America Before Read online

  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 anomaly12 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 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. PHOTO: SANTHA FAIIA.

  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.

  By stripping out all trees, vegetation, and other surface features, Lidar offers views of the Serpent Mound Manitou and the sinuous natural ridge on which it stands that cannot otherwise be seen today. LIDAR GRAPHICS BY JEFFREY WILSON.

  Partly wit
hin 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.

  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 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 d
efines 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.