Gill: When is an eagle not an eagle at the Newark Earthworks
Eagle Mound is the name of a three part earthwork in the center of the Great Circle portion of the Newark Earthworks.
Seen from above, it looks more like an arrow, almost a “You Are Here” indicator, pointing back towards the opening in the northeast quadrant of the otherwise unbroken Great Circle.
Recent discussions in these pages have mentioned the two effigy mounds found in Ohio, Serpent Mound in the southern part of the state, and Alligator Mound in this county, just west of the Newark Earthworks complex. Each are distinctly formed not in a geometric figure but the appearance of a creature, actual or mythological, one a snake and the other a four legged coiled tail animal some suspect was the “underwater panther” of Algonquian mythology, whose description might well have made early English speaking settlers think they meant an alligator…though such animals have never lived in Ohio.
Astute readers have asked “but isn’t Eagle Mound a third?” A good question.
Archaeologists have generally discounted the idea of an effigy, though the name has stuck. A very thorough dig in 1928 by the curator of archaeology for the state historical society, Emerson Greenman, showed a pattern of “postmolds” marking out a rectangular large building under the main body of the arrow or eagle, and two fence-like walls stretching out underneath where two narrow mounds make up the wings of the so-called eagle.
For what it’s worth, if you visit Eagle Mound on a sunny day, you are likely to see spiraling slowly overhead the cousins of the eagle family, turkey buzzards. In either case, they fly with their wings straight out, not swept back: if this is an effigy mound, it might be called Falcon or Hawk Mound.
Instead, we read through Greenman’s notes, used by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the early 1930s to reconstruct it to its original dimensions, to marvel at what was first built before the mound was constructed over that spot at the center of the larger circular enclosure.
Tracing large, sturdy posts at the corners, there’s also a doorway facing the same direction as the circle’s opening some 600 feet to the northeast. At the center point of both the former structure and the mound’s circumference, there was a puddled clay basin, a heart in the middle of the “big house” which doubtless had a smoke hole overhead.
And echoing patterns seen in other Hopewell period architecture around Chillicothe, they found artifacts of copper in one end, to the east, in the buried remains of the floor, and myriad scraps of mica, a silvery shining mineral frequently found with Native American burials of that period all over the western end.
The structure, about 90 feet long and 25 feet across, served its purposes for a time, for perhaps a generation, then was dismantled and buried and mounded over, as were the screening fences on either side, creating the Eagle Mound outline we know today.
Did those ancient builders intend to evoke a bird, a mythical flying creature, or did they just leave us that arrow pointing to the rising of the sun? We’re still working on that question.
Jeff Gill is a volunteer and tour leader with the Newark Earthworks Center, and a member of the ambassador team for the World Heritage Ohio program.
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Gill: When is an eagle not an eagle at the Newark Earthworks
