America before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization
By Graham Hancock
Part 5
Stuff Just Keeps on
Getting Older
The Mystery of the Primeval Mounds
18
Sun
FROM THE CITY OF MANAUS, at the heart of the Amazon River basin in South America, it’s a journey of about 6,000 kilometers by air to reach the city of St. Louis in the heart of the Mississippi River basin in North America. On the way you’ll cross the Equator and the Tropic of Cancer. Google informs me that the flight time will be about 11 hours, including a stopover in the Dominican Republic.
It wasn’t so simple in the ancient world. Although sections of the journey could have been made by sea most of the route would have been overland through some geographically very challenging parts of Central America and involving, ultimately, much more than 6,000 kilometers.
This is not to say that such a great distance must necessarily have ruled out any communication and interchange between the two regions. On the contrary, it is not in dispute that the peoples of South and North America are more closely related genetically to each other than they are to anyone else, that there are some linguistic connections, and that crops such as maize or manioc that had been domesticated in one region were also grown in the other—though sometimes with a significant time lag. In summary, the evidence confirms that there were contacts but it also suggests that they were random and infrequent rather than regular and sustained.
The two giant river basins of the Americas (note, maps not to scale). The Amazon
River basin (below) has a total area of 7.5 million square kilometers. The Mississippi
River basin (above) has a total area of 2.9 million square kilometers.
What, then, are we to make of the fact that stunningly similar earthworks
repeating stunningly similar geometric themes on a stunningly similar scale
to those of the Amazon River basin are also found in the Mississippi River
basin?
Are the resemblances coincidental?
Or did they arise during one of the random and infrequent episodes of
contact?
Or is there some other explanation?
It’s June 14, 2017, a week before the summer solstice, and I’m chewing
over these questions with Santha while we stand on top of an earthwork
called “Monks Mound” at the sacred heart of the ancient Mississippian city
of Cahokia.
Looking southwest from this vantage point what stands out, about 8 miles
away, are the twin A-shaped support towers and cable ties of the Stan Musial
Veterans Memorial Bridge, joining Illinois to Missouri across the Mississippi
River, and a couple of miles farther south along the Mississippi waterside the
glittering, stainless-steel Gateway Arch of the city of St. Louis. Conceived as
“a public memorial to the men who made possible the western territorial
expansion of the United States,”1
the arch reaches a height of 630 feet and is
claimed to be the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere
and the tallest arch in the world.
The contrast between old and new is abrupt—for the ancient mounds and
earthworks of the Mississippi Valley, even gigantic sites like Cahokia, have
an understated quality. They don’t radiate the brash and boastful self importance of so many of our modern structures—such as the skyscraper One
Metropolitan Square, which at 593 feet high seems to do battle with the
Gateway Arch to dominate the St. Louis skyline. Neither do they overwhelm
you with their grandeur and their majesty, like the pyramids of ancient Egypt
and Mexico. Nor do they wear their mysteries in full view like the great moai
of Easter Island. Instead an elegant synthesis between heaven and earth
seems to have been sought out. In consequence even Monks Mound, on the
100-foot-tall summit of which we’re now standing, is so seamlessly
integrated with its setting that it seems almost as much a work of nature as of
man.
Indeed this was precisely the view of Dr. A. R. Crook, director of the
Illinois State Museum and a geologist by training, who undertook the first
“scientific” investigations of Monks Mound in 1914. His theory, shared by
many of his colleagues at the time and perhaps colored by an underlying
prejudice that prehistoric Native Americans would not have been capable of
building on such a scale, was that the mounds of Cahokia were entirely
natural “erosional remnants.” In 1914 Crook drilled twenty-five shallow
augur holes into the north face of Monks Mound, found nothing to change his
view and—as late as 1921—was continuing to declare, as though it were an
established and objective fact, that the mounds were merely glacial and
alluvial deposits and thus of no archaeological interest.2
This mattered because other, wiser, scholars were already absolutely
certain that the Cahokia complex was man-made and of outstanding
archaeological interest and had mounted a campaign to save the mounds from
further destruction at the hands of farmers and industrialists. Crook’s claims
that they were natural formations were therefore most unhelpful and had to be
refuted before further progress could be made.
This challenge was duly taken up by archaeologist Warren T. Moorehead,
who joined forces with geologist Morris Leighton to undertake a much more
thorough investigation of the mounds in 1922 than Crook had mounted in
1914. After several test pits had been dug on the Fourth Terrace and on the
east side of Monks Mound, including auguring to a depth of 20 feet, the results, in the form of artifacts and exposed construction levels, were too
conclusive and compelling to be dismissed.3
Even Crook was convinced and
thereafter abandoned his position that the mounds were natural features 4—a
position that today, in the light of subsequent extensive excavations around
Cahokia and at Monks Mound, seems absurd.
Nonetheless, there remain many who would seek by one means or another
to take Cahokia away from the Native Americans who built it. Since it can no
longer be credibly claimed as a natural erosional feature, the fallback
position, popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but
repeatedly returned to even now, is that the great city, and others like it up
and down the Mississippi Valley, must have been the work of some superior
“master-race” of white-skinned foreigners who reached America in antiquity
and built the mounds with their advanced skills and techniques but were then
driven off or wiped out by native “savages.”5
Frequently compounded by rumors of “giants” or “aliens,” such reasoning
has already been comprehensively refuted by excavations proving to the
satisfaction of anyone capable of logical thought that the mounds, including
Monks Mound—that “stupendous pile of earth” as one early explorer
described it 6—are indeed the work of Native Americans.7
The very name of the great mound, however, demonstrates the effects of
the ongoing casual misappropriation of indigenous achievements. It bears
that name simply because a group of Trappist monks—immigrants from
France—grew vegetables on its terraces for a few years either side of AD
1810,8
but it was built around AD 1050 by the Native American civilization
archaeologists call the Mississippians.9
We don’t know what the people of that civilization called themselves and
we don’t know what they called Monks Mound. We do know, however, that
they thought and worked on a grand scale, as I shall show, and that they made
use of the same kinds of geometry and astronomy deployed at Serpent
Mound, 420 miles to the east, and in the great earthworks and mounds of the
Amazon thousands of miles to the south.
TWO VALLEYS
DESPITE THE PROMISING CLUES OFFERED by ethnographic research into the likely
role played by vision-inducing plants and shamanic experiences, the fact
remains that we are confronted across huge expanses of the Amazon by such
severely limited archaeological data that it’s impossible to give responsible,
informed answers to three fundamental questions:
What motivated the creation of the mounds and geoglyphs?
When were the very first structures of this kind made?
Where and how were the requisite design, planning, engineering,
and architectural skills developed?
In the Amazon, on all three counts, we simply don’t know. Moreover, our
ignorance is compounded by the absence of any detailed geometrical or
archaeoastronomical surveys of the earthworks and mounds thus far
discovered and by the fact that millions of square kilometers of the rainforest
have never been studied by archaeologists at all.
It’s quite a different story in the Mississippi Valley, which is not veiled by
vast areas of near-impenetrable jungle and where mounds and earthworks
remarkably similar to those now coming to light in the Amazon have been the
subject of more than 170 years of intensive archaeological investigation.
10
Because they were always in plain view, however, and because they often
occupied land that was desirable for agricultural or industrial purposes, the
vast majority of the immense prehistoric structures of the Mississippi Valley
no longer exist. An estimated 90 percent are gone—either partially or
completely demolished and cleared away in the obliteration of North
America’s past that began with the European conquest.
So just as archaeologists in the Amazon have only a limited database from
which to construct their theories, because the jungle covers so much, it’s also
the case that archaeologists in the Mississippi Valley have only a limited
database because so much has been destroyed. Still, they’ve achieved a great
deal with the roughly 10 percent of the original total of sites that have
survived and it may not be too much to hope that their discoveries could shed
light on the mysterious counterpart mounds and earthworks of the Amazon.
EARTH ISLAND, SKY WORLD
FROM CHAPTER 16, THE READER may recall Severino Calazans, an Amazonian
earthwork with the same 13-acre footprint and the same orientation to the
cardinal directions as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Though rectangular rather
than square (910 feet from north to south and 720 feet from east to west),
Monks Mound has a 14-acre footprint.11
Considered as a pyramid—and it is indeed a form of step pyramid—it
comes third in the Americas after the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl at Cholula and
the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan,12 both of which are stone-reinforced
monuments and significantly taller.
Considered an earthwork, and echoing that early explorer’s report, Monks
Mound has been described as “stupendous in many ways. It is the tallest
mound, covers the most area and contains the most volume of any prehistoric
earthen monument in the Americas.”13 It is, moreover, part of a giant
complex with multiple different elements including more than 100 subsidiary
earthen mounds, the archaeological traces of what was once a spectacular
circle of huge wooden posts (known as Cahokia’s “Woodhenge”), a spacious
central plaza, and an 18-meter-wide, 800-meter-long earthwork causeway
running arrow-straight between raised embankments.
Enigmatically, but quite deliberately set to an azimuth of 005 degrees—
that is, 5 degrees east of true north—it is this causeway, referred to by
archaeologists as the “Rattlesnake Causeway,” that defines Cahokia’s
principal axis,14 giving the site a certain ambiguity and adding to its air of
mystery. Every mound and earthwork is set out upon the ground in strict
relation to it, with clusters of structures, dominated by Monks Mound itself,
running south to north and other clusters running west to east.
It’s easy to understand, then, why the first and most powerful impression I
get overlooking this massive ancient site from the top of Monks Mound is of
its distinct “cardinality.” Exactly as is the case at Giza and Angkor—both of
which are aligned within fractions of a single degree to true north—so, too,
here at Cahokia. Despite its puzzling 5-degree offset there’s no mistaking
where to look for the cardinal directions. Something about the place—
something intended and carefully thought through by its original designers—
immediately connects you to both earth and sky.
Detail of Monks Mound and some of its immediately adjoining structures.
This sense of terrestrial and cosmic connectedness is among several
cogently argued reasons why archaeologist William Romain, whose work at
Serpent Mound we encountered in part 1, considers Monks Mound to have
been conceived by its designers as a true “axis mundi”—intended to serve as
a junction point between heaven and earth. He reminds us of the traditional
shamanistic spiritual system of the Native American peoples of the Eastern
Woodlands—the region of Cahokia. According to this system, the universe is
comprised “of an Above World, This World, and Below World. …
Connecting these realms is a vertical vector … the axis mundi that enables
shamans to move between cosmic realms. … The axis mundi can be
symbolically represented by any number of vertical elements such as a pole,
tree, column of smoke, mountain, pyramid, or mound.”15
Monks Mound has the look of a small mountain, Romain observes. It
dwarfs everything in the surrounding landscape and utterly dominates
Cahokia. This character of “verticality” is enhanced by the local topography of the Mississippi floodplain, which would have ensured that the Grand Plaza
was regularly, if shallowly, inundated. Out of the watery, marshy realm thus
created, Monks Mound would have seemed to rear up in numinous and
mythic power and was perhaps, Romain writes:
imagined as an earth island. … If the Below World as represented by the wetlands,
swamps, lakes, and man-made water features surrounding central Cahokia is a
watery world, then it is appropriate that in its verticality, Monks Mound would be
the structural axis mundi linking the watery Below World to the Above Sky
World.16
Interestingly, and again despite the 5-degree offset from true north so
firmly declared by Cahokia’s principal axis, the largest known building of the
Mississippian civilization was erected on the apex of Monks Mound and in
this case was precisely aligned to the cardinal directions.17 Its long axis,
measuring 30.85 meters, was set perfectly east–west; its short axis, measuring
13.85 meters, was set perfectly north–south.18
Romain also draws our attention to “the powerful visual hierophany” that
would have been witnessed at the spring and fall equinoxes when Cahokia
was in its prime, locking the site in to key conjunctions of heaven and earth.
It was in the staging of this hierophany that the site’s “Woodhenge” played
its most crucial role. Re-created with a modern simulacrum for the benefit of
the 300,000 tourists who now visit Cahokia each year, and named after the
similar prehistoric circle of huge wooden posts that stood on England’s
Salisbury Plain close to the world-famous site of Stonehenge before the stone
circle itself was completed, Cahokia’s Woodhenge lies some 850 meters west
of Monks Mound. Its existence remained unsuspected until the 1960s when
archaeologist Warren Wittry found traces of immense postholes. Subsequent
excavations revealed that no fewer than five woodhenges had been built on
the same site over a period of a couple of centuries in order to accommodate
increases in the size and shape of the Mound itself, which affected crucial
solar sight lines.
The objective of every realignment and rededication was that an observer
at the center of the post circle, looking due east across the “front sight” of a
specially placed equinox marker post, should see the sun’s disk appear above
the slope of the southern terrace of Monks Mound—an arrangement, says
Romain, that establishes an east–west solar-oriented line across the entire
Cahokia complex:
The result is that Monks Mound is visually connected to the Above World vis á vis
the rising sun and its location on the east–west sight line that intersects the major
site axis. In this way, Monks Mound is positioned at a center place.19
That assertion and manifestation of centrality is reconfirmed by two other
posts at Woodhenge that serve as front sights targeting the horizon azimuths
of the summer and winter solstice sunrises.20
ENTER THE MOON
THE CIRCLES, RECTANGLES, AND SQUARES of Cahokia, the solstitial and
equinoctial alignments, and the perfect cardinality of the large structure that
once stood atop Monks Mound are among the hallmarks of the same distinct
pattern of geometry and astronomy that we find in the Amazon earthworks.
Unexplained so far, however, is why Cahokia’s designers made a
deliberate choice not to align the main axis of their premier site to the
cardinal directions of earth and sky but instead chose to offset it by 5 degrees
east of true north?
It’s a question to which William Romain offers an intriguing answer. The
builders of Cahokia, he argues, were geometricians who made use of a
special rectangle, known as a “root-2 rectangle,” in planning the layout of the
city.
He gives much supporting evidence for this claim, which need not detain
us here.21 Nor do we want to get bogged down in unnecessary technical
detail. In brief, however, a root-2 rectangle is constructed by extending the
opposite sides of a square to the length of the square’s diagonal. If you take
such a rectangle, orient it to true north (0 degrees azimuth), and then rotate it
eastward by 5 degrees to match the azimuth of Cahokia’s principal axis, its
diagonals turn out to align closely with important solar and lunar events as
viewed from Monks Mound—specifically, the summer solstice sunrise at
azimuth 59.7 degrees, the winter solstice sunset at azimuth 239.3 degrees,
the moon’s maximum southern rising position at azimuth 130.1 degrees,
and the moon’s maximum northern setting position at azimuth 307.1
degrees.
The match, Romain admits, “is not perfect. A couple of the celestial
azimuths differ from the diagonals of the root two rectangle by 2 to 3
degrees. But since the rectangle is not intended for observational purposes it
is perhaps close enough to symbolically represent the complementary
opposite relationships of the sun and moon.”22
If Romain is right, then it appears that sophisticated astronomical and
mathematical ideas, combined with complex and cleverly thought through
symbolism, were already present, fully worked out, and in the hands of
competent professionals when Cahokia underwent what archaeologists call
its “big bang”—an explosive period of expansion and development—around
AD 1050.23
Is there evidence that such ideas were deployed elsewhere in North America before Cahokia?
19
MOON
WILLIAM ROMAIN’S CASE THAT NOT only solar but also lunar connections were
mediated through geometry in the alignments of Cahokia is strengthened by
the fact that other significantly older earthwork sites, most of which were
destroyed by “development” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were
built in the Mississippi River basin incorporating complex geometries based
almost exclusively on lunar alignments. Two of the most significant such
sites to have survived, at least in part, into the twenty-first century are the
High Bank Works and Newark Earthworks, both in Ohio. High Bank Works
is located near the town of Chillicothe, about 40 miles northeast of Serpent
Mound, and Newark Earthworks stands about 60 miles farther to the
northeast near the town of Newark.
Both are true geoglyphs in the Amazonian sense, being formed by
embankments and ditches set out on such a gigantic scale that their shape is
not evident at ground level and can only be discerned clearly from the air.
This 1934 aerial photograph shows the Circle-Octagon combination of the Newark
Earthworks. Those parts that still survive are now largely contained within a private
country club that includes an eighteen-hole golf course and promotes itself as “unlike
any other in the world. It is designed around famous prehistoric Native American
Earthworks that come into play on eleven of the holes.”
Both are dominated by immense octagon-circle combinations linked by
short causeways amid assemblies of other geometrical figures. Both are
currently thought to date to between AD 250 and 400.1
Both are attributed to
a culture that archaeologists have named the “Hopewell”—after a certain
Captain M. C. Hopewell, who happened to own a farm in the right place
when excavations began.2
Newark and High Bank were first professionally surveyed in the mid-nineteenth century when numerous mounds—most subsequently leveled for
plowing or industrial purposes—were reported to be situated within the
geometrical earthworks.3
It may therefore be relevant to recall at this point
that many of the Amazonian geoglyphs described in chapter 15 also contain
mounds—for example, eleven arranged in a circle within an immense
enclosure in the Upper Tapajos Basin,4
the “two high mounds, standing like
towers” at the southwestern entrance of the trapezoidal earthwork at Fazenda
Colorada,5
the twenty-five adjoining mounds of Fazenda Iquiri II,6
and the
ten surviving mounds of Coqueiral.7
Whereas no archaeoastronomical survey of the Amazonian earthworks has
yet been attempted, Cahokia and Serpent Mound have both been subject to
intense scrutiny. Meanwhile, at Newark and High Bank a series of studies
since the 1980s have revealed a complex symphony of geometry and
astronomy encoding not only familiar solar alignments but also, as we are
about to see, much more subtle and esoteric conjunctions of heaven and earth
concerned with the complex dance along the horizon of the rising and setting
moon.
PCBS
NEWARK AND HIGH BANK HAVE an almost technological feel to them,
resembling gigantic printed circuit boards or wiring diagrams from the
innards of some immense and ineffable instrument. It’s interesting, therefore,
that Bradley Lepper, currently curator of archaeology with the Ohio History
Connection, believes they may originally have been conceived by their designers as the components in “a monumental engine for world renewal … a
vast machine, or device, designed and built to unleash primordial forces.”8
At both sites the principal geoglyph combines a circle with an octagon and
in both cases these figures are formed by large earthen embankments as much
as 12 meters wide at the base and typically about 1.7 meters high.9
Newark Great Circle, also known as the Fairground Circle, with its interior ditch and
central three-lobed “Eagle Mound.” The diameter of the circle is 365.9 meters (just
over 1,200 feet).
A striking similarity of general design connects the octagon/circle theme of
Newark and High Bank with the Amazonian geoglyph (see chapter 15) of
Santa Isabel. Although the latter is less geometrically exact than the Ohio
examples, this is by no means always the rule since both regions exhibit
numbers of extremely precise and numbers of more mediocre earthworks.
The strict lines of Ohio’s Newark Octagon enclose an area of 50 acres and
its eight walls have an average length of 167.7 meters.10 The adjoining circle,
known since the nineteenth century as the “Observatory Circle,” encloses an
area of 20 acres and has a diameter of 321.3 meters.11 A resurvey of the site,
carried out with modern instruments in 1982, revealed that “the midline of
the embankment walls deviates by no more than 1.2 m at any place from a
perfect circle of diameter 321.3 m. A perfect circle of this diameter would
have a circumference of 1009.4 m, whereas the actual circle has a
circumference of 1008.6 m. Thus it is evident that the Observatory Circle
very closely approximates a true circle.”12
Located 2 kilometers southeast of the Observatory Circle is a second,
larger but less geometrically perfect circle known as the Great Circle and
formerly as the Fairground Circle, since it was used as the site of the Licking
County Fairgrounds from 1854 to 1933.13 It encloses an area of 30 acres 14
and, though much depleted by misuse and the passage of time, its earthwork
walls today, varying between 1.5 meters and 4.3 meters in height and
between 11 meters and 17 meters in width,15 still give a sense of the enormity
of the original enterprise. At its center are the remnants of a three-lobed
mound, usually referred to as “Eagle Mound” because many visitors have
seen in it a resemblance to a bird with outstretched wings.16 Archaeologists, however, regard it as “a series of conjoined mounds rather than a specific
effigy form.”17
Images from the 1894 Bureau of Ethnology Survey. Badly damaged even then,
Newark’s Great Square (left), also known as “Wright Square” or “the Wright
Earthworks,” is almost completely destroyed today, with only a short segment of one
of the four walls remaining. The perimeter of the Great Square is equal to the
circumference of the Great Circle (center), while its area is equal to the area of the
Observatory Circle (right).
The diameter of the Great Circle, at 365.9 meters,18 is of the same order of
magnitude as the Neolithic henges in the British Isles. Stonehenge at 110
meters is smaller 19 but Avebury at approximately 420 meters is larger.20
Moreover, just like Avebury and many of the Amazonian earthworks
reviewed in chapter 16, a striking feature of Newark’s Great Circle is the
massive ditch—as much as 12.5 meters wide and 4 meters deep 21—that runs
inside its embankment walls. Indeed, such a ditch, within rather than outside
a circular embankment, is the very definition of a henge.
Alongside its circles, and an integral part of the same enormous complex
(to the other major elements of which it was joined by causeways), Newark
in its prime possessed a square enclosure, “nearly geometrically perfect,”22
with sides averaging 931 feet in length.23 Almost nothing of it remains today
but fortunately enough was intact when it was surveyed in the nineteenth
century, first by Squier and Davis and later by Cyrus Thomas of the Bureau
of Ethnology, to establish its measures exactly. These and subsequent surveys
have revealed not only that “the perimeter of the square earthwork is
precisely equal to the circumference of the Great Circle,” but also, as Bradley
Lepper notes, that “its area is equal to the area of the Observatory Circle.” In these clearly deliberate and carefully thought through harmonies, Lepper
rightly finds “indications of the remarkable sophistication of the geometry
incorporated into the architecture of the Newark Earthworks.”24
William Romain is more specific. In his view the creators of this
extraordinary and in some ways rather otherworldly site “were intrigued by
the variety of possible relationships between a circle and a square. … The
idea that seems to be expressed is that, for every circular enclosure, a
corresponding square … can be related to the circle by geometric means.”25
“Squaring the circle”—constructing a square with the same area as a given
circle—was of course a geometrical exercise of great interest to the master
mathematicians of ancient Babylon, Egypt, and Greece.26
The dominant reference frame of modern archaeology does not encourage
us to believe that any Native North Americans 2,000 years ago would have
possessed the necessary knowledge and skills to perform such an exercise.
Yet clearly they did, for the proof is there at Newark—not scratched on some
handy-sized clay tablet or papyrus but set out with high precision on the
ground in an assembly of truly gigantic and mysterious earthworks.
Many different variations on the same theme, which there is not space to
review here, are to be found at other Hopewell sites in Ohio—for example, a
square/circle combination that formerly existed in Pike County. Fortunately,
it was surveyed by Squier and Davis in 1848 and their rendering, in figure 11 of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, shows it to have been very
similar in concept and plan—and indeed in size—to the earthwork at Jacó Sá
in the Amazon described in chapter 15. The two figures are not identical, but
they appear to demonstrate the identical geometrical principle.
From chapter 15 the reader will also recall the recent discovery of a
squared circle complex within the great henge at Avebury in the British Isles.
Are we to resort once again to the archaeological cover-all of
“coincidence” to explain the constant repetition and replication of the same
astronomical and geometrical constructs in earthworks as far apart in space
and time as Avebury, Newark, and Jacó Sá? Or could it be that some guided
and intentional process, as yet undetected by archaeology, was underway
behind the scenes of prehistory?
THE CONNECTION TO HIGH BANK
WE’VE SEEN HOW THE DIAMETER of the nearly geometrically perfect
Observatory Circle at Newark is 321.3 meters (1,054 feet). Astronomer Ray
Hively and philosopher Robert Horn of Indiana’s Earlham College, whose
comprehensive work at Newark and High Bank in the 1980s provided the
foundation for all subsequent studies, realized that the same length of 321.3
meters had also been used by the builders to lay out the Octagon:27
The conclusion suggested by the geometry of the Observatory Circle–Octagon
combination is that both figures have been carefully and skilfully constructed from
the same fundamental length.28
This unit of measure, now known by the unfortunate yet strangely
appropriate acronym OCD (for Observatory Circle Diameter), was also
deployed at High Bank, which, as Hively and Horn remind us, is “the only
other circle-octagon combination known to have been constructed by the
Hopewell.”29 It cannot be a coincidence, then, that High Bank turns out to
conform to a geometric pattern based on a fundamental length of 0.998
OCD.30
Nor is the connection between these two sites limited to their shared unit of
measure.
Perhaps most striking of all is the fact, noted by archaeologist Bradley
Lepper, that “the main axis of High Bank Works—that is, a line projected
through the center of the Circle and the Octagon—bears a direct relationship
to the axis of Newark’s Observatory Circle and Octagon. Although built
more than 60 miles apart, the axis of High Bank Works is oriented at
precisely 90 degrees to that of Newark earthworks. This suggests a deliberate
attempt to link these sites through geometry and astronomy.”31
In my view it more than merely “suggests!” Given that these are the only
two sites in North America with circle-octagon combination earthworks,
given that the circles are 99.8 percent identical in size, and given their precise
90-degree orientation to one another, a quite remarkable feat of surveying
across a great span of country, I think we can safely say that the designers
did intend a deliberate connection here. Lepper himself makes a strong case
that this connection might have been more than symbolic when he presents
evidence for the former existence of a causewayed road with some stretches
of its parallel walls still in place as late as the mid-nineteenth century. He
calls it “the Great Hopewell Road” and speculates that it was perhaps a
pilgrim route that once ran between Newark and High Bank.32
As at Newark, a circle-octagon combination forms the dominant glyph at
High Bank, and there are adjacent figures and causewayed avenues. When
Squier and Davis surveyed the site in the nineteenth century (there has been
massive destruction since) they reported that the walls of the High Bank
Octagon were “very bold; and where they have been least subjected to
cultivation are between eleven and twelve feet in height, by about fifty feet
base. The wall of the circle is much less, nowhere measuring over four or five
feet in altitude.”33 Despite its once “bold” walls, the High Bank Octagon,
enclosing 18 acres,34 is a much smaller figure than the Newark Octagon,
which, as we’ve seen, encloses 50 acres.35
Why, since otherwise the circle-octagon motifs of the two sites are so
similar, since their circles are of identical size, and since it seems the
earthwork-makers did nothing by chance, should there be this marked
reduction in scale of the High Bank Octagon?
The answer, as we shall see, has to do with eerily precise, indeed scientific,
observations of the moon.
Extreme rise and set points of the moon over its 18.6-year cycle as viewed from Newark, Ohio. When the moon is at a position for maximum extremes, the extreme north and south moonrises and moonsets in a given month are separated by 77 degrees; at the position for minimum extremes, the extreme moonrises and moonsets are separated by 49 degrees.
SKY KNOWLEDGE
LIKE OTHER SACRED SITES SCATTERED around the world, the geometrical
mounds and earthworks of North America don’t give up their secrets easily.
They have ways of grabbing your attention but they’re going to force you to
do some work before they allow you to understand them. Thus, for example,
getting to grips properly with Serpent Mound requires knowledge of what a
solstice is and of how the rising and setting points of the sun change
according to a predictable cycle throughout the year.
Such knowledge, archaeologists argue, would have had immediate utility
in the pre-industrial world, reminding farmers, in the words of Ecclesiastes,
that for “every thing there is a season … a time to plant and a time to pluck
that which is planted.”
As a motive for the memorialization of solstitial and equinoctial
alignments, however, the arguments in favor of a practical immediate
agricultural payoff don’t adequately account for the enormous effort involved
in the construction of many of the sites. After all, the same calendrical
functions could have been realized almost as effectively and much less
expensively with pairs of aligned poles.
The notion that a reliable agricultural calendar was the primary motive for
skywatching also fails to explain why we find the same focus on the rising
and setting sun on the solstices and the equinoxes in distinctly preagricultural sites such as Painel do Pilão in the Amazon, dating back more
than 13,000 years.36
Likewise, though they can only have been the product of detailed
observations of the heavens and would have required meticulous record keeping over many generations, the lunar alignments manifested in the great
earthworks at Newark and High Bank have no obvious practical function in
terms of harvests—or, indeed, of any other utilitarian pursuit. Once again,
though, what they do require of those who seek deeper knowledge of them is
a study of the heavens.
Nothing beats direct observation of the sky over the course of the year—
except observing it over the course of many years—but these days excellent
free astronomical software can speed up and simplify the learning task by
showing us the exact rising points of the sun and the moon at any location
and over any interval we choose.
If we make use of such software to observe the behavior of the moon over,
say, a period of a century, we will quickly notice that its rising and setting
points along the eastern and western horizons are locked to a cycle shifting
from farthest north to farthest south and back to farthest north again every
month. As more time passes, however, we will also observe that these
monthly “boundaries” on the moon’s rising and setting points aren’t fixed
from year to year but instead widen and narrow over an 18.6-year cycle. If
they are at their widest (“Maximum Extreme”) today, then they will be at
their narrowest (“Minimum Extreme) in 9.3 years and at their widest again
9.3 years after that.
Eight prominent directions are therefore implicated in these celestial
events. Four target the maximum and minimum monthly boundaries north of
east and the maximum and minimum monthly boundaries south of east
between which the moon can rise during its 18.6-year cycle. The other four
do the same for moonset on the western horizon. On each occasion as it
reaches one of its extremes the moon’s constant motion stops—literally
comes to a standstill—before it reverses the direction of its oscillation for the
next 9.3 years.
The geometry of the Newark Earthworks—and of High Bank, too—turns
out to be very closely fitted to these obscure celestial events, known to
astronomers as “lunar standstills,” knowledge of which would appear to have
no practical contribution to make to the necessities of everyday life.
NEWARK’S LUNAR CODE
IT’S LARGELY THANKS TO RAY Hively and Robert Horn that we know of these
lunar connections at all.
When they began work at Newark in 1975 their purpose was to conduct “a
field exercise in data collection and analysis for an undergraduate
interdisciplinary course.”37 Although cosmology and the astronomical
knowledge of prehistoric and ancient cultures were within the scope of the
course, they make clear that they “did not expect to find any particular
geometrical or astronomical pattern” at Newark.38 “Indeed, given the
difficulty of showing that any such pattern was intentional rather than
fortuitous, we doubted any persuasive hypothesis regarding design of the
earthworks could be formed.”39
To their surprise, however, as they admitted in 2016:
Our continued analysis … has revealed repetitive patterns of earthwork and
topographical features oriented or aligned to the extreme rise and set points of both
the sun and the moon on the horizon. These alignments, combined with the
massive scale, geometrical symmetry and regularity of the earthen enclosures
suggest that the Newark Earthworks were built to record, celebrate, and connect
with celestial actors or large-scale forces that appear to govern relations among
earth, sky and the human mind.40
In their initial study, published in the journal Archaeoastronomy in 1982,41
Hively and Horn did not recognize any solar alignments at Newark.42 What
grabbed their attention instead was the intricate cat’s cradle of lunar
alignments uncovered by their detective work.43
Some were obvious, indeed unmissable once the lunar concerns of the site
were admitted—for example, the fact that “the avenue axis of the Octagon points to the maximum northern extreme rising point of the moon with an
error of 0.2o
.”44
Such an “error,” amounting to less than two-tenths of a single degree,
represents remarkable precision for any epoch and far exceeds the level of
science generally assumed by archaeologists to have existed in the preColumbian Americas. Moreover, “the avenue axis and four sides of the
Octagon mark five of the eight extreme lunar rise-set points with a mean
accuracy of 0.5o
.”45
The three remaining alignments, accurate to within 0.4 degrees, 0.7
degrees, and 0.8 degrees, respectively, are also shown in the diagram
following.
RIGHT: The eight key stations of the 18.6-year lunar-standstill cycle at Newark. The central axis and four walls target, respectively: (1) maximum northern moonrise; (2) maximum northern moonset; (3) minimum northern moonrise; (4) minimum southern moonset; and (5) maximum southern moonrise. The three remaining alignments identified by Hively and Horn are (6) maximum southern moonset; (7) minimum northern moonset; and (8) minimum southern moonrise.
Hively and Horn reinforce their case with another observation. The four
sides of the Newark Octagon that are not aligned to significant lunar events
form closely parallel pairs and are highly symmetrical. By contrast the four sides that do align to lunar standstills are neither parallel nor symmetrical.
The obvious deduction to be made from this is that the geometrical symmetry
of the Octagon was deliberately distorted to achieve more accurate lunar
alignments.46 Moreover,
the requirements of (1) octagonal symmetry and of (2) alignment with lunar
extrema uniquely define the Newark Octagon. Of the infinity of possible octagons
which could have been constructed at this site, the one we find is precisely the one
which matches the lunar extrema most closely. In fact we have been unable to
design an equilateral polygon with eight or fewer sides which incorporates the
same lunar points more efficiently and accurately than does the Newark
Octagon.47
SUN AND MOON AT HIGH BANK
THE GREAT CONTRIBUTION OF HIVELY and Horn’s 1982 paper in
Archaeoastronomy was that it demonstrated how precisely, and how cleverly,
Newark celebrates and embraces the lunar standstills. In a follow-up paper published in the same journal in 1984, the same investigators go on to prove
that the High Bank structures embody equally unequivocal alignments to the
extreme north and south rise points of the moon.48 And just as at Newark,
where deliberate asymmetries were introduced into the side lengths and
angles of the Octagon to achieve more perfect lunar alignments, so, too, we
find that one of the eight walls of High Bank’s octagon is 16 percent longer
than it “should” be to preserve perfect geometrical symmetry. This “error,”
however, alters the angle to the neighboring vertex, thus opening up an
alignment to the southern extreme moonrise at minimum standstill within a
margin of just 0.6 degrees. If the wall had been the “correct” symmetrical
length no lunar alignment would have been possible.49 A second such “error”
facilitates an alignment with the southern extreme moonset, again at
minimum standstill.50
A further alignment, in this case made possible by deviations in linearity,
targets the northern extreme moonset at maximum standstill.
Clearly, therefore, High Bank and Newark have much in common and in
some ways seem almost like twins. Why then, as we asked earlier, does the
octagon of one of these “twins” enclose 50 acres while the octagon of the
other encloses just 18 acres?
The answer offered by Hively and Horn is that not only does the 50-acre
Newark octagon match the lunar extrema more closely than any other
269
possible octagon, but also that it was designed to do so within the specific
latitude band—measuring 44.5 kilometers from north to south—in which
Newark is located.51 In other words, the purpose of accurately aligning the
earthwork to the lunar standstills would not have been served if the Newark
octagon, like the circle, had been reproduced with an exact duplicate at High
Bank more than 90 kilometers to the south.52 The 18-acre figure with
different vertex angles that we find at High Bank is perfectly suited to the
task at High Bank’s latitude.
Among other differences between the two sites, perhaps the most notable
is that no alignment to any significant solar event, whether to the equinoxes,
or to the solstices, or to the so-called cross-quarter days in between, has yet
been satisfactorily identified at Newark in the earthworks themselves.53
But there’s a context to this.
Recent research by Hively and Horn has raised the intriguing possibility
that the very reason Newark’s earthworks are where they are is that four
prominent “high-elevation overlooks” in the surrounding landscape serve as
natural front and back sights targeting sunrise and sunset on the winter and
summer solstices.54 It’s unlikely to be an accident that the point of
intersection of these natural alignments “lies in the central region of the
earthworks and is equidistant (within 2 percent) from the centers of the
Observatory Circle and the Great Circle.”55
Just as with its latitude, therefore, though the matter cannot be proved, the
choice of Newark’s natural setting feels designed and deliberate.
Meanwhile, at High Bank, Hively and Horn’s 1984 study not only
confirmed key lunar alignments to southern extreme moonrise, southern
extreme moonset, and northern extreme moonset, as we’ve seen, but also to
the northern extreme moonrise and to the southern extreme moonset—
both at maximum standstill. In addition, the summer solstice sunrise is
targeted within 0.5 degrees by wall 1 → 2 while the alignment 13 → 2 targets
the winter solstice sunrise 56—the same familiar memes of cosmic mystery
and geometric magic that manifest in earlier sites such as Serpent Mound and
later sites such as Cahokia.
We’ve seen that these memes can be traced in the Amazon at least as far
back as Painel do Pilão some 13,000 years ago. Before Cahokia, before Newark and High Bank, before Serpent Mound,
how far back can we follow their trail in North America?
next
THE POVERTY POINT TIME MACHINE
source and footnotes here
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