America before The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization
By Graham Hancock
...INTRODUCTION...
I HAVE IN MY SHELVES A renowned and much respected book titled History
Begins at Sumer.
1
The reference, of course, is to the famous high civilization
of the Sumerians that began to take shape in Mesopotamia—roughly modern
Iraq between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—around 6,000 years ago.
Several centuries later, ancient Egypt, the very epitome of an elegant and
sophisticated civilization of antiquity, became a unified state. Before bursting
into full bloom, however, both Egypt and Sumer had long and mysterious
prehistoric backgrounds in which many of the formative ideas of their
historic periods were already present.
After the Sumerians and Egyptians followed an unbroken succession of
Akkadians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, and there were,
moreover, the incredible achievements of ancient India and ancient China. It
therefore became second nature for us to think of civilization as an “Old
World” invention and not to associate it with the “New World” at all.
Besides, it was standard teaching in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
that the Americas—North, Central, and South—were among the last great
landmasses on earth to be inhabited by humans, that these humans were
nomadic hunter-gatherers, that most of them subsequently remained hunter-gatherers, and that nothing much of great cultural significance began to
happen there until relatively recently.
This teaching is deeply in error and as we near the end of the second
decade of the twenty-first century, scholars are unanimous not only that it
must be thrown out but also that an entirely new paradigm of the prehistory
of the Americas is called for. Such momentous shifts in science don’t occur
without good reason and the reason in this case, very simply, is that a mass of
compelling new evidence has come to light that completely contradicts and
refutes the previous paradigm.
Everyone has and does their own “thing,” and my own thing, over more
than quarter of a century of travels and research, has been a quest for a lost
civilization of remote prehistory—an advanced civilization utterly destroyed
at the end of the Ice Age and somewhat akin to fabled Atlantis.
Plato, in the oldest-surviving written source of the Atlantis tradition,
describes it as an island “larger than Libya and Asia put together”2
situated
far to the west of Europe across the Atlantic Ocean.3
Hitherto I’d resisted that
obvious clue which I knew had already been pursued with unconvincing
results by a number of researchers during the past century.4
As the solid
evidence that archaeologists had gotten America’s Ice Age prehistory badly
wrong began to accumulate in folders on my desktop, however, and with new
research reports continuing to pour in, I couldn’t help but reflect on the
significance of the location favored by Plato. I had considered other
possibilities, as readers of my previous books know, but I had to admit that
an immense island lying far to the west of Europe across the Atlantic Ocean
does sound a lot like America.
I therefore decided to reopen this cold case. I would begin by gathering
together the most important strands of the new evidence from the Americas. I
would set these strands in order. And then I would investigate them
thoroughly to see if there might be a big picture hidden among the details
scattered across thousands of scientific papers in fields varying from
archaeology to genetics, astronomy to climatology, agronomy to ethnology,
and geology to paleontology.
It was already clear that the prehistory of the Americas was going to have
to be rewritten; even the mainstream scientists were in general agreement on
that. But could there be more? This book tells the story of what I found.
Part 1 Manitou
The Mystery of Serpent Mound
The first survey map of Serpent Mound, made by Ephraim Squier and Edwin H.
Davis in 1846 and published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1848, described the
mound as “the most extraordinary earthwork thus far discovered in the West.”
1
AN ENCHANTED REALM
ARCHAEOLOGY TEACHES US THAT THE vast, inviting, resource-rich continents
of North and South America were among the very last places on earth to have
been inhabited by human beings. Only a handful of remote islands were
settled later.
This is the orthodoxy, but it is crumbling under an onslaught of compelling
new evidence revealed by new technologies, notably the effective sequencing
of ancient DNA. The result is that many of the most fundamental “facts” of
American archaeology, many of the “ground truths” upon which the theories
and the careers of its great men and women were built in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, now stand exposed as fallacies.
Far from being very recent, it is beginning to look as though the human
presence in the Americas may be very old—perhaps more than 100,000 years
older than has hitherto been believed.
This greatly extended time frame, taking us back deep into the Ice Age, has
profound implications for how we view, interpret, and date all the
monuments of the Americas built before the time of Columbus. The
possibility that they might have an unrecognized prehistoric backstory can no
longer be discounted. Moreover, the New World was physically, genetically,
and culturally separated from the Old around 12,000 years ago when rising
sea levels submerged the land bridge that formerly connected Siberia to
Alaska.1
This separation remained total until just 500 years ago when genetic
and cultural exchanges restarted during the European conquest. It follows,
16
therefore, that any deep connections between the Americas and the Old
World that are not the result of recent European influence and that cannot be
attributed to coincidence must be more than 12,000 years old.
It was with all this in mind, on June 17, 2017, that I made my first visit to
Serpent Mound, a national historic landmark in southern Ohio described as
“the finest surviving example of a prehistoric animal effigy mound in North
America, and perhaps the world.”2
It’s in Adams County, about 75 miles east of Cincinnati and 7 miles north
of the town of Peebles by way of SR-41N and OH-73W. With its rolling hills
and green meadows, this is a predominantly rural, substantially forested part
of the state, running northward from the Ohio River. On that vibrant summer
day every tree was in full, luxuriant leaf, every flower was in bloom, the
fields glowed, and the winding lanes seemed part of a bucolic dream.
In some remote epoch, however, this entire idyllic area suffered a
devastating cataclysm, the most striking remnant of which has all the features
of a classic impact crater 14 kilometers in diameter with a pronounced central
uplift, sunken inner ring-graben, transition zone, and outer rim.3
Millions of
years of erosion have softened its contours but Google Earth or an overflight
reveal its obvious crater-like appearance. Most geologists agree that it is the
result of some kind of explosive event but the nature of the explosion for a
long while remained unsettled and there were heated arguments between
those who favored volcanism and those who favored an impact by an asteroid
or comet.4
Because Serpent Mound is the best-known feature within it, and
because of the uncertainty caused by the dispute, the crater was therefore
officially known for many years as the “Serpent Mound Cryptoexplosion
Structure.”5
Only since the late 1990s has mounting evidence led to today’s
widespread consensus that it was, as many had long suspected, formed by a
hypervelocity cosmic impact.6
Variously referred to as the “Serpent Mound Crypto-Explosive Structure” and as the
“Serpent Mound Disturbance,” most scientists now agree that the bizarre geological
feature within which the mound was built is an ancient impact crater with a diameter
of around 14 kilometers.
As to timing, the impact was “later than Early Mississippian, because rocks
of this age [about 345 million years old] were involved in the disturbance,
and earlier than the Illinoian glaciation (125,000 years ago), because these
sediments are undisturbed in the northern part of the structure.”7
That’s a pretty wide window! Nonetheless, most of the experts seem
confident that the crater’s age must be in the hundreds of millions, not just
hundreds of thousands, of years.8
And while it’s thought unlikely that the
Native Americans who built Serpent Mound could have known anything
about cosmic impacts, many scholars speculate that as keen observers of
nature they would certainly have noticed the curious, jumbled, cataclysmic,
ringlike structure of the area and been impressed by it.9
“They had to know there was a significance to that spot,” says Ohio
geologist Mark Baranoski. “They placed a deep reverence in old Mother
Earth. It’s almost mystical that they built a spiritual site.”10 Similarly,
geoscientist Raymond Anderson of the University of Iowa describes Serpent
Mound crater as “one of the most mysterious places in North America. The
Native Americans found something mystical there. And they were right.”11
Dating back to the time of the impact, an intense magnetic anomaly 12
centered on the site causes compasses to give wildly inaccurate readings.
There are also gravity anomalies caused by the impact and there are multiple
underground caverns, streams, and sinkholes that, in the view of Ohio
archaeologist William Romain, would have been seen by the ancients as
entrances to the underworld: “Among many peoples, unusual or transitional
areas such as this are often considered sacred. Indeed such places are often
considered supernatural gateways, or portals, between the celestial
Upperworld and the Underworld. … One can only conclude that the Serpent
Mound builders were aware of at least some of the more unusual
characteristics of the area and that they located the effigy in this anomalous
area for a very specific reason.”13
As we drove the last few miles along OH-73W, I could reflect that we
were entering the lair of the Serpent—a sacred domain where the forces of
earth and sky had once collided with sufficient energy, according to the
calculations of state geologist Michael Hansen, “To disturb more than 7 cubic
miles of rock and uplift the central portion of the circular feature at least
1,000 feet above its normal position.”14
One might expect the great effigy mound to be located on the high point of
that central uplift, but instead it uncoils and undulates along a sinuous ridge
in the southwestern quadrant of the crater near the edge of the ring-graben. At
the northern end of the ridge, where it takes a turn to the northwest, lies the
serpent’s head.
I’d seen it all in plan and maps many times before, but now, for the first
time, I was about to see the real thing. I was traveling with my wife,
photographer Santha Faiia, and with local geometrician and
archaeoastronomer Ross Hamilton, who has devoted much of his life to the
study of Serpent Mound and whose book on the monument is a thought provoking reference on the subject.15
Not only here but elsewhere in the world I have noticed that very special
ancient places such as Serpent Mound seem able to invoke mechanisms to
protect themselves from human folly. Among these mechanisms, from time
to time, a passionate and devoted individual will be prompted by a particular
site to go forth as its advocate—Maria Reiche at the Nazca Lines, for
example, or Klaus Schmidt at Göbekli Tepe—and ensure not only its
preservation but also the dissemination of key knowledge about it.
For the past decades, with absolute commitment, lean and gray-bearded
and ascetic as a Buddhist monk, Ross Hamilton has been that individual for
Serpent Mound.
GROUND AND SKY
WE TURN OFF 73W JUST before Brush Creek and enter a manicured park,
maintained by the Ohio History Connection. Leaving our vehicle, we follow
the footpath through scattered stands of trees, pass the visitor center, and
come after a few moments to a grass-covered embankment about three feet
high.
“The tail of the Serpent,” Ross says.
I frown. It’s a bit of an anticlimax! I don’t immediately see the mystic
spiral I’ve been expecting from the plans I’ve studied. But modern steps
surmount the outer curve and from this vantage point the inner coils of the
earthwork become visible.16
The effect remains underwhelming, largely because the present
management of the site has allowed a thick clump of trees to block the view
that would otherwise open up to the north across the full length of the
Serpent’s body from its tail to its head.
To see the immense effigy as a whole, therefore, rather than in isolated
parts, we need to observe it from the sky. Fortunately, Santha has come
prepared for this with a recently acquired MavicPro drone equipped with a
high-resolution camera. She fires up the little quadcopter right away and
suddenly we’re looking down through the monitor from an altitude of 400
feet with the Serpent beneath us, unfolding outward from that coiled tail.
The site is almost deserted but there are a few people in the shot and they
give me a sense of its scale. I know it already from my background research,
but to see it with my own eyes is quite another matter. This undulating
Serpent, with its gaping jaws, is 1,348 feet long.17 The earthwork mound that
forms its body averages around 4 feet in height and tapers from a width of
about 24 feet to about 22 feet through its seven principal meanders before
narrowing farther into the spiral of the tail.18 People beside it appear as
midgets or elves in the shadow of a dragon and for the first time, with a
20
shiver down my spine, I become aware—not in my intellect, but in my heart,
in my spirit—that a mighty and uncanny power slumbers here.
From an altitude of 400 feet, the full form of the great Manitou of Serpent Mound
becomes visible.
Ross seems to read my mind. “Some call it a Manitou,” he says. “But I’d
go further. I’d say our Serpent is Gitché Manitou—the Great Spirit and
ancestral guardian of the ancient people.”
For those reared in the materialist-reductionist mind-set of Western
science, the Native American notion of Manitou seems slippery and elusive.
Though it may be materialized it cannot be reduced to matter. Nor can it be
weighed, measured, or counted. It is an unquantifiable, formless but sentient
force, “supernatural, omnipresent and omniscient,”19 in one sense a spiritual entity in its own right, in another the mysterious, unseen power that animates
all life and that can manifest both in natural phenomena and in man-made
objects and structures that have been created with correct intent. “The
profoundness of a spiritual presence of Manitou, and through it recognition of
the supernatural,” comments one authority, “was and is a tangible entity seen
and felt by hundreds of generations of the Indian people of North America.
… In essence, Native people perceived a spiritual landscape imprinted on the
physical landscape as both one and the same. This ‘duality’ of the natural
world still inspires the Native population to revere as sacred certain places
and rocks deemed to possess ‘Manitou.’”20
THE SERPENT AND THE EGG
WE BRING THE DRONE DOWN to earth for a battery change then send it back into
the sky.
From an altitude of 400 feet it’s notable how the sinuous natural ridge on
which Serpent Mound was built has distinct “head” and “tail” ends and how
the head of the Serpent is placed at the “head” end of the ridge, while the
undulating body, all the way back to the tail, follows the contours of the ridge
exactly.
Encouraged by the modern management of the site,21 however, the
luxuriant tree cover that prohibits observation along the main north–south
axis also crowds the east and west sides of the body, seeming to hem in the
great Manitou. A tangled mass of greenery chokes the steep western slope of
the bluff down to Brush Creek, and I note how the tree growth is particularly
tall and dense to the northwest, around the Serpent’s head, as though
intentionally allowed to flourish there to blind it.
I ask Santha to point the camera at the head—which is not a work of
artistic realism but is instead a triangular geometric construct extending
forward from the Serpent’s neck and formed of the two gaping “jaws” with a
curved earthwork running between them.
Partly within those gaping jaws sits a substantial and clearly defined
ellipse. It’s a feature that Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, the earliest
scientific surveyors of the mound, were intrigued by. Writing in 1848, in the
very first official publication released by the then newly established
Smithsonian Institution, they observed that this curious structure was
formed by an embankment of earth, without any perceptible opening, four feet in
height, and … perfectly regular in outline, its transverse and conjugate diameters
being one hundred and sixty and eighty feet respectively. The ground within the
oval is slightly elevated: a small circular elevation of large stones, much burned,
once existed at its centre; but they have been thrown down and scattered by some
ignorant visitor, under the prevailing impression probably that gold was hidden
beneath them. The point of the hill within which this egg-shaped figure rests,
seems to have been artificially cut to conform to its outline, leaving a smooth
platform.22
Squier and Davis go on to remind us that “the serpent, separate or in
combination with the circle, egg, or globe, has been a predominant symbol
among many primitive nations.”23 They draw our attention in particular to the
southwest of England, where Stonehenge stands, and to the nearby great
henge, stone circles, and serpentine causeways of Avebury, but nonetheless
decline the twin challenges of tracing “the analogies which the Ohio structure
exhibits to the serpent temples of England” and of pointing out “the extent to
which the symbol was applied in America.”24 Almost wistfully, however,
they describe such an investigation as “fraught with the greatest interest both
in respect of the light which it reflects upon the primitive superstitions of
remotely separated people, and especially upon the origin of the American
race.”25
Scholars in the nineteenth century, and indeed well into the early twentieth
century, routinely applied words like “primitive” and “savage” to the works
of our ancestors. At Serpent Mound, however, as Ross Hamilton points out,
these so-called superstitious primitives were demonstrably the masters of
some very exacting scientific techniques. He gives me a penetrating look.
“Just consider the precision with which they found true north and balanced
the whole effigy around that north–south line. It was a long while before
modern surveyors could match it. In fact everyone got it wrong until 1987,
when William Romain carried out the first proper survey of the mound and
gave us a map with correct cardinal directions.”
Connecting the hinge of the effigy’s jaws to the tip of the inner spiral of its
tail, Serpent Mound’s meridian axis combines aesthetic refinement with
astronomical and geodetic precision of a high order. Moreover, although they
themselves took the matter no further, Squier and Davis were right to draw
comparisons with Stonehenge and Avebury, for these great English
earthworks, as we shall see in the next chapter, both bear the imprint of the
same “artistic science.”
William Romain’s 1987 map revealed the precision of Serpent Mound’s north–south
axis.
2
A JOURNEY IN TIME
JOIN ME IN A TIME machine. I’ve set it to take us back to the peak of the last
Ice Age 21,000 years ago and to bring us, on a midsummer’s day, to the
amazing, mysterious, and atmospheric location where the Great Serpent
Mound National Historic Landmark can now be found.
Of course there was no “National Historic Landmark,” no such entity as
the United States of America, and no Adams County in the very different
world of 21,000 years ago. At that time, from roughly the Ohio and the
Missouri Rivers northward, a wide horizontal strip of the United States, and
all of Canada as far as the Arctic Ocean, lay beneath a giant shroud of ice.
At no point, however, even at the last glacial maximum 21,000 years ago,
did the ice ever advance quite far enough to the south to bury the sinuous
natural ridge on which Serpent Mound stands today.
We’ll get to the question of when the great effigy itself was first heaped up
in the form of a serpent. But for now let’s step out of our time machine onto
that serpentine ridge and breathe the crisp fresh air under the blue
midsummer skies of an unpolluted world.
We might see some of the great beasts of the North American Ice Age—
the famed “megafauna,” such as mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, short faced bears, and saber-toothed tigers. They thrived at the last glacial
maximum and would continue to do so for several more millennia until they
were all swept from the earth between roughly 12,800 and 11,600 years ago
in what is known as the “Late Pleistocene Extinction Event.”1
The creatures
26
I’ve named were by no means its only casualties. All together thirty-five
genera of North American megafauna (with each genus consisting of several
species) were wiped out during this enigmatic cataclysm that brought the Ice
Age to an end.2
But all that was still far in the future 21,000 years ago, and
we’re not at Serpent Mound for the megafauna. Instead I want you to shade
your eyes and look to the horizon, approximately a dozen miles to your north.
There, armored in brilliant, scintillating, dazzling reflections, a spectacle
awaits you the like of which exists nowhere in the world today outside of
Antarctica. That sight, a sheer, looming, continuous cliff of ice rising more
than a mile high and extending across almost the entire width of North
America from the east coast to the west coast, marks the southernmost extent
of the ice cap in these parts. Elsewhere it stretched out its lobes and tongues a
few tens of miles farther south, but here, just short of the outer rim of Serpent
Mound crater, the advance was decisively stopped.
If humans had been present in Adams County 21,000 years ago to witness
the phenomenon, what would they have made of it? Would they have thought
this sudden halt of the march of the ice cliffs was random? Just one of those
things that happen?
Or might it have seemed that some great Manitou protected this land?
Let’s get back in our time machine.
I’m going to set it to stay in the same location but to jump 8,000 years
forward to a midsummer’s day 13,000 years ago, just a couple of hundred
years before the onset of the Late Pleistocene Extinction Event.
The first thing you’ll notice as we step out onto the ridge is that the world
is warmer—indeed it has been warming steadily since about 18,000 years ago
and particularly dramatically since 14,500 years ago. In consequence,
although it is still a giant force of nature, the ice cap has receded about 600
miles to the latitude of Lake Superior, and those looming ice cliffs that
formed a massive artificial horizon just 12 miles north of Serpent Mound are
completely gone. Minus the roads and telecommunications cables, therefore,
the view that confronts us at midsummer 13,000 years ago is pretty much the
same as the view at midsummer today where the natural horizon encircling
the effigy is formed by broken and eroded ranges of low hills—themselves
the remnants of the ancient hypervelocity cosmic impact that created this
unique landscape.
So, a timeline for time travelers:
300 million years ago, or thereabouts, a giant cataclysm forms the
Serpent Mound crater.
21,000 years ago, the North American ice cap reaches the
southernmost point of its advance, stopping just a few miles north of
the eroded crater rim.
By 13,000 years ago the ice cliffs are gone and Serpent Mound’s
natural horizon has been restored.
On June 17, 2017, I made my first research visit to Serpent Mound,
reported in chapter 1, and on June 20, midsummer’s eve, Santha, Ross
Hamilton, and I returned to the site to fly the drone again and to observe
sunset over the effigy from the viewpoint of the gods.
A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
MIDSUMMER—THE SUMMER SOLSTICE—IS the longest day of the year (presently
June 20/21 in the Northern Hemisphere), when the sun rises at the farthest
point north of east and sets at the farthest point north of west on its annual
journey. It is also a particularly significant day at Serpent Mound—for it is
on the summer solstice that the open jaws of the Serpent most directly
confront the setting point of the sun, as though about to engulf it.
This is because the northern end of the ridge, which Squier and Davis
believed had been terraformed (“artificially cut” as we saw in the last
chapter), terminates in a pronounced turn to the west that defines the
orientation of the Serpent’s head. It seems implausible, whoever they may
have been and whenever they first conceived of the mound (open questions,
as we shall see), that the ancient builders were unaware that this natural
westward curve aligned the leading edge of the ridge with the point of sunset
on the summer solstice.
Serpent Mound alignment to the summer solstice sunset.
I believe they were acutely aware of it.
Indeed, the presence of the Serpent here, and the orientation of its head,
bear all the hallmarks of great minds at work, manifesting a carefully
thought-out design not meant to stand alone but rather to enhance and
elucidate the solstice alignment—the sacred communion of earth and sky—
that nature had already put in place.
From the perspective of twenty-first-century science, the fact that the end
of a natural ridge is oriented toward the summer solstice sunset is a matter of
chance. It would be foolish to invest it with any significance—let alone with
so much significance that it could motivate a huge construction project and
bring it to triumphant completion.
We should keep in mind, however, that matters seemed very different to
the ancients, who perceived the earth and sky as living spirits in communion
with one another.
In our century, when technology is king and the majority of the human
race live and die in cities, we cut down rainforests, pollute and defile the
earth, and shun and scrape the sky. Serried blades of immense buildings dice
our view of the horizon into jagged, glittering, meaningless origami, while
light pollution is so intense that we cannot see the stars. Ironically, however,
any number of astronomy programs will bring those stars flickering into
virtual reality on our computer screens. Ironically, too, ours is a culture that has advanced the scientific study of the cosmos to an exceptionally high
degree.
It seems we want to see everything, but only at a distance, through a
technological filter.
Little wonder, therefore, that, for so many of us, the sky has entirely lost
the numinous aura that once clung about it, and has been reduced to a vague,
out-of-focus, largely irrelevant, not even beautiful background to the much
more important material business of our daily lives. Reared in a culture that
focuses all its energies on the production and consumption of commercial
goods and services, it just looks to us like bad business to commit huge
resources, intelligence, and energy to building great monuments aligned—for
example—to the rising or setting points of the sun on the equinoxes or on the
summer or winter solstices.
Yet for thousands upon thousands of years this is exactly what happened
all around the world.
WHERE HEAVEN AND EARTH MEET
GO TO THE CITY OF Luxor in Upper Egypt, place yourself at the western
entrance of the great Temple of Karnak in the predawn on December 20/21
(the winter solstice and shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere),
and wait patiently until the sun appears. When it does you will see that its
first rays shine directly down the kilometer-long axis of the temple that is
oriented south of east at precisely the correct angle to target the rising point
of the sun on that special day.
Or go to Stonehenge in the predawn on June 20/21, the summer solstice,
enter the great stone circle, and face north of east along its axis toward a
rough, unquarried megalith—the Heel Stone—standing prominently outside
the circle. As light floods the sky you will see how carefully and purposefully
the Heel Stone seems to have been placed, almost like the front sight on the
barrel of a rifle, to target the rising sun on that special day.
Or go to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and position yourself dead center at the
western end of the entrance causeway of the great temple complex in the
predawn on March 20/21, the spring equinox, or on September 20/21, the
30
autumn equinox, when night and day are of equal length and the sun rises
perfectly due east. On either of these two special occasions you will discover
that the causeway and temple are so precisely oriented that the sun, as it rises,
perches for a moment atop Angkor’s central tower and lights up the entire
majestic complex like a fairy-tale kingdom.
All these places are man-made sanctuaries that speak to the union of
heaven and earth at key moments of the year. They might rightly be
described as hierophanies because their fundamental purpose is to reveal and
manifest the sacred connection between macrocosm and microcosm, sky and
ground, “above” and “below.”
Scattered around this majestic garden planet we call Earth, however, are
other, even more powerful hierophanies, put in place not by human beings
but by nature, where ground and sky whisper to one another with exceptional
intimacy. Wise ancients, who knew the garden long before us, sought out
such spots, which they held to be sacred, and when they found them they
would sometimes modify them to honor and enhance the communion
witnessed there.
Research published in 2018, though subject to further confirmation,
suggests that Stonehenge may be one of them. Archaeologists have long
believed that its taller, heftier pillars—the big limestone “sarsens”—did not
occur locally on Salisbury Plain where Stonehenge stands but had to be
dragged 18 miles from the Marlborough Downs.3
The enduring mystery,
therefore, was, why anyone would go through all that trouble and effort
moving megaliths weighing up to 50 tons to Salisbury Plain when
Stonehenge could simply have been erected on the Marlborough Downs
instead?
The new research offers a rather surprising answer. It seems that two of the
sarsens—Stone 16 in the southwestern quadrant of the great circle, and the
Heel Stone outside the circle to its northeast—were NOT after all brought
here from the Marlborough Downs but have stood naturally on Salisbury
Plain for millions of years.4
What’s magical about them, however, is their
alignment. An observer behind Stone 16 looking northeast toward the Heel
Stone at dawn on the summer solstice will see the sun rise behind it. Then 6
months later, at the winter solstice, an observer behind the Heel Stone
looking southwest at Stone 16 will see the sun set behind it.
Archaeologist Mike Pitts, who led the research, suggests that the way the
alignment of these two sarsens signaled midwinter and midsummer would
not have gone unnoticed by the ancient Britons, who would have accorded
special significance to the site long before they planned the geometry of
Stonehenge and raised up the whole spectacular complex of megaliths around
the preexisting axis. Indeed, if Pitts is right, it is because of this natural
solstice axis that Stonehenge was built here in the first place.5
Another example of humans sacralizing a place where earth speaks to sky
is the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt, which is thought to have begun life as a
“yardang”—a ridge of bedrock shaped by millennia of desert winds into a
completely natural form somewhat resembling a lion.6
Many such outcrops,
described by European explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as
“sphinxlike” and as resembling “lions,” exist in Egypt’s Western Desert.7
But
what was special about this one was its situation overlooking the Nile Valley
and the curious fact that nature had oriented it, with considerable precision, to
due east and thus to the rising point of the sun on the equinoxes. As suggested at Stonehenge, it looks like this celestial alignment is what
attracted human beings to it in the first place, motivating them to transform it
into a giant monolithic work of sculpture, first enhancing its naturally leonine
form and much later, in the time of the pharaohs, recarving its (by then
heavily eroded) leonine head into a human likeness.
Go to Giza at dawn on the winter solstice and you will see the sun rising
far to the south of east, and thus far to the right of the gaze of the Sphinx. Go
there at dawn on the summer solstice and you will see the sun rising far to the
north of east, and thus far to the left of the gaze of the Sphinx. But go there at
dawn on either the spring or the autumn equinox and you will witness the
sacred communion of heaven and earth, with the gaze of the Sphinx perfectly
aligned to the disk of the sun as it rises.
Such enchanted but fleeting conjunctions of earth and sky are not confined
to the Old World.
In the New World, Native Americans likewise built immense structures to
honor and channel precisely the same moments and energies and sought out
certain striking topographical features—regarded as sacred—through which
the celestial and terrestrial spirits were already bound in intimacy. Thus, just
as Egypt has its Great Sphinx, natural but modified and enhanced by humans
to bind sky and ground at sunrise on the equinoxes, and just as the natural
solstitial axis of Stonehenge has been modified and enhanced by humans with
numinous and beautiful effect, so North America has its Great Serpent
Mound, a natural ridge, modified and enhanced by humans to join heaven
and earth at sunset on the summer solstice.
In their 1987 paper the Hardmans proposed a viewpoint near the center of the oval
formation in front of the Serpent’s head where an altar of large stones was reported
to have remained in place until it was destroyed in the nineteenth century. From this viewpoint they settled on an alignment at azimuth 302 degrees targeting sunset on the
summer solstice.
HERE COMES THE SUN
SERPENT MOUND’S STRIKING CONNECTION TO the summer solstice went
unnoticed, unobserved, and unstudied by anyone in our era until 1987. That
was the year in which the fall issue of the Ohio Archaeologist published a
landmark paper by Clarke and Marjorie Hardman titled “The Great Serpent
and the Sun.”
In this paper, the ridge behind which the sun sets on June 20/21 as viewed
from Serpent Mound was daringly renamed “Solstice Ridge” by the authors,
and the orientation of the open jaws of the Serpent to the setting point of the
sun on the summer solstice was recognized and made explicit for the first
time.8
What has been seen cannot be unseen, even in an age so radically
disconnected from the cosmos as our own. Thanks to the Hardmans,
therefore, no one who takes a serious look at Serpent Mound can now fail to
observe the way the Serpent’s jaws line up to the setting summer solstice sun.
Because those jaws gape wide, however, it’s an alignment that would have
been as general and obvious 13,000 years ago as it is today. The Hardmans
therefore sought to refine it. As shown in the diagram above, they selected as
their viewpoint the reported location, near the center of the oval formation in
front of the Serpent’s head, of the former “elevation of large stones”
described by Squier and Davis as destroyed when they visited the site in the
mid-nineteenth century.9
The Hardmans argued that an observer who
positioned himself in this location on the evening of the summer solstice
would see the sun set at an azimuth of 302 degrees behind a specific feature
on “Solstice Ridge”—a feature something like the front sight on a rifle that
they nominated “Solstice Knob.”10
The “azimuth” of an object is its distance from true north in degrees counting
clockwise. North is nominated as 0 degrees, so azimuth 90 degrees is due east, azimuth
180 degrees is due south, and azimuth 270 degrees is due west. An azimuth of 302
degrees will therefore be 32 degrees north of west.
ROASTING THE HARDMANS
IT’S OFTEN THE CASE IN archaeological scholarship, and actually good science,
that whenever an adventurous and unusual new thesis is published attempts
will be made to falsify it. It was therefore only to be expected, as I turned to
the winter 1987 issue of Ohio Archaeologist, that I would find a refutation of
the Hardmans’ work. Titled “Serpent Mound Revisited,” the paper was
written by William F. Romain, a very interesting and important researcher in
this field.
On the assumption that Serpent Mound had been built around 2,000 years
ago (the consensus archaeological opinion in the 1980s) Romain pointed out
that the Hardmans proposed alignment had failed to take into account a well established archaeoastronomical phenomenon, namely that the sun’s rising
and setting points along the horizon do not remain fixed but slowly change
down the ages.11
This happens because sunrise and sunset positions are constrained not only
by the latitude from which they are observed, but also by the tilt of the earth’s
axis in relation to the plane of its orbit. Presently the angle of the tilt stands at
around 23° 44'.12 This angle, however, is not fixed but slowly increases and
decreases in a 41,000-year “obliquity cycle” between a minimum of 22.1°
35
and a maximum of 24.5°.13 The resulting changes to sunrise and sunset
positions along the horizon over long periods are “sizable,” according to
leading archaeoastronomer Anthony F. Aveni,14 whose calculations Romain
used in his 1987 paper to highlight what he believed was the fatal flaw in the
Hardmans’ case. They had accepted the epoch of 2,000 years ago for the
construction of Serpent Mound, but their proposed sunset azimuth of 302°
made no sense. Viewed from Serpent Mound 2,000 years ago, as Romain
correctly pointed out, “the summer solstice sun would have set at an azimuth
of about 300.4 degrees. … In other words, the summer solstice sun would
have set roughly 1.6 degrees, the equivalent of 3 sun diameters, south of
Solstice Knob.”15 If Serpent Mound really was that far out of alignment
2,000 years ago when it was supposed to have been built, then only four
logical conclusions presented themselves: (1) its builders were very poor
astronomers; (2) they hadn’t intended to orient the monument to the summer
solstice sunset at all; (3) the Hardmans were right in their general thesis but
had gotten the proposed observation point and sight line wrong; or (4) The
alignment had not been made 2,000 years ago but at a completely different
time.
In another paper, published in Ohio Archaeologist a year later, Robert
Fletcher and Terry Cameron picked up where Romain had left off in a
renewed roasting of the Hardmans. Noting that the summer solstice sun as
viewed from Serpent Mound currently sets at azimuth 300° 05', and noting
the effects of the obliquity cycle, they treat with sarcasm the Hardmans’
claim that the Serpent’s primary orientation was to azimuth 302°: “If a
horizon marker at 302 degrees was used at one time to mark the summer
solstice sunset position, the Serpent, by implication, must have been
constructed around 11,000 BC. There may be some who would have
problems with that date.”16
It’s the last line that reveals the scorn.
You bet there would have been “some” in 1988 who would have had
problems with that date! Indeed, not just some but all archaeologists would
have regarded it as the province of the lunatic fringe to suggest that Serpent
Mound might in any way go back as far as 11,000 BC, that is, to around
13,000 years ago.
In the 1980s, as we’ll see in part 2, there was a general acceptance that
humans might have first arrived in the Americas by 12,000 or even 13,000
years ago. But those earliest migrants were deemed by archaeologists to have
been scattered hunter-gatherer groups, living from hand to mouth and lacking
the vision, sophistication, and level of organization required to create a
monument on the scale of Serpent Mound.
William Romain’s summer solstice sunset alignment for Serpent Mound along
azimuth 300.1 degrees. This alignment would have targeted the summer solstice
sunset 2,000 years ago and differs by 1.9 degrees from the alignment proposed by the
Hardmans.
The real implication of the Hardmans’ “error”—the clue they’d
inadvertently stumbled upon, of possibly much more ancient origins for the
site—was therefore never followed up because the prevailing theory of the
peopling of the Americas would not admit it as evidence.
Meanwhile, as the years passed, William Romain changed his mind. In
1987 he had written in his critique of the Hardmans that the orientation of
Serpent Mound could be “better explained by a set of facts having nothing to
do with the summer solstice.”17 By the year 2000, however, he was ready to
accept as “unequivocal” an alignment from the head of the Serpent “through
the oval embankment to the summer solstice sunset,”18 and showed in a map
how this could be done to target azimuth 300.4 degrees, later revised to
azimuth 300.1 degrees (personal communication October 31, 2018), where
the summer solstice sun would have set 2,000 years ago.19 He also reiterated
the definitive north–south line he’d identified in 1987 running through the
monument from the inner spiral of its tail to the hinge of its jaws.20
BUT IS THE SERPENT
REALLY 2,000 YEARS OLD?
BACK IN THE 1980S, WHEN Romain first laid into the Hardmans, the one thing
both sides agreed on was that Serpent Mound was about 2,000 years old and
was one of the later works of “the Adena,” a Native American culture thought
to have flourished between approximately 800 BC and AD 100.21 Though no
carbon dating had been done, this was the consensus view of almost all
experts at the time, and Romain and the Hardmans not only accepted it
without question but also used it as the basis for their own calculations of
alignments.
Imagine their surprise, therefore, when Robert Fletcher of the University of
Pittsburgh (one of the early critics of the Hardmans), William Pickard of
Ohio State University, and Bradley T. Lepper of the Ohio Historical Society
carried out the first carbon-dating of Serpent Mound and found it to be much
younger than everyone had supposed—not 2,000 years old or more, but
1,000 years old or less.22 To be precise, they concluded that the most likely
date for its construction was 920 years (plus or minus 70 years) before the
38
present,23 and that it must therefore be the work of the so-called Fort Ancient
culture thought to have flourished at around that time.24
Published in spring 1996 in a respected peer-reviewed journal, this notion
of a much younger Serpent Mound went on to enjoy a level of widespread
acceptance among American archaeologists that would certainly not have
been accorded to it if the redating had gone in the other direction. Moreover,
after being quickly and uncritically adopted into doctrine,25 it was then
disseminated to the public for most of the next 20 years as unquestioned
historical fact.26
As part of this process, an Orwellian scene took place at Serpent Mound in
2003 when the official Ohio historical marker that had previously attributed
the monument to the Adena culture was “unhappened” and replaced by
another in which visitors were informed that the earthwork had been built
“around 1000 A.D. by the Fort Ancient culture.”27
Let’s take a look at the evidence on which Fletcher, Pickard, and Lepper
based the 1996 claim that so effectively redefined Serpent Mound.
Part of it has to do with an absence of evidence of typical Adena cultural
artifacts—indeed an absence of any artifacts—in those parts of the Serpent
excavated prior to the 1990s.28 As Fletcher & Co. rightly point out, it was
only because a number of “definite Adena burial mounds” had been found
nearby that Serpent Mound had been attributed to the Adena in the first place
—an attribution that was therefore “somewhat tenuous.”29
As to the positive evidence for their claim, Fletcher & Co. give special
prominence to stone flakes and tools uncovered by their excavations at
Serpent Mound, including “a classic Fort Ancient Madison point.”30 They
also recovered twenty-nine pottery shards “assignable to some period
between A.D. 350 and 950.”31 Finally—and clearly the clincher as far as
they’re concerned—they list the radiocarbon dates for three samples of
charcoal retrieved during their excavations.
One, with a date of 2920 plus or minus 65 years before the present, they
immediately dismiss because it came from a level “far below the estimated
original surface upon which Serpent Mound was built.”32
But the other two they like. Both were recovered from the “intact sediment
used to create the effigy,” and both returned the same calibrated radiocarbon
date of AD 1070.33
These two identical dates, Fletcher, Pickard, and Lepper conclude,
“Represent valid chronological evidence for the construction of Serpent
Mound sometime during the Late Prehistoric or Early Fort Ancient
periods.”34
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 Lepper 41 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
41
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, under informs 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
42
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.
3
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 around 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
44
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.
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
46
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.
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.”
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
The 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.”
THE MANITOU AND THE MEGALITH
DEEP IN CONVERSATION, WE’VE WALKED along the bank of Brush Creek at the
base of Serpent Mound ridge to its northwestern end where it comes to a
point naturally targeting the summer solstice sunset. Trees and bushes cover
everything here except the snout of the ridge itself, which thrusts a gnarled and weathered limestone cliff forward through the green veil, revealing an
overhang and hints of caves.
Ross stops and holds up a hand. “Do you see it?” he says.
I look around. I’m bad at tests! Then my eyes fall on a chunky, mosscovered limestone megalith leaning into the bank among the undergrowth.
It’s not finely quarried but its relatively straight sides and corners, and the
curved section cut out at one end, make it likely that humans have worked on
it. It’s over 9 feet in length, about 2 feet wide and something more than a foot
thick, almost big enough to stand in at Avebury or Stonehenge as a
replacement for one of the smaller megaliths there.
“Do you mean this megalith?” I ask.
“We’ll come to that,” says Ross, “but look past the megalith. Look above
it.”
“I see a cliff.”
“But do you see the face in the cliff?”
The moment Ross says the word “face” everything swings into focus for
me. It’s not a human face but a serpent’s face. That overhang is an upper jaw,
there’s the line of a mouth below it. Above the corner of the mouth to the
right, much darker than the rest of the face, a distinct eye seems to gaze down
at us.
In later research I’ll find that many visitors have noticed the resemblance
of this completely natural outcrop to the head of a serpent. In 1919, for
example, Charles Willoughby of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum
visited Serpent Mound and concluded:
The site chosen for this great effigy was probably determined largely by
superstitions which may have been connected with the headland upon which it was
built. This headland, rising to a height of about 100 feet, gradually narrows and
terminates in a cliff, bearing a certain resemblance to the head of a reptile. … The
contour of the head, the muzzle, the eye and mouth are clearly indicated. The
Indians may also have seen in the promontory extending backward from the head
along the shore of Bush creek, the body of the serpent deity. Natural formations,
peculiarly shaped stones, concretions, and other objects resembling human or
animal forms or any of their parts were generally supposed to possess supernatural
powers, and in this instance, with a little imagination, one can easily approach the
Indian’s point of view.7
Earlier, in 1886, archaeologist W. H. Holmes came away from Serpent
Mound with a similar impression. “Having the idea of a great serpent in the
mind,” he wrote in Science,
one is at once struck with the remarkable contour of the bluff, and especially of the
exposure of rock, which readily assumes the appearance of a colossal reptile lifting
its front from the bed of the stream. The head is the point of rock, the dark lip-like
edge is the muzzle, the light coloured underside is the white neck, the caves are the
eyes, and the projecting masses to the right are the protruding coils of the body.
The varying effects of light must greatly increase the vividness of the impressions,
and nothing would be more natural than that the Sylvan prophet … should
recognize this likeness and should at once regard the promontory as a great
Manitou. His people would be led to regard it as such and the celebration of feasts
upon the point would readily follow.
With a mound-building people, this would result in the erection of suitable
enclosures and in the elaboration of the form of the reptile, that it might be the
more real. The natural and the artificial features must all have related to one and the same conception. The point of naked rock was probably at first and always
recognised as the head of both the natural and the modified body. It was to the
Indian the real head of the great serpent Manitou.8
We’re still standing by the megalith that first caught my attention. “What
about this?” I ask. “Is this part of the Serpent Mound story or just a random
chunk of rock?”
Ross shrugs. “Nobody knows for sure.” He pauses before adding, “I’ve got
my own theory though.”
“Which is?”
“I think it’s one of the large stones that Squier and Davis reported had
stood in the oval earthwork in front of the Serpent’s head in the nineteenth
century.”
“The ones they said had been scattered by some treasure hunter?”
“That’s right,” Ross replies. “And if I recall correctly, they also said those
stones had been arranged in a circle before they were thrown down.”
I know what Ross is reminding me of here is a connection he’s written
about between the geometry of Stonehenge and the geometry of Serpent
Mound, which he regards as “two elements comprising a larger picture
pointing to a highly evolved school of astro-architecture, the origin of which
is not known.”9
Therefore, while he does not dispute that Serpent Mound was the work of Native American geometers and astronomers, he believes that they were members of a much older school and implementing a much older design which likewise—at many different times and in many different media—was brought into commission in many other parts of the world as well.
This fundamental, endlessly reiterated, endlessly reincarnated design, he
says, “seems to have no home base—no specific country or culture
responsible for its phenomenon.”10
This, however, is precisely what we would expect if it’s “home base” were
a lost civilization destroyed so completely, and so deeply buried in time, that
it has been reduced to the stuff of myths and legends.
WHAT THE SERPENT SEES
IN THE HOUR BEFORE SUNSET, as a refreshing chill enters the air, we’re back at
the upper level of Serpent Mound with all batteries charged and the drone
ready to fly.
The sun, which rose north of east this morning, seems already drawn down
low on its arc toward its setting point on the northwestern horizon, and again
we notice the effective “blinding” of the serpent by the dense trees allowed to
flourish along its line of sight as a matter of deliberate policy by the Ohio
History Connection. It’s obvious, if we did not have the drone, that we would
get at best only faint impressions and hints of the alignment if a few scattered
sunbeams somehow found their way through the thicket.
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” I say to Ross. “It feels almost like
sacrilege.”
“But the good news is people are waking up again, here and everywhere
else. Regardless of what the Ohio History Connection wants or does, or what
the archaeologists tell us we should believe, we’re at one of those junctures in
the cycle where the Manitou is reactivated as a source of knowledge and
wisdom.”
With a soft buzz of its rotors, Santha’s little drone climbs into the sky and
we cluster around the monitor to share the aerial view. It’s 7:55 pm and from
an altitude of 400 feet uncluttered by trees, we can see that the sun still has
some distance to travel before it conjuncts the range of hills forming the local
horizon to the northwest. The warm, mellow light of the end of a summer’s
day interspersed with patterns of cool, deep shade dapples the immense
earthwork along its entire length and despite the trees closing in around its
head it seems truly master of its enchanted kingdom.
Santha has the drone hovering in place near the back of the Serpent’s neck
overlooking its open jaws, the great oval, the trees, and the horizon far
beyond. It’s the perfect shot but by 8:12 pm, the glare is so intense that it’s
difficult to be certain exactly where the sun now sits in relation to the
horizon. There’s a great scooped out hollow of silver light there and the sun’s
disk is somewhere in the middle of it. A shift in position of the drone,
however, confirms that sunset is still some time off.
At 8:13 pm, we bring the device down for a battery change and relaunch it,
but just 11 minutes later, at 8:24, the control panel lights up with a low battery warning. The ponderous roll of the earth toward the east, the majestic
descent of the sun toward the west, seem to have synced into a kind of slow motion dream sequence and, with no alternative, hoping we have not
miscalculated the timing of the universe, we bring the drone back to earth.
There’s something seriously wrong with it. Not the battery problem—that
was easily solved—but something in the communications between the control
unit and the little quadcopter. In the 28 minutes it takes to fix it we can feel
the light leaching out of the sky. The evening air grows cool and the shadows
cast by the trees lengthen. The sun’s still in the heavens—somewhere!—but
whether it has dropped behind the hills yet or whether we’ll still have a
chance to witness that moment is completely unclear when the drone finally
starts to obey orders again and we’re able to relaunch it at 8:52 pm.
Santha rockets it straight up to 400 feet, to the vantage point she’d found
before, and we all give a cheer as we see in the monitor, as though by some
miracle, that the sun is indeed still with us and poised exactly on the rim of
the hills that the Hardmans dubbed “Solstice Ridge.”
The next 3 minutes are magical as the great luminary, source of all life on
earth, begins its final descent into night. It’s a transformation and a transition
rather than an abrupt change of state.
The glare that dazzled the camera earlier is much reduced now, and little
by little the sky fills with the most seductive soft glow and the sun’s disk
seems to excavate a niche in the horizon, where, as readers can confirm from
the photographs, its setting is indeed in very fine alignment with the open
jaws of the Serpent.
There it reclines, seemingly still, shedding its brilliance and beneficence
across this golden land of bounteous fields and forests, as though in deep
communion with the earth. I’m reminded of a passage from the Ancient
Egyptian Book of the Dead, a hymn addressed to Ra the Sun God:
Men praise thee in thy name “Ra” and they swear by thee, for thou art lord over
them. Thou hearest with thine ears and thou seest with thine eyes. Millions of
years have gone over the world; I cannot tell the number of those through which
thou hast passed. … Thou dost pass over and dost travel through untold spaces
requiring millions and hundreds of thousands of years to pass over; thou passest
through them in peace and thou steerest thy way across the watery abyss to the
56
place which thou lovest; this thou doest in one little moment of time, and then thou
dost sink down and dost make an end of the hours.11
Over Serpent Mound the drama continues to unfold, this love affair of
planet and star, ground and sky, above and below, this beautiful and moving
alignment sustained for a long, lingering interval as the sun continues its
descent.
Half its disk has disappeared from view now, then three quarters, then just
a glimmering, radiant shimmering sliver somehow enduring on the horizon,
and then at last it’s gone entirely but for a warm, all-embracing after blush
that blossoms in the gloaming.
OLD CERTAINTIES
IF SERPENT MOUND HAD BEEN kept clear of trees by the successive cultures that
venerated and repeatedly restored the great effigy, then the alignment within
the wide spread of the Serpent’s jaws would always have been a striking
feature here from the time of the retreat of the ice sheets more than 13,000
years ago. Because of the shifting tilt of the earth’s axis, however, the exact
point on the horizon where the summer solstice sun would set would shift
several degrees north and south of its present position over the 41,000-year
obliquity cycle.
We’ve already seen how the Hardmans were taken to task in the 1980s for mistakenly proposing a summer solstice sunset alignment at an azimuth as
viewed from Serpent Mound that—according to the calculations of their
critics Fletcher and Cameron—coincided with a date of 11,000 BC.
Archaeologists at the time considered that date far too early for any
civilization capable of creating a structure of the scale and complexity of
Serpent Mound to have evolved in North America and accordingly no further
investigation of this rather intriguing anomaly was ever undertaken.
The 1980s are long gone, however, and in the twenty-first century, as we’ll
see in part 2, new evidence has emerged that calls all the old certainties into
question.
NEXT
NEW WORLD
The mystery of the first americans 55s
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