America Before
Page 61
11. Saunders, “Early Mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 39.
12. David G. Anderson, “Archaic Mounds and the Archaeology of Southeast Tribal Societies,” in Jon L. Gibson and Philip Carr (eds.), Signs of Power: The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast (University of Alabama Press, 2010), Kindle location 5180.
13. See, for example: Joe W. Saunders et al., “A Mound Complex in Louisiana at 5400–5000 Years Before the Present,” Science 277 (September 19, 1997), 1796–1799; Joe W. Saunders, et al., “Watson Brake, a Middle Archaic Mound Complex in Northeast Louisiana,” 631–668; Saunders, “Early Mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 25–52, in particular 33 and 42.
14. Saunders, “Early Mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 46.
15. Saunders et al., “A Mound Complex in Louisiana at 5400–5000 Years Before the Present.”
16. Cited in Heather Pringle, “Oldest Mound Complex Found at Louisiana Site,” Science (September 19, 1997), 1761–1762.
17. Ibid.
18. Saunders et al., “A Mound Complex in Louisiana at 5400–5000 Years Before the Present,” 1797.
19. Norman L. Davis, “Solar Alignments at the Watson Brake Site,” Louisiana Archaeology, no. 34 (2012), 97.
20. Saunders, “Early Mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 35.
21. Sassman and Heckenberger, “Crossing the Symbolic Rubicon in the Southeast,” Kindle location 4176.
22. Davis, “Solar Alignments at the Watson Brake Site,” 97, supports the view that there are 12 mounds. Saunders, “Early Mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 35, states that “the site is composed of 11 earthen mounds. … A probable (subject to verification) 12th mound lies outside the enclosure” immediately to the southeast.
23. Pringle, “Oldest Mound Complex Found at Louisiana Site.”
24. Davis, “Solar Alignments at the Watson Brake Site,” 97.
25. Saunders et al., “Watson Brake, a Middle Archaic Mound Complex in Northeast Louisiana,” 631.
26. Saunders, “Early Mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 37.
27. Ibid., 36–37.
28. Saunders et al., “Watson Brake, a Middle Archaic Mound Complex in Northeast Louisiana,” 665.
29. Ibid.
30. Saunders, “Early Mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 43.
31. Cited in Pringle, “Oldest Mound Complex Found at Louisiana Site.”
32. The notion has good support from other knowledgeable archaeologists. See, for example, Saunders et al., “Watson Brake, a Middle Archaic Mound Complex in Northeast Louisiana,” 662.
33. Sassman and Heckenberger, “Crossing the Symbolic Rubicon in the Southeast,” Kindle location 4170.
34. For example, Insley Mounds.
35. Sassman and Heckenberger, “Crossing the Symbolic Rubicon in the Southeast,” Kindle locations 4185–4191 and 4195–4205.
36. Davis, “Solar Alignments at the Watson Brake Site,” 110.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 97–115.
39. Notably William Romain, who wrote to the editor of Louisiana Archaeology to confirm that his own “findings for Watson Brake corroborate the central thesis of Norman L. Davis (as published in 2012 in Louisiana Archaeology) relative to the overall solstice alignment of the site.” William F. Romain, letter to Dennis Jones, Editor, Louisiana Archaeology, in Louisiana Archaeology, no. 36, 2013 (2009), 3, https://www.laarchaeologicalsociety.org/product-page/number-36-2009-published-2013.
40. Davis, “Solar Alignments at the Watson Brake Site,” 97.
41. Ibid., 104.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 105.
46. Ibid., 105–106.
47. Ibid., 106–107.
48. Ibid., 110.
49. William F. Romain, letter to Dennis Jones, Editor, Louisiana Archaeology, in Louisiana Archaeology, no. 36, 2013 (2009), 3–4.
50. Davis, “Solar Alignments at the Watson Brake Site,” 110.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 113–114.
54. Ibid., 114.
55. Saunders, “Early Mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 45–46.
56. Ibid.
57. Ellerbe and Greenlee, Poverty Point: Revealing the Forgotten City, 28.
58. Ohio History Connection, “Adena Culture,” http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Adena_Culture.
59. See, for example, p. 1 of D. W. Dragoo, “Adena and the Eastern Burial Cult” in Archaeology of Eastern North America 4 (Winter 1976), 1–9: “Extensive research throughout the East in recent years has clearly shown Adena to be one of only several regional cultures present between 1000 BC and AD 200.” This view has been maintained in the twenty-first century—see, for example, p. 453 of S. M. Rafferty, “Evidence of Early Tobacco in Northeastern North America?” Journal of Archaeological Science 33, no. 4 (2006), 453–458, which dates the Boucher Mound, Vermont: “The site has an extensive radiocarbon chronology, with dates ranging from 885 +-35 BC to as late as 49 BC uncalibrated, with a calibrated range indicating continuous use of the site through the majority of the first millennium BC, from as early as 1036 BC to as late as 49 BC. … The site features a rich and diverse assemblage of burial offerings, including numerous Adena-related artifacts.”
60. Correspondence by my research assistant Holly Lasko with Bob Maslowski of the Council for West Virginia Archaeology on May 25, 2018, “Most Adena mounds I’m familiar with date between 400 and 200 BC.” See B. Lepper, “How Old Is the Adena Mound?” Ohio History Connection Archaeology Blog (January 12, 2014), https://www.ohiohistory.org/learn/collections/archaeology/archaeology-blog/2014/january-2014/how-old-is-the-adena-mound. This article is based on a paper published in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, whose abstract states that Adena Mound (typesite) dating of 200 BC places it near the midpoint of radiocarbon-dated Adena culture sites. The reference for the paper is Bradley T. Lepper et al., “Radiocarbon Dates on Textile and Bark Samples from the Central Grave of the Adena Mound (33RO1), Chillicothe, Ohio,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology (2014).
61. Edward W. Herrmann et al., “A New Multistage Construction Chronology for the Great Serpent Mound, USA,” Journal of Archaeological Science 50 (October 2014), 121.
62. The oldest reliable Adena Mound date is arguably (by no means definitively) c. 400 BC and based on recent AMS dates from Cresap Mound. See William H. Tippins, Richard W. Lang, and Mark A. McConaghy, “New AMS Dates on the CRESAP Mound (46MR7),” Pennsylvania Archaeologist 86, no. 2 (2016), 2–20, Table 4, p. 17.
63. Jon L. Gibson, “Navels of the Earth: Sedentism in Early Mound-Building Cultures in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” World Archaeology 38, no. 2 (June 2006), 316.
64. John E. Clark, “Surrounding the Sacred: Geometry and Design of Early Mound Groups as Meaning and Function,” in Jon L. Gibson and Philip Carr (eds.), Signs of Power: The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast (University of Alabama Press, 2010), Kindle location 3741–3747.
65. Ibid., Kindle location 3770.
PART VI
22: QUIETUS?
1. Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind (Crown, 1996), 79. The Message of the Sphinx was published in the United Kingdom by Heinemann as Keeper of Genesis, but with the same page numbering.
2. O. Neugebauer and Richard A. Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts: 1. The Early Decans (Brown University Press, 1960), 24–25 and 112ff. Jane Sellers, The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt: An Essay on Egyptian Religion and the Frame of Time (Penguin Books, 1992), 39ff.
3. Robert Bauval (with Adrian Gilbert), The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids (Heinemann, 1994).
4. Virginia Trimble, “Astronomical Investigations Concerning the So-called Air Shafts of Cheops’s Pyramid,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, band 10 (1964), 183–187, and Alexander Badawy, “The Stellar Destiny of the Pharaoh
and the So-called Air-Shafts in Cheops’s Pyramid,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, band 10 (1964), 189–206.
5. Bauval, The Orion Mystery, 191.
6. Pyramid Texts, Lines 882–885 in R. O. Faulkner (ed. and trans.), The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford University Press, 1969), 154.
7. See, for example, the discussion by I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt (Penguin, 1993), 285.
8. Information from site placard, Mound B, Moundville Archaeological Park, Alabama.
9. Information from Rattlesnake Disk exhibit placard, museum, Moundville Archaeological Park, Alabama.
23: THE PORTAL AND THE PATH
1. See, for example, Robert L. Hall, An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Belief and Ritual (University of Illinois Press, 1997), 21 and 162–163; George F. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’” in Kent F. Reilly III and James F.Garber (eds.), Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography (University of Texas Press, 2007), 193ff; George Lankford, “World on a String,” in Richard F. Townsend and Robert V. Sharp (eds.), Hero, Hawk and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (Yale University Press, 2004), 212; and Ray A. Williamson and Claire R. Farrer (eds.), Earth and Sky: Visions of the Cosmos in Native American Folklore (University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 219–220.
2. See Andrew Collins and Gregory Little, Path of Souls: The Native American Death Journey (ATA Archetype Books, 2014), 7–9. Above Top Secret, “Southern Death Cult (Eye in the Hand),” (December 27, 2012), http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread912520/pg1 in conjunction with “The Mystery of Mayan and Egyptian Common Creation Myth,” December 18, 2010, http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread909246/pg1.
3. Out of the tens of thousands of codices that existed before the conquest, only four have survived. See, for example, Michael D. Coe, The Maya, 4th ed. (Thames and Hudson, 1987), 161; and University of Arizona Library, “Mayan Codex Facsimiles,” http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/mexcodex/maya.htm.
4. Mark Seeman, “Hopewell Art in Hopewell Places,” in Richard F. Townsend and Robert V. Sharp (eds.), Hero, Hawk and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (Yale University Press, 2004), 57.
5. See, for example, Reilly and Garber, Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms, 112, 115, 118, 125, 193, 130, and so on.
6. Ibid., 5.
7. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’” 175.
8. Ibid.
9. George Lankford, “The Great Serpent in Eastern North America,” in Reilly and Garber, Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms, 134–135.
10. George Lankford, “Some Cosmological Motifs in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex,” in Reilly and Garber, Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms, 8.
11. Lankford, “The Great Serpent in Eastern North America,” 134–135.
12. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead (Arkana, 1985), lxv.
13. Information from ibid, lxv–lxxi, and from Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson, British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (British Museum Press, 1995), 47, 146.
14. Pyramid Texts, Lines 312–313 in R. O. Faulkner (ed. and trans.), The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford University Press, 1969), 68.
15. Ibid., 94, Line 474.
16. Ibid., 294, Lines 2057–2058.
17. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell (Martin Hopkinson, 1925) (3 volumes in one edition, page numbers reset to 1 with each volume), vol. 2, 196.
18. Cited in Ake Hultkrantz, Conceptions of the Soul Amongst Native American Indians (Ethnographical Museum of Stockholm, 1953), 70.
19. Ibid.
20. Budge, The Book of the Dead, 542.
21. Hultkrantz, Conceptions of the Soul Amongst Native American Indians, 116.
22. Ibid., 77.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 79.
25. Ibid., 88.
26. Ibid., 112.
27. Ake Hultkrantz, Shamanic Healing and Ritual Drama: Health and Medicine in Native American Religious Traditions (Crossroad, 1992), 32. See also Hultkrantz, Conceptions of the Soul Amongst Native American Indians, 26–27.
28. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’” 175–176, 181.
29. F. Dunand and R. Lichtenberg, Mummies and Death in Egypt (Cornell University Press, 2006), x: “During the funeral, magical formulas were recited, and these and others were copied onto a Book of the Dead that lay in the tomb along with the deceased. A selection of figurines and ritual implements, along with a panoply of amulets and utilitarian objects from this life, accompanied the body. Once placed in the tomb, the individual would simultaneously move about in the realm where the dead were and also share in the course of the sun as it set and was reborn daily. The mobile ‘soul,’ the ba, soared up toward the daylight and then returned to animate its home base, the embalmed corpse in its coffin. The ka, the other ‘soul’ and the immaterial double of the material body, consumed the food and drink the survivors brought to the funerary chapel, at the same time perpetuating, by speaking it out loud, the name of the person, which they could read on a stela. This whole system—which implies a far more complex anthropological representation of a living, thinking being than our own—was believed to confer the potential capacities of a god on the deceased. The classical form of a sarcophagus—a mummy with the mask and the heavy wig that were proper to images of deities—served as the hieroglyphic symbol for the idea of superior dignity (the Egyptian word was sah).”
30. Pyramid Texts, Line 1109, in Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 183.
31. Cited in Ake Hultkrantz, The North American Indian Orpheus Tradition (Ethnographical Museum of Stockholm, 1957), 121.
32. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’” 181.
33. Cited in ibid.
34. Cited in Hultkrantz, The North American Indian Orpheus Tradition, 61.
35. Pyramid Texts, 138, Lines 747–748 in The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.
36. Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell, vol. 3, 103–104.
37. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’ 176.
38. Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell, vol. 3, 104.
39. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’” 176.
40. Pyramid Texts, in The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 135, Line 723.
41. Ibid., 253, Line 1717.
42. Ibid., 259, Line 1763.
43. Ibid., 144, Lines 802–803.
44. Ibid., 236, Line 1561.
45. Ibid., 70, Line 326.
46. Ibid., 78, Line 379.
47. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’” 176–177.
48. The Orion Nebula is one of the best-studied objects in the sky. See, for example, F. Palla and S. W. Stahler, “Star Formation in the Orion Nebula Cluster,” Astrophysical Journal 525, no. 2 (1999), 772: “We study the record of star formation activity within the dense cluster associated with the Orion nebula. … This model assumes that stars are produced at a constant rate and distributed according to field-star initial mass function.”
49. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’” 193.
50. Ibid., 203–204.
51. Pyramid Texts, in The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 166, Line 980.
52. Ibid., 156, Lines 890–891.
53. Ibid., 70, Line 324.
54. Ibid., 79, Line 392.
55. Ibid., 135, Line 727.
56. Ibid., 158, Line 907.
57. Ibid., 238, Line 1583.
58. Ibid., 249, Line 1680.
59. Ibid., 144, Line 799.
60. R. O. Faulkner, The Book of the Dead (British Museum Publications, 1972), 62, Spell 42.
61. Pyramid Texts, in The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 253, Line 1720.
62. Susan Brind Morrow, The Silver Eye: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts (Head of Zeus, 2016), Kindle location 433.
63. The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 144, Line 803.
64. Ibid., 253, Line 1717.
65. Ibid., 44, Line 151.
66. Ibid.
/> 67. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’” 177.
68. Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell, vol. 3, 104.
69. George Lankford draws a specific parallel between the Native American traditions and the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead in George Lankford, Reachable Stars: Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America (University of Alabama Press, 2007), 204. The same idea is proposed in F. Kent Reilly III, “The Great Serpent in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” in Visualizing the Sacred: Cosmic Visions, Regionalism and the Art of the Mississippi World (University of Texas Press, 2011), 122–123.
70. Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford University Press, 2002), 132.
71. G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Beyond the Milky Way: Hallucinatory Imagery of the Tukano Indians (UCLA Latin America Center Publications, 1978), 13.
72. Faulkner, The Book of the Dead, 90. Also see R. O. Faulkner, “The King and the Star-Religion in the Pyramid Texts,” in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 25 (1966), 154n7. Virginia Lee Davis makes the link between the Milky Way and the “Winding Waterway” in Archaeoastronomy 9 (JHA xvi) (1985), 102. The archeoastronomer and Egyptologist Jane B. Sellers arrives at the same conclusion as V. L. Davis (J. B. Sellers, The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt [Penguin Books, 1992], 97). For further discussion and additional sources, see also Bauval, The Orion Mystery, 119–121.
73. Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell, vol. 3, 90.
74. Pyramid Texts, 258, Line 1760.
75. Ake Hultkrantz, The Religions of the American Indians (University of California Press, 1979) (originally published in 1967 as De Amerikanska Indianernas Religioner), 133.
76. Lankford, “The ‘Path of Souls,’” 177.
77. Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell, vol. 3, 89.
78. Ibid., 89–90.
79. Ibid., xii.
80. Sources for the foregoing all in ibid, notably 13–14, 59–60, 110–115, 136, 249–251, and 282–283 (“the Slaughterers of Apep”).
81. Ibid., 109.
82. Ibid., 113.
83. Hultkrantz, The North American Orpheus Tradition, 97–98.