Ancient earthwork in Ohio still baffles researchers

By Bob Downing
Knight Ridder Newspapers

BOB DOWNING / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS The Serpent Mound is the largest and finest serpent effigy in the United States and one of Ohio's only effigy mounds.

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Other links Sign up for Travel e-mail NWsource: Travel

No one knows who built the ancient earthwork in southern Ohio or when it was constructed, but it was obviously a major religious or mythical symbol to its makers.

The Serpent Mound is the largest and finest serpent effigy in the United States and one of Ohio's only effigy mounds. It is a National Historic Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.

Yet it remains one of the most poorly understood constructions by ancient mound-building peoples with an elusive past.

The crescent-shaped mound — it appears to be in the shape of an undulating snake with a spiral-coiled tail — sits atop a plateau 90 feet above wooded Ohio Brush Creek.

Some claim the shape of the mound is of a snake with its mouth open swallowing an egg or chasing a frog. Others say it represents a horned snake of Indian culture. Of course, no one knows.

For more information, call 800-752-2757 or see www.ohiohistory.org/places/serpent. Park hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends from April 1 to Memorial Day weekend and in September and October. Also from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily from April 1 through Oct. 31. Admission is free but there is a $6 parking fee.

The head of the snake is aligned to the summer solstice sunset and the coils may point to the winter solstice sunrise and the equinox sunrise.

Some claim the Indians may have built it in the wake of Halley's Comet appearing in the year 1066.

The mound has gained a reputation for being a spiritual place where strange things occasionally happen. It is a New Age power center, believers say.

The mound — it is managed by the Ohio Historical Society — makes a great stop for casual travelers.

Serpent Mound State Memorial is off State Route 73 about 10 miles north of Peebles in Adams County. It is six miles north of State Route 32 and 20 miles south of Bainbridge in Bratton Township.

You walk on a paved path up to 3 feet high that takes you around the mound. You can climb a 25-foot tower to get an aerial look at what may be an ancient sky calendar. There is a small museum at the 54-acre state memorial.

The grass-covered mound is 2 to 6 feet high and 20 to 25 feet wide as it stretches nearly a quarter mile. The bottom of the mound is yellow clay from nearby pits and rock covered with soil.

The serpent's head and tail both lie along cliffs on the southwest. The northeast edge of the effigy slopes sharply away. That creates an isolated feeling and provides good vistas of the Ohio Brush Creek Valley.

There is no evidence of the Indians who created it burying their dead on the serpent mound. They were buried, instead, in other nearby mounds.

	BOB DOWNING / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS The tower at Serpent Mound in Ohio offers visitors a view of the ancient earthwork.

The Serpent Mound was built atop a unique geological feature: an underground explosion that jumbled the rocks under and around the area.

Some rock formations rose 1,000 feet above ground and others sank 400 feet for reasons that befuddle geologists.

Whatever happened — a meteor or asteroid or volcano or underground explosions — occurred about 200 million years ago. It affected a 15-square-mile area around where the Serpent Mound is now.

Similar underground phenomena have been recorded elsewhere with no mound-building activities. But experts are unsure if there is a tie between the effigy and whatever happened around the site.

There are similar serpent effigies in Ontario and Scotland.

The Ohio site was first surveyed in 1846 by Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis of Chillicothe. They published their work.

Harvard University archaeologist Frederic Ward Putnam visited the site in 1885 and was so worried that it would be destroyed by vandals and erosion that he purchased the site in the name of Harvard's Peabody Museum.

He spent three years from 1887-1889 excavating the effigy and nearby conical mounds. He found no human bones or artifacts in the serpent mound. He concluded that the builders of the effigy, along with two nearby burial mounds, were from the mound-building Adena culture (800 B.C. to A.D. 100).

A third burial mound at the park and a village site near the serpent's tail belong to the later Fort Ancient culture from A.D. 1000 to 1550.

More recent radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the Serpent Mound dates not to the Adenas but to the Fort Ancients in the 11th century.

In 1993, researchers Robert Fletcher and Terry Cameron theorized that the Serpent Mound forms an elaborate astronomical calendar.

Harvard turned the site over to the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society in 1900.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More travel/outdoors headlines...