It's being considered for UNESCO World Heritage status, about the only useful thing UNESCO or indeed the UN does.
The serpent from above. (Courtesy Ohio History Connection)
Posted on 10/16/2018 12:04:05 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
On a lush hilltop deep in Southern Ohio, a giant snake slithers through the grass, its intentions a mystery.
Despite more than a century of study, we still don't know who built the Great Serpent Mound, or why.
That's part of what makes a visit here so fascinating, and also a little bit frustrating. There are still questions that can't be answered through a Google search or more than a century of research.
This much is known:The Serpent Mound is not a burial mound, though there are burial mounds nearby, from two different native populations, the Adena, who lived in Ohio from roughly 800 B.C. to A.D. 100, and the Fort Ancient, who lived here a thousand years later, from 1000 to 1650.
- At 1,348 feet long, the serpent is the largest effigy mound in the world -- that is, an earthen creation in the shape of an animal or other symbol.
- Its construction is sophisticated, built in layers, with its head directly aligned with the setting sun on the summer solstice.
- It was built at least 1,000 years ago - and quite possibly much, much earlier.
Debate continues among archaeologists about which of those two cultures constructed the snake, and for what purpose.
"It's one of those big questions in archaeology that we hope to answer one day," said Jarrod Burks, the director of archaeological geophysics at Ohio Valley Archaeology, based in Columbus.
He added: "It's become quite heated, with a lot of back and forth."
...The Serpent Mound is unrelated to the Hopewell sites, built either well before or long after the Hopewell culture existed in Ohio.
(Excerpt) Read more at cleveland.com ...
It's being considered for UNESCO World Heritage status, about the only useful thing UNESCO or indeed the UN does.
The serpent from above. (Courtesy Ohio History Connection)
Cue up Duran Duran “union of the snake”?
Wasn’t the mound also put into the eroded crater of a meteorite strike?
For all we know this mound could be the life-long project of one guy with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. Sort of like the Coral Castle.
Then I reply to myself: Now imagine that guy is 12-18 feet tall, and recalculate...
[[its intentions a mystery.]]
My bet is it was a fancy dung heap
When I built my little garden years ago....I put in a little canal system that is exactly like this.
And all because he was very bored, and his wife was nagging.
I’ve been to Serpent Mound. It is impressive.
PFL
I visited here a few years ago. I had a few impressions:
1) the mound echoes the landscape around it. It is on a hill with a river winding below it. You don’t see this in the aerial shots as the image is flattened out from above.
2) I could visualize Indians parading along the top of this “serpent,” enacting ceremonies for rain, marriage, coming of age, etc.
3) I wasn’t sure how much constant grass mowing was wearing down the mound over time.
Used to live near there. There have been interesting developments in the area about the Greater Miami peoples. In the 90’s an excavation was started on a settlement of the people that lived in the area long before the pilgrims ever set foot onto the continent. A few years ago there were several shows made about this mound and its counterpart somewhere near England (Scotland? don’t remember honestly). ONe of the shows also went on to show animal-formed mounds in the Midwest. It was an interesting show as it was my introduction into what LIDAR was doing at that time and how it could rewrite what we know about North America, the Incas, and Aztecs. The one thing I Remember about this mound is that it was not touristy. Yeah, we all knew about it but it wasn’t like it was on the tourist list for places to must see. It was in this parking lot in eighth grade I first got behind the wheel of a car after drinking 2 beers.
[thumbing through my Encyclopedia Britannica] Hmmm, and all along, I thought Delaware was the first state...
What drew my attention was the Ohio snake's coils (3 down, 4 up). Could they have astronomical significance similar to that of the mayan, inca and aztec snake gods? Knowledge that was lost or forgotten over hundreds of years of disease, drought, earthquakes or war. Maybe the annual flooding along the Mississippi was just to much for them and they left for warmer pastures further west - the Yucatan peninsula:
Ohio snake, equinox points:
Aztec snake: Quetzalcoatl, god of knowledge, astrology and of priests, son of the creator god, a blond, blue-eyed stranger. Also known as, or very closely associated with the Mayan Kukuclan.
“Hundreds of North and South American Indian and South Pacific legends tell of a white-skinned, bearded lord who traveled among the many tribes to bring peace about 2,000 years ago. This spiritual hero was best known as Quetzelcoatl.”
http://www.ancientpages.com/2017/02/07/kukulkan-feathered-serpent-and-mighty-mayan-snake-god/
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d9/b4/ec/d9b4eccc1fb6a4b8364b3384346c6c37.jpg
Mayan snake: Kukuklan, teacher of writing and knowledge, the Vision God, underwater serpent, feathered serpent, bird messenger between the gods and the priests/royalty; the alterego of Sun God, Kininch, who controls droughts. He “ emerged from the ocean, and disappeared in it afterward.” Chichin Itzu is a calender and twice each year at the equinoxs, KuKuklan appears to slither down the side. The Snake King dynasty is associated with Mayans.
Inca snake: Pacha Kamaq, the creator son of the Sun God, a serpent from the sea who, tossed back into the sea (or a lake) became the god of fish when he wasn't making earthquakes. Pachacamac, the city dedicated to him, was a site of the Oracle - a center of knowledge and astrology. Either he was treated as invisible or his priests had to erect a cloth between them and his totum in the shape of a man so they couldn't look at it. Again, it's three down, four up on the coils, same as Ohio
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4d/7c/bd/4d7cbdf7f645fb5d587086679b03b08d.jpg
My personal conjecture is that it’s a retelling of the serpent and the woman in the garden.
I drive by it about once a week. A friend’s family owned the farm in the Brush Creek flood plain downhill from it across State Route 73. It is too high on the hillside to have been likely for farming with such lush farmland just down the hill. Just a personal opinion, but I’ve lived here a couple decades now.
I’m curious as to how the know when it was built.
If you can track that down on YT, I’d appreciate it.
There *may* be a topic that talks about that in the keyword, but meanwhile, it has to do with radiocarbon dating of some organic material (possibly an old campfire) which tested out from the Fort Ancient period. That is likely to mean that the existing old structure was used by the later group, rather than they built it.
There's a possibility that the figure was not originally in the form we see now, since it has different strata laid down at different times. The original length and shape may have been quite different. But my seat of the pants guess is, the serpent is really a comet (hence the big circle at the head) and then it becomes a matter of what the lowest strata yields to scientific dating.
IOW, time to ping another list.
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That’s something I often wonder about when it comes to site or non-organic artifact dating.
The organic remains may be no more related to when and who built the thing than any trash I leave at Stonehenge is.
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