Shiels: Alligators, serpents and Ohio's ceremonial earthworks
The Department of Interior’s decision to nominate the Great Circle and Octagon Earthworks for World Heritage status has made us all more aware of these two amazing mounds in Newark and Heath -- and a new book on the New York Times best seller should make us proud of an amazing mound in Granville as well.
Origin. A Genetic History of the Americas begins with this sentence:
“On a July afternoon I walked down a tree lined street in Granville, Ohio.”
Author Jennifer Raff continues down (or more accurately, up) the street and introduces Alligator Mound, built about 1200 AD. Readers learn a good deal about Alligator Mound and a little bit about Granville.
Alligator Mound is one of two “effigy mounds” in Ohio. Serpent Mound is the other. An “effigy mound” is a mound in the shape of an animal.
No one doubts that Serpent Mound was built to look like a snake. Was the Alligator mound built to look like an alligator? How would ancient Ohioans have known what alligators look like? Archaeologist Bradley Lepper and Denison professor Todd Frolking have argued that what Anglo-American settlers called Alligator Mound was more likely built to look like an underwater panther, an iconic figure in some American Indian cultures.
Ancestors of American Indians built numerous effigy mounds over several centuries beginning about 1200 AD. The largest number of these are in Wisconsin and Minnesota but Ohio’s Serpent Mound is the best known. Nearly every American history textbook includes a picture of Serpent Mound.
Effigy mounds are a different variety of earthworks from the Octagon and the Great Circle which archaeologists have labelled “Hopewell Earthworks,” built by what archaeologists consider a different American Indian culture hundreds of years earlier.
Ohio was the epicenter of the Hopewell culture that built ceremonial geometric earthworks across most of eastern North America between the years 1 and 400 AD. Wisconsin was the epicenter of the culture that built effigy mounds several centuries later. Impressive American Indian cultures lived in North America, including mound building cultures located largely east of the Mississippi River.
Newark’s Octagon and Great Circle earthworks are two of the seven Ohio earthworks that are about to be designated a World Heritage site by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). The other five are all within driving distance: Fort Ancient and the earthworks that constituent the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe.
Serpent Mound, Ohio’s most famous earthwork, is not included in this World Heritage nomination precisely because it was built several centuries later, by what archaeologists recognize as a different culture.
But here is something very few people know: the United States Department of Interior has included Serpent Mound as well as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks on its short list of potential World Heritage sites. Ohio will almost certainly have a World Heritage site within the next two years and may very well have a second a few years after that.
Serpent Mound is famous. World Heritage status will make the earthworks in Newark and Heath and five other Ohio earthworks well known, even famous. We can expect our grandchildren to read about the Octagon and the Great Circle in their textbooks, as current children read about Serpent Mound. Already Americans are reading Jennifer Raff’s best selling book and learning about our very own effigy mound here in Licking County.
Richard Shiels is an Emeritus Associate Professor of History and Founding Director of Ohio State University’s Newark Earthworks Center.
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Shiels: Alligators, serpents and Ohio's ceremonial earthworks
