Serpent Mound in Adams County and the so-called "Alligator" Mound in Licking County are among the most fascinating legacies of Ohio's ancient Native American cultures. Effigy mounds are gigantic earthen sculptures built in the shapes of animals or, sometimes, people. Some investigators call them "geoglyphs" and similar monuments are found around the world, from the hilltops of Great Britain and Iowa to the deserts of California and Peru.
Much about these ancient works of indigenous art is still mysterious, but Ohio's effigies may finally be giving up some of their secrets. A study of their age and cultural context hints they are symbols of the most powerful creatures of the Woodland Indian Underworld – the Great Serpent and the Underwater Panther. Perhaps these sacred places were shrines where shamans invoked the terrible power of the Underworld.
I gave a talk for the Ohio State University on Wednesday 27 January 2010. The audio portion of the program, along with my PowerPoint slides, is available at this OSU website:
http://presenter.cfaes.ohio-state.edu/lechman.1/The_Serpent_and_the_Alligator_Ohios_Effigy_Mounds_presented_by_Brad_Lepper_-_Web_(800x600)_-_20100127_05.21.59PM.html
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7 comments:
Great info thanks ...
Thanks for posting this very interesting talk for us folks who live in other states - in my case Pennsylvania.
This is very interesting information here. I wish I had found this first before I signed up for the other one. This is much better!
Like most "tow the line" archeologists in the U.S., Mr. Lepper simply seeks to validate the same old worn theories of isolationism while denouncing any evidence to the contrary as fraud and fake. How pitifully sad that scientific method is applied only when it is convenient to one's agenda.
I am frankly puzzled by "seekthetruth's" comment regarding "'tow the line' archaeologists" that denounce "any evidence" contrary to isolationism (the idea that American Indian cultures developed in relative isolation from Old World influences between the original discovery of America (circa 15,000 B.C.) and the initial incursions of the Norse into far northeastern North America at around A.D. 1000. Far from being "tow the line" conformists, most of the best archaeologists I know are open to considering new evidence and delight in making discoveries that change existing interpretations. As the late Carl Sagan wrote: "Science...requires an almost complete openness to all ideas, no matter how bizarre and weird they sound... But at the same time, science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way you can distinguish the right from the wrong, the wheat from the chaff, is by critical experiment and analysis."The evidence for relative isolationism is fairly strong, while the evidence for pre-Columbian contacts with American cultures generally is very weak. Apart from the solid evidence of a Norse occupation at the site of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and the somewhat less compelling evidence of Polynesian contacts with Peruvians at about the same time period, all of the evidence offered by the "diffusionists" (those who think that many achievements of the American Indian cultures were the result of contact with Old World cultures) are completely unconvincing. I refer interested readers to Ken Feder's marvelous review of the arguments and evidence in Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology.
If you stop and think about it for a second...the Native Americans were not isolationists. This is where they were born. They had everything they needed or wanted and the damp, dark and infected alleys of Europe only offered disease and death. Who would want to go over there when this paradise was where these people were born?
Very good and interesting talk. I think that attributing modern associations to such imagery as serpents may be mistaken. It is more likely that it was the essence of the imagery that was important and not the imagery itself. The mounds seem to be based in gesture signs and therefor the serpent would be associated with its undulating motion and water such as a river or stream which presents similar imagery. The signs are simply words or phrases and thus should not have mystical associations attributed to them.
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