpent effigies in Canada and Scotland.
Origin and chronology
Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists and archaeologists had disputed which culture and people had created the Serpent Mound, as may be seen in a overview published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002.The Ancient Earthworks Project published "New Radiocarbon Dates Suggest Serpent Mound is More Than 2,000 Years Old". The article provided evidence supporting attribution of the mound to the Adena peoples around 300 BCE and refers to radiocarbon data that was published later in an October 2014 article in The Journal of Archaeological Science. The radiocarbon dates were later corroborated refined in 2019. Monaghan and Hermann determined that the mound was built around 2,300 years ago during the Adena period and that it was subsequently rebuilt or repaired about 900 years ago during the Fort Ancient period. They provided a reconciliation of the radiocarbon dating differences among samples.
In 2018, archaeologist Brad Lepper published a response questioning the attribution of construction to the Adena culture.
Lepper et al. pointed out that the dates obtained by Herrmann and Romain are of poor quality. The material the team dated is not charcoal, but “organic sediment”. Moreover, the samples were obtained from soil cores and not an exposed stratigraphic profile, so the resulting dates are known to be problematic. Henriksen and his colleagues have demonstrated that such dates can be as much as 3,000 years older than the actual age of a mound. Moreover, the Adena culture is not known to have built effigy mounds or to have used serpent symbolism in their art, whereas the Fort Ancient culture built the Ohio Alligator Mound and frequently depicted serpents in their art. These assessments conclude that the best available data indicate that Serpent Mound was built by the Fort Ancient culture.
The Serpent Mound at Rice Lake in Peterborough County, Ontario, Canada, has been dated to more than 2,000 years old. It has also been linked to the Adena culture.
Prehistory of Ohio
The Woodland Period of the Post-Archaic Period is known for its rich ritual and artistic life and well-developed villages. The period is well known for many earthworks and mounds built during the time. During the early and middle woodland period, the Adena culture and Hopewell tradition flourished during the Early and Middle Woodland periods, and the addition of agriculture enabled the population of the Woodland people to expand dramatically. Several groups of the Woodland people lived in larger villages, surrounded by defensive walls or ditches. Ceremonial and artistic endeavors waned during the Late Woodland period, as did trading with other groups. Many of the earthworks and effigy mounds were built early in this period. Construction of mounds by cultures in the area stagnated until the late prehistoric periodCultures of the Midwest
Adena culture
The Adena culture consisted of the pre-contact Native Americans who lived throughout the midwest in the areas that would become the states of Kentucky, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and most predominantly, Ohio. The majority of these peoples inhabited the Scioto River and Hocking valleys in southern Ohio, as well as the Kanawha Valley near present-day Charleston, West Virginia. This period is often referred to as The Early Woodland Period, ranging between 800 BCE and 1 CE. The name “Adena” refers to the shared culture of the peoples rather than to a singular group or tribe.Archaeologists attribute two of the mounds at the site to the Adena culture as a whole, although are unsure of the specific tribes who inhabited the land. The term "culture" encompasses similarities in artifact style, architecture, and other cultural practices, allowing archaeologists to distinguish the Adena culture from other cultures in the region at different time periods. The Adena Mound site became the "type site" of the regional culture that is used by anthropologists.
Fort Ancient Culture
The Fort Ancient Culture refers to the Native American Cultures who predominantly inhabited land near the Ohio River valley in a culture that flourished from 1000 CE to 1750 CE. These civilizations flourished in the modern-day regions of southern Ohio, northern Kentucky, southeastern Indiana, and western West Virginia. The Fort Ancient tribes are often referred to as a "sister culture" of the Mississippian culture, although they can be distinguished from that culture through the time period in which they thrived and their many cultural differences. Along with their relation to the Mississippian culture, evidence suggests that the Fort Ancient Culture were not the direct descendants of the Hopewellian Culture. Despite what many believe, the tribes of the Fort Ancient Culture were not responsible for the creation of The Great Serpent Mound, although they contributed to its physical appearance through maintenance of it around 200 CE.In 1996, the team of Robert V. Fletcher and Terry L. Cameron reopened a trench created by Frederic Ward Putnam of Harvard more than 100 years before. They found a few pieces of charcoal in what they believed to be an undisturbed portion of the Serpent Mound. Natural changes called bioturbation, including burrows, frost cracks, etc., can reverse the structural timeline of an earthen mound such as Serpent Mound, however, and bioturbation can shift carbon left by a later culture on the surface to areas deep within the structure, making the earthwork appear younger. This factor may be significant to the dating of the original construction of the mound.
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. The third date, ca. 2900 BP, was recovered from a core sample below the 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.
Another effigy mound found in Ohio, the Alligator Effigy Mound in Granville, was carbon dated to around 950 AD.
Interpretations
Assuming that the mound was built around 1070 CE, many archaeologists believe that the mound's creation could have been influenced by two different astronomical events. The primary theory is that the light from a supernova may have prompted its construction. Although numerous supernovas may have occurred over the centuries that span the possible construction dates of the effigy, the one that created the Crab Nebula occurred in the year 1054 CE. The light of the supernova would have been visible for two weeks after it first reached earth and it was visible in broad daylight. As a secondary theory, some archaeologists suggest and the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1066 CE could have been the influence and that the tail of Halley's Comet could have influenced the shape of the mound; however, the tail of the comet has always appeared as a long, straight line that does not resemble the curves of the Serpent Mound.The mound is located on the site of a classic astrobleme, an ancient meteorite impact structure. When attempting to understand the impact origin of this structure, the pattern of disruption of sedimentary strata has provided archaeologists with a lot of information. In the center of the structure, strata have been uplifted several hundred feet, resembling the central uplifts of the Copernicus lunar crater. In 2003, geologists from Ohio State University and the University of Glasgow corroborated the meteorite impact origin of the structure at The Serpent Mound. They had previously studied core samples collected at the site in the 1970s, providing them with a background of information pertaining to the site. Further analyses of the rock core samples indicated that the impact occurred during the Permian Period, about 248 to 286 million years ago. This has led archaeologists to believe that the topographic expression of this impact or the impact crater, has been completely erased by erosion.
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. A depiction of the serpent mound appeared in The Century periodical in April 1890, drawn by William Jacob Baer.
According to archaeologist Brad Lepper, Serpent Mound may be a depiction of a Dhegihan Siouan origin story of the Great Serpent "Toothy Mouth”, lord of the Beneath World, who impregnated the First Woman.
According to Woodward and McDonald's interpretation: