We had a spectacular rainbow yesterday, as the setting sun illuminated the whole eastern sky line. The picture here is just a fragment of it (Ohio treelines can be annoying on occasion). The other picture is of the Serpent Mound. For those of you who don't know, there are dozens of digs and mounds in Ohio. So far, the most complete book I have seen on them is Bradley Lepper's "Ohio archaeology : an illustrated chronicle of Ohio's ancient American Indian cultures". It has many illustrations, maps and pictures. I just got it from the library, but it is so great I'm picking it up for our family. A couple of interesting things about the serpent mound is that carbon dating puts it's origin at about 1000 b.c., and the people who lived in the region at that time seemed to disappear around 400 a.d. It is somewhat unclear exactly who they were - anthropologists are still debating about it. Of course other tribes have been here off and on since then. The other interesting thing about the serpent mound is that it has some astronomical orientations, much like Stonehenge and other early sites (the head/tail line orients to the north, various features point to sunrise and sunsets at solstice and equinox times as well as lunar events) . I'm trying to talk the family into an archeology-themed camping trip this summer.
Here is some info about the serpent mound from Wikipedia:
The Great Serpent Mound is a 1,330-foot-long, three-foot-high prehistoric effigy mound located on a plateau of the Serpent Mound crater along Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio. Including all three parts, it extends about 1,370 feet, and varies in height from less than a foot to more than three feet. Conforming to the curve of the property on which it rests with its head approaching near a cliff point, the serpent winds back and forth for more than seven hundred feet and ends with a triple coiled tail. The neck is stretched out off a gentle curve from the seventh coil from the tail, ending with open mouth around the east end of a lengthwise one hundred twenty foot hollow oval feature, thought variously to be an egg, the sun, the body of a frog, or merely the remnant of a platform serving to support something. The effigy's extreme western feature is a triangular mound approximately 31.6 feet at its base and long axis. It is the largest effigy earthwork in the world.
While there are several burial mounds around the Serpent mound site, the Serpent itself does not contain any human remains and wasn't constructed for burial purposes. The Cherokee relate the legend of the Uktena, a large serpent with supernatural appearance and power. The question raised regarding such Indian legend asks whether the ancient native people actually created very large totemic shrines based upon platforms made of earth and stone. Subsequent changes in the form of inheriting cultures or war could conceiveably have deconstructed such a marvelous effigy, leaving merely its platform.
Astronomical significance
The oval-to-head area of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset. This calendrical alignment was first noted in print by Clark and Marjorie Hardman in the journal Ohio Archaeologist 37(3):34-40 (1987). William F. Romain, a northern Ohio resident, suggested an array of lunar alignments using the curves in the effigy's body, but these sightlines are over a much shorther distance than the head and oval summer solstice sightline, and their legitimacy is therefore less plausible. A link to this image and others is noted below. The carbon dating attribution of 1070 coincides with two significant astronomical events: The appearance of Halley's Comet in 1066 and the light from the supernova that created Crab Nebula in 1054. This light was visible for two weeks after it first reached earth, even during the day. There is speculation that the serpent mound was to emulate a comet, slithering across the night sky like a snake. However, it must be noted that Halley's Comet's tail has always appeared as a long, straight line, and in no way resembles the convolutions of a serpent. Also, Halley's comet appears every 76 years, and there are an untold number of other supernovae that may have occurred over the centuries than span the possible construction dates of the effigy, so that such suggestions are at best tentative speculations.
The Serpent Mound also may have been designed in accord with the placement of the stars composing the constellation Draco (Draco), an idea admittedly as speculative as the theory of its construction being associated with either Halley's Comet or the 1054 supernova. The star pattern of the constellation Draco fits with fair precision to the Serpent Mound. An image of this and other astronomical information regarding the Great Serpent Mound is available through this link:
There are other articles by the same guy available online, but fair warning: the author is a little nutty. : )
