Lepper even speculates (he does admit it’s speculation)35 that the Serpent was made in response to the passage of Halley’s Comet in 1066—recorded elsewhere as far afield as Europe and China: “It was a spectacular, fiery display. And it seems to me it’s more than possible that the Native Americans may have viewed Halley’s comet as a serpent snaking across the sky. It’s possible they looked up at it and recorded it as an omen and built the serpent.”36
And that’s it! With a wave of the archaeologist’s magic wand, a fairy-tale castle of speculation is conjured into being on the foundations of just two tiny fragments of charcoal. In the process, while being rendered less old, less venerable, and less mysterious, the sublime artistry, astronomy, geometry, and imagination expressed in Serpent Mound are snatched from one culture and handed to another by the so-called experts of a third!
SKIN CHANGER
NORTH AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY HAS A long track record of wanting Native American sites to be young, as we’ll see in part 2. In the case of Serpent Mound, however, there were some archaeologists, notable among them William Romain, who were never happy with the “somewhat tenuous” nature of the evidence on which Fletcher, Pickard, and Lepper had built their castle in the sky. As Romain tactfully put it in 2011, “Since the charcoal that was dated did not come from a foundation feature or event, the A.D. 1070 date may not reflect when the effigy was actually constructed.”37
Soon afterward Romain followed up his hunch by joining forces with a multidisciplinary team of fellow researchers “to re-evaluate when and how Serpent Mound was built.”38 It was a thorough, professional, long-term project deploying the latest technologies and involving fresh excavations, core sampling, and multiple radiocarbon dates. The results, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in October 2014, thoroughly ripped the rug out from under the comfortable consensus of the previous 18 years that the Serpent was around 900 or 1,000 years old and was the work of the Fort Ancient culture.
“We believe that taken as a whole,” Romain and his colleagues reported, “our data strongly support that Serpent Mound was first constructed ~2300 years ago, rather than ~1400 years later. Our results indicate the presence of a pre-construction paleosol beneath Serpent Mound, and that charcoal from different locales along its surface dates consistently to ~300 BC. The youngest calibrated age within the 95% probability range is 116 BC and we obtained no dates associated with the later Fort Ancient occupation of the site.”39
Charitably, however, there was no crowing in triumph, no pouring of scorn on Fletcher, Lepper, and Pickard. Instead Romain’s team saw the real answer in a compromise:
The evidence compiled by Fletcher et al. concerning the reliability of their C-14 ages is generally convincing and supports the charcoal as authentically related to a Fort Ancient (re)construction episode 900 years ago, which leaves the contradiction between the two initial construction chronologies unresolved. To settle this contradiction, we propose that Serpent Mound was constructed and then later modified during two distinct episodes: an Adena construction ~2300 years ago during which the mound was first built, followed ~1400 years later by an episode of Fort Ancient renovation or repair.40
Because their work was well done, their evidence solid, and their arguments compelling, but also because their “redating” was more of a return to the pre-1996 consensus than anything dangerously new or radical, the model proposed by Romain and his colleagues has subsequently displaced Fletcher et al. Serpent Mound has been returned to the Adena and, despite some unpersuasive protests from Bradley Lepper41 and incomplete information foisted on the public at the site itself, few today would seriously attempt to argue that it is less than 2,300 years old.
The lingering question, though, is, could it be older?
Perhaps very much older?
After all, is it not the defining quality of the serpent that from time to time it sheds its skin? And is it not precisely on account of this that it served for many ancient cultures as a symbol of reincarnation?42 It is therefore reasonable to ask how often Serpent Mound has shed its skin and renewed itself.
This noticeboard, which remained in place at the site in 2018, underinforms the public by making Serpent Mound more than 1,000 years younger than the most accurate carbon dates suggest. PHOTO: ROSS HAMILTON.
The 1996 and the 2014 studies, taken together, provide solid evidence of a change of skin around 900 years ago—a “renovation” project. However, largely because of the “pre-construction paleosol” (soil stratum laid down in an earlier age) forming the foundation of the mound,43 it is taken for granted that the earlier episode at 2,300 years ago was the birth of the project. Setting aside the one anomalous charcoal fragment, dated to 2,920 years ago in the 1996 study, and the two fragments testifying to the Fort Ancient renovation, all the datable materials from the 2014 study, which clustered around 300 BC as we’ve seen, were found above this bed of ancient soil. “The sub-mound paleosol was buried,” the archaeologists therefore conclude, “and Serpent Mound construction began … 2300 years ago during the Early Woodland (Adena) Period.”44
It seems like a reasonable argument but it leaves another possibility unconsidered—namely that 2,300 years ago Serpent Mound was already an enormously ancient structure, perhaps very much eroded and damaged, and that it was cleared down to the level of the paleosol and remade by the Adena culture at this time.
In that case the archaeologists behind the 2014 study would not have documented the birth of the Serpent but its rebirth—or reincarnation.
Why not?
The 2014 study did not gather the necessary data to confirm whether the mound was in continuous use from the Adena period 2,300 years ago until the Fort Ancient renovations 1,400 years later: “However, a possible erased coil near the head of the serpent indicates that other alterations, potentially several hundred years earlier than the Fort Ancient repairs, may also have occurred. This suggests a deeper, richer, and far more complex history for Serpent Mound than previously known.”45
Again—why should this deeper, richer, far more complex history be limited to the relatively recent past? Since Romain and his coauthors are prepared to consider the possibility that Serpent Mound “was regularly used, repaired, and possibly reconfigured by local groups for more than 2000 years,”46 then why not for longer?
Even Fletcher & Co. admit that their anomalous 2,920-year-old piece of charcoal, and nearby Adena burial mounds, are evidence of “the use of the area during the Early Woodland Period.”47 But why should such use have been “ephemeral,” as they assert?48 Why shouldn’t those Early Woodland peoples also, like later cultures, have been present to tend to, maintain, restore, and sometimes reorient and reconstruct the great Manitou?
If so, and if others who came before them had done the same work in their time, inheriting that sacred responsibility from even earlier cultures and participating down the millennia in an irregular process of restoration and refurbishment, then the possibility cannot be ruled out that the first incarnation of the effigy might indeed have been in the Ice Age 13,000 years ago. Were that to be confirmed, everything we’ve been taught about the state of early Native American civilizations and the global timeline of prehistory would have to be rethought.
THE DRAGON AND THE SUN
IN 2017 THE CLOSEST SUNSET to the precise astronomical moment of the summer solstice occurs on the evening of June 20—which is why Santha, Ross Hamilton, and I are back at Serpent Mound on that day rather than on the 21st, when the solstice is more often celebrated. Angles, calculations, and astronomical software are all very well, but nothing beats direct, on-the-spot observation. Our project on the 20th, therefore, having familiarized ourselves with the site and its surroundings on our first visit on the 17th, is for Santha to fly the drone 400 feet above the great effigy, and photograph it at sunset from a point overlooking both its head and the horizon, commanding its field of view, so that we can see for ourselves what its alignment is really all about.
It’s arou
nd 3 pm and the sky is cloudless, giving us hope of a clear horizon this evening. With more than enough time to spare on what, after all, is the longest day of the year, Ross beckons for us to follow him on a steep, winding path that leads down from behind the coiled tail of the Serpent through dense woods to the base of the ridge on which the great effigy stands. It’s such a calm, clear, peaceful afternoon, filled with the sweet notes of birdsong and so poignant a dance of light and shadow between the leaves and the sun that the three of us fall silent, descending slowly and steadily, just breathing it all in. The path levels out along the bank of Brush Creek and we follow it toward the northwest. The creek is on our left and the ridge looms 100 feet above us on our right. Its slope is not entirely overgrown. In places it is sheer, almost a cliff, on which the trees and bushes can get no purchase and the bare limestone bedrock is exposed.
As we walk Ross goes over the implications of his own investigations into the true age of Serpent Mound. I refer the reader to his masterwork, The Mystery of the Serpent Mound, for full details.1 In brief, though, his view as to when exactly the effigy was first constructed is not derived from any of the radiocarbon assays, or from calculations to do with the azimuth of the summer solstice sunset. Instead he focuses on the form of the serpent, which he perceives as a terrestrial image of the constellation Draco.
In images from many cultures, Draco is depicted as a serpent.
I have my own history with Draco, as those who have followed my work over the years will know. In my 1998 book Heaven’s Mirror, for example, I present evidence that this enormous constellation, widely depicted as a serpent by many ancient cultures,2 served as the celestial blueprint according to which the temples of Angkor in Cambodia were laid out on the ground—with each temple “below” matching a star “above.” The essence of my case is that the notion of “as above so below” expressed in the architecture of Angkor is part of an ancient globally distributed doctrine—or “system”—that set out quite deliberately to create monuments on the ground, all around the world, to mimic the patterns of certain significant constellations in the sky. Moreover, since the positions of all stars as viewed from earth change slowly but continuously due to the phenomenon called “precession,” it is possible to use particular configurations of astronomically aligned monuments to deduce the dates that they represent—that is, the dates when the stars were last in the celestial locations depicted by the monuments on the ground.
The constellation of Draco overlaid on Serpent Mound. The neighboring constellation is Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, which houses our present pole star, Polaris. LEFT: The accuracy of Romain’s 1987 survey is demonstrated by the many-starred asterism of Draconis. Each point of light is given equal size in order to demonstrate the accuracy of the original designer’s vision (Hamilton 1997, after Cambridge and Romain). RIGHT: The ancient north star Thuban, which preceded the present pole star Polaris (the dot touching the outside of the circle), is used as the center of this geometry. Both ends of the Serpent are equal in distance from the center point, Thuban (Hamilton 1997, after Romain).
This process of constant change unfolds, of course, over a great cycle of 25,920 years and has nothing to do with the motions of the stars, or with the obliquity cycle. Its cause is another quite different motion of the earth driven by the contradictory pull of the gravity of the sun and the moon. The result is a slow circular wobble of the planet’s axis of rotation, at the rate of one degree every 72 years, much resembling the wobble of a spinning top that is no longer upright. The earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars, so these changes in orientation cause changes in the positions of all stars as viewed from earth.
To envisage the process, picture the earth’s axis passing through the geographical south and north poles and thence extended into the heavens. The south and north pole stars in any epoch are the stars at which the two “tips” of this extended axis point most directly.
Serpent Mound is in the Northern Hemisphere and the north celestial pole is presently occupied by our “pole star” Polaris (Alpha Ursae Minoris, in the constellation of the Little Bear). The effect of precession, however, is to cause the tip of the axis to inscribe an immense circle in the heavens over the cycle of 25,920 years. Thus around 3000 BC, just before the start of the Pyramid Age in Egypt, the pole star was Thuban (Alpha Draconis) in the constellation Draco.3 At the time of the Greeks it was Beta Ursae Minoris. In AD 14000 it will be Vega.4 Sometimes in this long cyclical journey the extended north pole of the earth will point at empty space and then there will be no useful “pole star.”
The constellation of Draco coils eternally around the pole of the ecliptic. Thuban, in the tail of Draco, was the pole star in 3000 BC.
As one of the notable circumpolar constellations, and also one of the most widely recognized, and one of the oldest for which written records have survived,5 what makes Draco particularly significant and remarkable was summed up in 1791 in two lines from a poem by Charles Darwin’s grandfather, the physician and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin:
With vast convolutions Draco holds
Th’ ecliptic axis in his scaly folds.6
This “ecliptic axis”—astronomers today call it the “pole of the ecliptic”—is the still, fixed point in the celestial vault around which the vast circle of the north celestial pole makes its endlessly repeated 25,920-year journey. It is the one place in the sky that never moves or changes while everything else about it dances and shifts, and once you recognize it for what it is—nothing less than the very heart of heaven—it’s striking how the serpentine constellation of Draco seems to coil protectively around it.
If at Angkor that constellation was honored in the form of temples laid out in its image on the ground, then I could see no reason in principle why a similar project should not have been mounted in North America. In one case the medium was stone, with temples targeting the equinox sunrise. In the other it was a great earthwork targeting the summer solstice sunset.
In both cases the result was a symbolically powerful union of ground and sky—a union, according to Ross Hamilton, that was made manifest not 1,000 years ago, nor even 2,300 years ago, but around 4,800 to 5,000 years ago. That was the time when Thuban in Draco was the pole star. And at that same remote date, almost 1,000 miles to the south in Louisiana, a site now known as Watson Brake was built. I will have a great deal more to say about Watson Brake in part 5. As we shall see, it is indisputably 5,000 years old in its present form, and it is Ross’s argument that the same mysterious and as yet unidentified group of Native American geometers and astronomers who made Watson Brake also made the great Manitou at Serpent Mound.
As usual in these matters, however, there’s complexity and nuance behind the headlines. So, yes, Ross is of the view that a major project was undertaken at Serpent Mound around 5,000 years ago. But as we talk now he clarifies what, for him, is obviously an extremely important point: “I always make an effort NOT to give people the impression that 5,000 years ago is when the first mound structure was built on this spot,” he says emphatically:
I believe it was a sacred place, with a structure upon it, its connection to the solstice recognised long before, but that it was remade, renovated, and renewed around 5,000 years ago, reinforcing the worn-down traces of older foundations unrealised by conventional dating methods.
So there was something here already, a legacy from much earlier times, but 5,000 years ago or thereabouts a very well-developed version of the current serpentine effigy was created as an active, fully functioning Manitou. In accord with Native American legend and mythology it would have been outfitted with the necessary accoutrements to facilitate earth–sky interaction phenomena, quite similar to the way some feel the Great Pyramid and its two sibling pyramids once operated.
The Cherokee say there was once a powerful crystal mounted at the head of the serpent—a crystal mentioned in Mooney’s nineteenth-century collection of Cherokee “myths. …” That crystal put out a brilliant light
that “sullied the meridian beams of the sun.” As the story goes, the crystal was stolen and afterward the people fell into darkness. They revisited the former residences of their godly forebears whom they held in highest regard, and gradually took away relics of the remaining parts of the Serpent as well, leaving only dirt. Then they started taking the dirt also until the culture that archaeologists call the Adena decided to stop the practice and refurbish all the old sites with fresh earth and stone to ensure they would survive and that the people would have a living testament to the former glories of their ancestors. This reclaiming of the old holy sites began roughly around 2,500 to 2,300 years ago (in other words 2,500 years after the creation of the Manitou), and continued until about AD 500 when everyone mysteriously vanished or went their separate ways to look for other places in the Mississippi Valley to refurbish. The ancient country of Manitouba was vast, and so there were plenty of other sites to fix up and rededicate. Hence an explosion of remarkably adept architectural masterpieces all throughout much of the Great South and of the Mississippi as we approach the historic period—returning full circle to Ohio. In this model, the same wave of inspiration refurbished the Manitou twice, the refurbishments 1,400 years apart, making it the oldest and youngest, the alpha and omega, of the Ohio Valley antiquities.
I’m doing the mental arithmetic. “So the ‘Fort Ancient’ work at Serpent Mound 1,000 years ago was the second of these restoration projects?”
“That’s right,” Ross replies, “as hopefully everyone, even the archaeologists involved in wrongly attributing the Mound solely to the Fort Ancient culture back in 1996, are now beginning to realize.”
America Before Page 4