America Before

by Graham Hancock

  In my view it more than merely “suggests!” Given that these are the only two sites in North America with circle-octagon combination earthworks, given that the circles are 99.8 percent identical in size, and given their precise 90-degree orientation to one another, a quite remarkable feat of surveying across a great span of country, I think we can safely say that the designers did intend a deliberate connection here. Lepper himself makes a strong case that this connection might have been more than symbolic when he presents evidence for the former existence of a causewayed road with some stretches of its parallel walls still in place as late as the mid-nineteenth century. He calls it “the Great Hopewell Road” and speculates that it was perhaps a pilgrim route that once ran between Newark and High Bank.32

  As at Newark, a circle-octagon combination forms the dominant glyph at High Bank, and there are adjacent figures and causewayed avenues. When Squier and Davis surveyed the site in the nineteenth century (there has been massive destruction since) they reported that the walls of the High Bank Octagon were “very bold; and where they have been least subjected to cultivation are between eleven and twelve feet in height, by about fifty feet base. The wall of the circle is much less, nowhere measuring over four or five feet in altitude.”33 Despite its once “bold” walls, the High Bank Octagon, enclosing 18 acres,34 is a much smaller figure than the Newark Octagon, which, as we’ve seen, encloses 50 acres.35

  Why, since otherwise the circle-octagon motifs of the two sites are so similar, since their circles are of identical size, and since it seems the earthwork-makers did nothing by chance, should there be this marked reduction in scale of the High Bank Octagon?

  The answer, as we shall see, has to do with eerily precise, indeed scientific, observations of the moon.

  Extreme rise and set points of the moon over its 18.6-year cycle as viewed from Newark, Ohio. When the moon is at a position for maximum extremes, the extreme north and south moonrises and moonsets in a given month are separated by 77 degrees; at the position for minimum extremes, the extreme moonrises and moonsets are separated by 49 degrees.

  SKY KNOWLEDGE

  LIKE OTHER SACRED SITES SCATTERED around the world, the geometrical mounds and earthworks of North America don’t give up their secrets easily. They have ways of grabbing your attention but they’re going to force you to do some work before they allow you to understand them. Thus, for example, getting to grips properly with Serpent Mound requires knowledge of what a solstice is and of how the rising and setting points of the sun change according to a predictable cycle throughout the year.

  Such knowledge, archaeologists argue, would have had immediate utility in the pre-industrial world, reminding farmers, in the words of Ecclesiastes, that for “every thing there is a season … a time to plant and a time to pluck that which is planted.”

  As a motive for the memorialization of solstitial and equinoctial alignments, however, the arguments in favor of a practical immediate agricultural payoff don’t adequately account for the enormous effort involved in the construction of many of the sites. After all, the same calendrical functions could have been realized almost as effectively and much less expensively with pairs of aligned poles.

  The notion that a reliable agricultural calendar was the primary motive for skywatching also fails to explain why we find the same focus on the rising and setting sun on the solstices and the equinoxes in distinctly pre-agricultural sites such as Painel do Pilão in the Amazon, dating back more than 13,000 years.36

  Likewise, though they can only have been the product of detailed observations of the heavens and would have required meticulous record-keeping over many generations, the lunar alignments manifested in the great earthworks at Newark and High Bank have no obvious practical function in terms of harvests—or, indeed, of any other utilitarian pursuit. Once again, though, what they do require of those who seek deeper knowledge of them is a study of the heavens.

  Nothing beats direct observation of the sky over the course of the year—except observing it over the course of many years—but these days excellent free astronomical software can speed up and simplify the learning task by showing us the exact rising points of the sun and the moon at any location and over any interval we choose.

  If we make use of such software to observe the behavior of the moon over, say, a period of a century, we will quickly notice that its rising and setting points along the eastern and western horizons are locked to a cycle shifting from farthest north to farthest south and back to farthest north again every month. As more time passes, however, we will also observe that these monthly “boundaries” on the moon’s rising and setting points aren’t fixed from year to year but instead widen and narrow over an 18.6-year cycle. If they are at their widest (“Maximum Extreme”) today, then they will be at their narrowest (“Minimum Extreme) in 9.3 years and at their widest again 9.3 years after that.

  Eight prominent directions are therefore implicated in these celestial events. Four target the maximum and minimum monthly boundaries north of east and the maximum and minimum monthly boundaries south of east between which the moon can rise during its 18.6-year cycle. The other four do the same for moonset on the western horizon. On each occasion as it reaches one of its extremes the moon’s constant motion stops—literally comes to a standstill—before it reverses the direction of its oscillation for the next 9.3 years.

  The geometry of the Newark Earthworks—and of High Bank, too—turns out to be very closely fitted to these obscure celestial events, known to astronomers as “lunar standstills,” knowledge of which would appear to have no practical contribution to make to the necessities of everyday life.

  NEWARK’S LUNAR CODE

  IT’S LARGELY THANKS TO RAY Hively and Robert Horn that we know of these lunar connections at all.

  When they began work at Newark in 1975 their purpose was to conduct “a field exercise in data collection and analysis for an undergraduate interdisciplinary course.”37 Although cosmology and the astronomical knowledge of prehistoric and ancient cultures were within the scope of the course, they make clear that they “did not expect to find any particular geometrical or astronomical pattern” at Newark.38 “Indeed, given the difficulty of showing that any such pattern was intentional rather than fortuitous, we doubted any persuasive hypothesis regarding design of the earthworks could be formed.”39

  To their surprise, however, as they admitted in 2016:

  Our continued analysis … has revealed repetitive patterns of earthwork and topographical features oriented or aligned to the extreme rise and set points of both the sun and the moon on the horizon. These alignments, combined with the massive scale, geometrical symmetry and regularity of the earthen enclosures suggest that the Newark Earthworks were built to record, celebrate, and connect with celestial actors or large-scale forces that appear to govern relations among earth, sky and the human mind.40

  In their initial study, published in the journal Archaeoastronomy in 1982,41 Hively and Horn did not recognize any solar alignments at Newark.42 What grabbed their attention instead was the intricate cat’s cradle of lunar alignments uncovered by their detective work.43

  Some were obvious, indeed unmissable once the lunar concerns of the site were admitted—for example, the fact that “the avenue axis of the Octagon points to the maximum northern extreme rising point of the moon with an error of 0.2o.”44

  Such an “error,” amounting to less than two-tenths of a single degree, represents remarkable precision for any epoch and far exceeds the level of science generally assumed by archaeologists to have existed in the pre-Columbian Americas. Moreover, “the avenue axis and four sides of the Octagon mark five of the eight extreme lunar rise-set points with a mean accuracy of 0.5o.”45

  The three remaining alignments, accurate to within 0.4 degrees, 0.7 degrees, and 0.8 degrees, respectively, are also shown in the diagram following.

  RIGHT: The eight key stations of the 18.6-year lunar-standstill cycle at Newark. The central axis and four walls t
arget, respectively: (1) maximum northern moonrise; (2) maximum northern moonset; (3) minimum northern moonrise; (4) minimum southern moonset; and (5) maximum southern moonrise. The three remaining alignments identified by Hively and Horn are (6) maximum southern moonset; (7) minimum northern moonset; and (8) minimum southern moonrise. TOP LEFT: Simulation of maximum northern moonrise at Newark, as viewed along the Observatory Circle–Octagon axis.

  Hively and Horn reinforce their case with another observation. The four sides of the Newark Octagon that are not aligned to significant lunar events form closely parallel pairs and are highly symmetrical. By contrast the four sides that do align to lunar standstills are neither parallel nor symmetrical. The obvious deduction to be made from this is that the geometrical symmetry of the Octagon was deliberately distorted to achieve more accurate lunar alignments.46 Moreover,

  the requirements of (1) octagonal symmetry and of (2) alignment with lunar extrema uniquely define the Newark Octagon. Of the infinity of possible octagons which could have been constructed at this site, the one we find is precisely the one which matches the lunar extrema most closely. In fact we have been unable to design an equilateral polygon with eight or fewer sides which incorporates the same lunar points more efficiently and accurately than does the Newark Octagon.47

  In the High Bank Octagon wall 11 → 1 is 16 percent longer than wall 10 → 11, displacing vertex 11 from its ideal position in such a way as to produce a lunar alignment, targeting the minimum southern moonrise between vertices 11 and 5. Likewise, there is no gap at the position of the ideal vertex at position 12. Instead the gap has been moved northward to position 9. A line between points 4 and 9 aligns with the minimum southern moonset. A further alignment, made possible by deviations in linearity, targets the maximum northern moonset at maximum standstill.

  SUN AND MOON AT HIGH BANK

  THE GREAT CONTRIBUTION OF HIVELY and Horn’s 1982 paper in Archaeoastronomy was that it demonstrated how precisely, and how cleverly, Newark celebrates and embraces the lunar standstills. In a follow-up paper published in the same journal in 1984, the same investigators go on to prove that the High Bank structures embody equally unequivocal alignments to the extreme north and south rise points of the moon.48 And just as at Newark, where deliberate asymmetries were introduced into the side lengths and angles of the Octagon to achieve more perfect lunar alignments, so, too, we find that one of the eight walls of High Bank’s octagon is 16 percent longer than it “should” be to preserve perfect geometrical symmetry. This “error,” however, alters the angle to the neighboring vertex, thus opening up an alignment to the southern extreme moonrise at minimum standstill within a margin of just 0.6 degrees. If the wall had been the “correct” symmetrical length no lunar alignment would have been possible.49 A second such “error” facilitates an alignment with the southern extreme moonset, again at minimum standstill.50

  Targeting of the northern extreme moonrise and the southern extreme moonset at High Bank—both at maximum standstill. In addition, the summer solstice sunrise is targeted within 0.5 degrees by wall 1 → 2 while the alignment 13 → 2 targets the winter solstice sunrise.

  A further alignment, in this case made possible by deviations in linearity, targets the northern extreme moonset at maximum standstill.

  Clearly, therefore, High Bank and Newark have much in common and in some ways seem almost like twins. Why then, as we asked earlier, does the octagon of one of these “twins” enclose 50 acres while the octagon of the other encloses just 18 acres?

  The answer offered by Hively and Horn is that not only does the 50-acre Newark octagon match the lunar extrema more closely than any other possible octagon, but also that it was designed to do so within the specific latitude band—measuring 44.5 kilometers from north to south—in which Newark is located.51 In other words, the purpose of accurately aligning the earthwork to the lunar standstills would not have been served if the Newark octagon, like the circle, had been reproduced with an exact duplicate at High Bank more than 90 kilometers to the south.52 The 18-acre figure with different vertex angles that we find at High Bank is perfectly suited to the task at High Bank’s latitude.

  Among other differences between the two sites, perhaps the most notable is that no alignment to any significant solar event, whether to the equinoxes, or to the solstices, or to the so-called cross-quarter days in between, has yet been satisfactorily identified at Newark in the earthworks themselves.53

  But there’s a context to this.

  Recent research by Hively and Horn has raised the intriguing possibility that the very reason Newark’s earthworks are where they are is that four prominent “high-elevation overlooks” in the surrounding landscape serve as natural front and back sights targeting sunrise and sunset on the winter and summer solstices.54 It’s unlikely to be an accident that the point of intersection of these natural alignments “lies in the central region of the earthworks and is equidistant (within 2 percent) from the centers of the Observatory Circle and the Great Circle.”55

  Just as with its latitude, therefore, though the matter cannot be proved, the choice of Newark’s natural setting feels designed and deliberate.

  Meanwhile, at High Bank, Hively and Horn’s 1984 study not only confirmed key lunar alignments to southern extreme moonrise, southern extreme moonset, and northern extreme moonset, as we’ve seen, but also to the northern extreme moonrise and to the southern extreme moonset—both at maximum standstill. In addition, the summer solstice sunrise is targeted within 0.5 degrees by wall 1 → 2 while the alignment 13 → 2 targets the winter solstice sunrise56—the same familiar memes of cosmic mystery and geometric magic that manifest in earlier sites such as Serpent Mound and later sites such as Cahokia.

  We’ve seen that these memes can be traced in the Amazon at least as far back as Painel do Pilão some 13,000 years ago.

  Before Cahokia, before Newark and High Bank, before Serpent Mound, how far back can we follow their trail in North America?

  THE POVERTY POINT TIME MACHINE

  DEAR READER, I DO NOT propose to take you on a tour of every mound and earthwork site in the United States, nor even of every mound or earthwork site I’ve visited personally. But if you were to rent a car in New Orleans and drive the 800 or so miles north through the Mississippi Valley as far as Cincinnati or a little farther, with time on your hands for some significant side trips east and west, you could plan an interesting journey. Despite the wanton destruction during the past 200 years, some outstanding sites have been saved in Louisiana,1 Mississippi,2 Alabama,3 Tennessee,4 Illinois,5 and Ohio,6 and there are also significant sites in Florida,7 Georgia,8 Texas,9 Arkansas,10 Kentucky,11 and Indiana.12 Other states have mounds and earthworks, too. But in antiquity the North American mound-building phenomenon was centered on the Mississippi River, and on its great Ohio and Missouri tributaries, and this is reflected in the distribution of the surviving sites today.

  A number of different “mound-building cultures” have been identified by archaeologists, who have assembled them into categories based on period, location, types of pottery, types of tools, arts and crafts, and other criteria. We’ve already met some of the leading lights in this typology, such as the “Adena” (roughly 1000 BC to 200 BC), presently thought to have been the builders of Serpent Mound, the “Hopewell” (roughly 200 BC to AD 500), who were responsible for Newark and High Bank, and the “Mississippians” (roughly AD 800 to 1600), who built Cahokia.

  Archaeologists make routine use of all these labels but also interpolate them with others that filter out of the classroom and into general consciousness, causing confusion all around. Thus, for example, you will not go far in learning about the mound-builders without encountering references to the Woodland Period, which is in turn divided into Early Woodland (1000 BC to 200 BC), Middle Woodland (200 BC to AD 600–800) and Late Woodland (AD 400 to AD 900–1000).13 Allowing for some oversimplification of a complicated picture, the Adena culture built its mounds and earthworks during the Early Woodlan
d period. The Hopewell culture built its mounds and earthworks during the Middle Woodland period. The Coles Creek culture was prominent during the Late Woodland period. The Late Woodland period in turn overlaps with the Early Mississippian period.

  But these are no more than artificial constructs that help tidy-minded archaeologists preserve a sense of order and control over otherwise dangerously unruly data—and, besides, we must question how much the types of utensils and tools used by a culture actually tell us anything of value. We wouldn’t expect to gather crucial information about modern cultures from their knives, forks, hammers, and screwdrivers, so why should we suddenly set different standards when we try to understand the ancient world?

  Undoubtedly many different Native American cultures, speaking many different languages, were involved in the construction of the mounds. Undoubtedly their arts and crafts and tools and pottery differed. Undoubtedly they expressed themselves in many different ways. Yet when it came to their earthworks, for some mysterious reason, they all did the same things, in the same ways, repeatedly reiterating the same memes linking great geometrical complexes on the ground to events in the sky.

  It represents a catastrophic loss of memory for our species, something akin to a madman smashing his own brains out, that there was such wholesale destruction of the Native American earthworks during the rapid growth of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To give credit where credit is due, it is entirely because of the excellent, dedicated, meticulous surgery of archaeologists that anything has been salvaged from the wreck at all—and as it turns out, quite a lot has been salvaged.

  In consequence, whether we are viewing the handiwork of the Adena, such as Serpent Mound, or of the Hopewell, such as Newark and High Bank, or of the Mississippians, such as Cahokia, no sentient person can doubt the prodigious scale of this Native American achievement. There can be no doubt either that geometers and astronomers were in every case central to the enterprise. Nor is there doubt about when the enterprise came to an end—around AD 1600 in yet another catastrophic consequence of the European conquest of North America.