America Before

by Graham Hancock

  Lidar image reveals how Monks Mound is bounded by plazas and other significant structures on its north, south, east, and west sides. IMAGE BY WILLIAM ROMAIN.

  This sense of terrestrial and cosmic connectedness is among several cogently argued reasons why archaeologist William Romain, whose work at Serpent Mound we encountered in part 1, considers Monks Mound to have been conceived by its designers as a true “axis mundi”—intended to serve as a junction point between heaven and earth. He reminds us of the traditional shamanistic spiritual system of the Native American peoples of the Eastern Woodlands—the region of Cahokia. According to this system, the universe is comprised “of an Above World, This World, and Below World. … Connecting these realms is a vertical vector … the axis mundi that enables shamans to move between cosmic realms. … The axis mundi can be symbolically represented by any number of vertical elements such as a pole, tree, column of smoke, mountain, pyramid, or mound.”15

  Monks Mound has the look of a small mountain, Romain observes. It dwarfs everything in the surrounding landscape and utterly dominates Cahokia. This character of “verticality” is enhanced by the local topography of the Mississippi floodplain, which would have ensured that the Grand Plaza was regularly, if shallowly, inundated. Out of the watery, marshy realm thus created, Monks Mound would have seemed to rear up in numinous and mythic power and was perhaps, Romain writes:

  imagined as an earth island. … If the Below World as represented by the wetlands, swamps, lakes, and man-made water features surrounding central Cahokia is a watery world, then it is appropriate that in its verticality, Monks Mound would be the structural axis mundi linking the watery Below World to the Above Sky World.16

  Interestingly, and again despite the 5-degree offset from true north so firmly declared by Cahokia’s principal axis, the largest known building of the Mississippian civilization was erected on the apex of Monks Mound and in this case was precisely aligned to the cardinal directions.17 Its long axis, measuring 30.85 meters, was set perfectly east–west; its short axis, measuring 13.85 meters, was set perfectly north–south.18

  Archaeologists have established that a large structure, perfectly aligned to the cardinal directions, once stood on the summit of Monks Mound. IMAGE BY WILLIAM ROMAIN.

  The workings of Cahokia’s Woodhenge. PHOTO BY WILLIAM ISEMINGER; ANNOTATIONS BY WILLIAM ROMAIN.

  Romain also draws our attention to “the powerful visual hierophany” that would have been witnessed at the spring and fall equinoxes when Cahokia was in its prime, locking the site in to key conjunctions of heaven and earth. It was in the staging of this hierophany that the site’s “Woodhenge” played its most crucial role. Re-created with a modern simulacrum for the benefit of the 300,000 tourists who now visit Cahokia each year, and named after the similar prehistoric circle of huge wooden posts that stood on England’s Salisbury Plain close to the world-famous site of Stonehenge before the stone circle itself was completed, Cahokia’s Woodhenge lies some 850 meters west of Monks Mound. Its existence remained unsuspected until the 1960s when archaeologist Warren Wittry found traces of immense postholes. Subsequent excavations revealed that no fewer than five woodhenges had been built on the same site over a period of a couple of centuries in order to accommodate increases in the size and shape of the Mound itself, which affected crucial solar sight lines.

  Equinox sunrise above the slope of the southern terrace of Monks Mound. PHOTOGRAPHED FROM WOODHENGE BY WILLIAM ROMAIN.

  The objective of every realignment and rededication was that an observer at the center of the post circle, looking due east across the “front sight” of a specially placed equinox marker post, should see the sun’s disk appear above the slope of the southern terrace of Monks Mound—an arrangement, says Romain, that establishes an east–west solar-oriented line across the entire Cahokia complex:

  The result is that Monks Mound is visually connected to the Above World vis á vis the rising sun and its location on the east–west sightline that intersects the major site axis. In this way, Monks Mound is positioned at a center place.19

  That assertion and manifestation of centrality is reconfirmed by two other posts at Woodhenge that serve as front sights targeting the horizon azimuths of the summer and winter solstice sunrises.20

  ENTER THE MOON

  THE CIRCLES, RECTANGLES, AND SQUARES of Cahokia, the solstitial and equinoctial alignments, and the perfect cardinality of the large structure that once stood atop Monks Mound are among the hallmarks of the same distinct pattern of geometry and astronomy that we find in the Amazon earthworks.

  Unexplained so far, however, is why Cahokia’s designers made a deliberate choice not to align the main axis of their premier site to the cardinal directions of earth and sky but instead chose to offset it by 5 degrees east of true north?

  It’s a question to which William Romain offers an intriguing answer. The builders of Cahokia, he argues, were geometricians who made use of a special rectangle, known as a “root-2 rectangle,” in planning the layout of the city.

  He gives much supporting evidence for this claim, which need not detain us here.21 Nor do we want to get bogged down in unnecessary technical detail. In brief, however, a root-2 rectangle is constructed by extending the opposite sides of a square to the length of the square’s diagonal. If you take such a rectangle, orient it to true north (0 degrees azimuth), and then rotate it eastward by 5 degrees to match the azimuth of Cahokia’s principal axis, its diagonals turn out to align closely with important solar and lunar events as viewed from Monks Mound—specifically, the summer solstice sunrise at azimuth 59.7 degrees, the winter solstice sunset at azimuth 239.3 degrees, the moon’s maximum southern rising position at azimuth 130.1 degrees, and the moon’s maximum northern setting position at azimuth 307.1 degrees.

  The match, Romain admits, “is not perfect. A couple of the celestial azimuths differ from the diagonals of the root two rectangle by 2 to 3 degrees. But since the rectangle is not intended for observational purposes it is perhaps close enough to symbolically represent the complementary opposite relationships of the sun and moon.”22

  If Romain is right, then it appears that sophisticated astronomical and mathematical ideas, combined with complex and cleverly thought through symbolism, were already present, fully worked out, and in the hands of competent professionals when Cahokia underwent what archaeologists call its “big bang”—an explosive period of expansion and development—around AD 1050.23

  Is there evidence that such ideas were deployed elsewhere in North America before Cahokia?

  MOON

  WILLIAM ROMAIN’S CASE THAT NOT only solar but also lunar connections were mediated through geometry in the alignments of Cahokia is strengthened by the fact that other significantly older earthwork sites, most of which were destroyed by “development” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were built in the Mississippi River basin incorporating complex geometries based almost exclusively on lunar alignments. Two of the most significant such sites to have survived, at least in part, into the twenty-first century are the High Bank Works and Newark Earthworks, both in Ohio. High Bank Works is located near the town of Chillicothe, about 40 miles northeast of Serpent Mound, and Newark Earthworks stands about 60 miles farther to the northeast near the town of Newark.

  Both are true geoglyphs in the Amazonian sense, being formed by embankments and ditches set out on such a gigantic scale that their shape is not evident at ground level and can only be discerned clearly from the air.

  This 1934 aerial photograph shows the Circle-Octagon combination of the Newark Earthworks. Those parts that still survive are now largely contained within a private country club that includes an eighteen-hole golf course and promotes itself as “unlike any other in the world. It is designed around famous prehistoric Native American Earthworks that come into play on eleven of the holes.”

  Both are dominated by immense octagon-circle combinations linked by short causeways amid assemblies of other geometrical figures. Both ar
e currently thought to date to between AD 250 and 400.1 Both are attributed to a culture that archaeologists have named the “Hopewell”—after a certain Captain M. C. Hopewell, who happened to own a farm in the right place when excavations began.2

  Newark and High Bank were first professionally surveyed in the mid-nineteenth century when numerous mounds—most subsequently leveled for plowing or industrial purposes—were reported to be situated within the geometrical earthworks.3 It may therefore be relevant to recall at this point that many of the Amazonian geoglyphs described in chapter 15 also contain mounds—for example, eleven arranged in a circle within an immense enclosure in the Upper Tapajos Basin,4 the “two high mounds, standing like towers” at the southwestern entrance of the trapezoidal earthwork at Fazenda Colorada,5 the twenty-five adjoining mounds of Fazenda Iquiri II,6 and the ten surviving mounds of Coqueiral.7

  Whereas no archaeoastronomical survey of the Amazonian earthworks has yet been attempted, Cahokia and Serpent Mound have both been subject to intense scrutiny. Meanwhile, at Newark and High Bank a series of studies since the 1980s have revealed a complex symphony of geometry and astronomy encoding not only familiar solar alignments but also, as we are about to see, much more subtle and esoteric conjunctions of heaven and earth concerned with the complex dance along the horizon of the rising and setting moon.

  PCBS

  NEWARK AND HIGH BANK HAVE an almost technological feel to them, resembling gigantic printed circuit boards or wiring diagrams from the innards of some immense and ineffable instrument. It’s interesting, therefore, that Bradley Lepper, currently curator of archaeology with the Ohio History Connection, believes they may originally have been conceived by their designers as the components in “a monumental engine for world renewal … a vast machine, or device, designed and built to unleash primordial forces.”8

  At both sites the principal geoglyph combines a circle with an octagon and in both cases these figures are formed by large earthen embankments as much as 12 meters wide at the base and typically about 1.7 meters high.9

  Newark Great Circle, also known as the Fairground Circle, with its interior ditch and central three-lobed “Eagle Mound.” The diameter of the circle is 365.9 meters (just over 1,200 feet).

  A striking similarity of general design connects the octagon/circle theme of Newark and High Bank with the Amazonian geoglyph (see chapter 15) of Santa Isabel. Although the latter is less geometrically exact than the Ohio examples, this is by no means always the rule since both regions exhibit numbers of extremely precise and numbers of more mediocre earthworks.

  The strict lines of Ohio’s Newark Octagon enclose an area of 50 acres and its eight walls have an average length of 167.7 meters.10 The adjoining circle, known since the nineteenth century as the “Observatory Circle,” encloses an area of 20 acres and has a diameter of 321.3 meters.11 A resurvey of the site, carried out with modern instruments in 1982, revealed that “the midline of the embankment walls deviates by no more than 1.2 m at any place from a perfect circle of diameter 321.3 m. A perfect circle of this diameter would have a circumference of 1009.4 m, whereas the actual circle has a circumference of 1008.6 m. Thus it is evident that the Observatory Circle very closely approximates a true circle.”12

  Located 2 kilometers southeast of the Observatory Circle is a second, larger but less geometrically perfect circle known as the Great Circle and formerly as the Fairground Circle, since it was used as the site of the Licking County Fairgrounds from 1854 to 1933.13 It encloses an area of 30 acres14 and, though much depleted by misuse and the passage of time, its earthwork walls today, varying between 1.5 meters and 4.3 meters in height and between 11 meters and 17 meters in width,15 still give a sense of the enormity of the original enterprise. At its center are the remnants of a three-lobed mound, usually referred to as “Eagle Mound” because many visitors have seen in it a resemblance to a bird with outstretched wings.16 Archaeologists, however, regard it as “a series of conjoined mounds rather than a specific effigy form.”17

  Images from the 1894 Bureau of Ethnology Survey. Badly damaged even then, Newark’s Great Square (left), also known as “Wright Square” or “the Wright Earthworks,” is almost completely destroyed today, with only a short segment of one of the four walls remaining. The perimeter of the Great Square is equal to the circumference of the Great Circle (center), while its area is equal to the area of the Observatory Circle (right).

  The diameter of the Great Circle, at 365.9 meters,18 is of the same order of magnitude as the Neolithic henges in the British Isles. Stonehenge at 110 meters is smaller19 but Avebury at approximately 420 meters is larger.20 Moreover, just like Avebury and many of the Amazonian earthworks reviewed in chapter 16, a striking feature of Newark’s Great Circle is the massive ditch—as much as 12.5 meters wide and 4 meters deep21—that runs inside its embankment walls. Indeed, such a ditch, within rather than outside a circular embankment, is the very definition of a henge.

  Alongside its circles, and an integral part of the same enormous complex (to the other major elements of which it was joined by causeways), Newark in its prime possessed a square enclosure, “nearly geometrically perfect,”22 with sides averaging 931 feet in length.23 Almost nothing of it remains today but fortunately enough was intact when it was surveyed in the nineteenth century, first by Squier and Davis and later by Cyrus Thomas of the Bureau of Ethnology, to establish its measures exactly. These and subsequent surveys have revealed not only that “the perimeter of the square earthwork is precisely equal to the circumference of the Great Circle,” but also, as Bradley Lepper notes, that “its area is equal to the area of the Observatory Circle.” In these clearly deliberate and carefully thought through harmonies, Lepper rightly finds “indications of the remarkable sophistication of the geometry incorporated into the architecture of the Newark Earthworks.”24

  Variations on a theme. LEFT: Ancient Works, Pike County, Ohio, as mapped by Squier and Davis in 1848. RIGHT: Jacó Sá earthwork, the Amazon. PHOTO: RICARDO AZOURY/PULSAR IMAGENS.

  William Romain is more specific. In his view the creators of this extraordinary and in some ways rather otherworldly site “were intrigued by the variety of possible relationships between a circle and a square. … The idea that seems to be expressed is that, for every circular enclosure, a corresponding square … can be related to the circle by geometric means.”25

  “Squaring the circle”—constructing a square with the same area as a given circle—was of course a geometrical exercise of great interest to the master mathematicians of ancient Babylon, Egypt, and Greece.26

  The dominant reference frame of modern archaeology does not encourage us to believe that any Native North Americans 2,000 years ago would have possessed the necessary knowledge and skills to perform such an exercise. Yet clearly they did, for the proof is there at Newark—not scratched on some handy-sized clay tablet or papyrus but set out with high precision on the ground in an assembly of truly gigantic and mysterious earthworks.

  Many different variations on the same theme, which there is not space to review here, are to be found at other Hopewell sites in Ohio—for example, a square/circle combination that formerly existed in Pike County. Fortunately, it was surveyed by Squier and Davis in 1848 and their rendering, in figure 11 of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, shows it to have been very similar in concept and plan—and indeed in size—to the earthwork at Jacó Sá in the Amazon described in chapter 15. The two figures are not identical, but they appear to demonstrate the identical geometrical principle.

  From chapter 15 the reader will also recall the recent discovery of a squared circle complex within the great henge at Avebury in the British Isles.

  Are we to resort once again to the archaeological cover-all of “coincidence” to explain the constant repetition and replication of the same astronomical and geometrical constructs in earthworks as far apart in space and time as Avebury, Newark, and Jacó Sá? Or could it be that some guided and intentional process, as yet undetected by ar
chaeology, was under way behind the scenes of prehistory?

  THE CONNECTION TO HIGH BANK

  WE’VE SEEN HOW THE DIAMETER of the nearly geometrically perfect Observatory Circle at Newark is 321.3 meters (1,054 feet). Astronomer Ray Hively and philosopher Robert Horn of Indiana’s Earlham College, whose comprehensive work at Newark and High Bank in the 1980s provided the foundation for all subsequent studies, realized that the same length of 321.3 meters had also been used by the builders to lay out the Octagon:27

  The conclusion suggested by the geometry of the Observatory Circle–Octagon combination is that both figures have been carefully and skilfully constructed from the same fundamental length.28

  This unit of measure, now known by the unfortunate yet strangely appropriate acronym OCD (for Observatory Circle Diameter), was also deployed at High Bank, which, as Hively and Horn remind us, is “the only other circle-octagon combination known to have been constructed by the Hopewell.”29 It cannot be a coincidence, then, that High Bank turns out to conform to a geometric pattern based on a fundamental length of 0.998 OCD.30

  Nor is the connection between these two sites limited to their shared unit of measure.

  Perhaps most striking of all is the fact, noted by archaeologist Bradley Lepper, that “the main axis of High Bank Works—that is, a line projected through the center of the Circle and the Octagon—bears a direct relationship to the axis of Newark’s Observatory Circle and Octagon. Although built more than 60 miles apart, the axis of High Bank Works is oriented at precisely 90 degrees to that of Newark earthworks. This suggests a deliberate attempt to link these sites through geometry and astronomy.”31