The Great Serpent Mound is a 1,330-foot (410 m)-long, three-foot-high prehistoric effigy mound located on a plateau of the Serpent Mound crater along Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio. Maintained within a park by the Ohio Historical Society, it has been designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of Interior.
The Serpent Mound of Ohio was first reported from surveys by Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis in their historic volume Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, published in 1848 by the newly founded Smithsonian Museum. Researchers have attributed construction of the mound to three different prehistoric indigenous cultures.
Although it was once thought to be Adena in origin, now based on the use of more advanced technology, including carbon dating and evidence from 1996 studies, many scholars now believe that members of the Fort Ancient culture built it about 1070 CE (plus or minus 70 years). There are still anomalies to be studied. Serpent Mound is the largest serpent effigy in the world.
Including all three parts, the Serpent Mound extends about 1,370 feet (420 m), and varies in height from less than a foot to more than three feet (30–100 cm). Conforming to the curve of the land on which it rests, with its head approaching a cliff above a stream, the serpent winds back and forth for more than eight hundred feet and seven coils, and ends in a triple-coiled tail.
The serpent head has an open mouth extending around the east end of a 120-foot (37 m)-long hollow oval feature. Scholars posit that the oval feature symbolizes an egg, the sun, the body of a frog, or merely the remnant of a platform. The effigy's extreme western feature is a triangular mound approximately 31.6 feet (9.6 m) at its base and long axis. There are also serpent effigies located in Scotland and Ontario that are very similar.
The dating of the design, the original construction, and the identity of the builders of the serpent effigy are three questions still debated in the disciplines of social science, including ethnology, archaeology, and anthropology. In addition, contemporary American Indians have an interest in the site. Several attributions have been entered by academic, philosophic, and Native American concerns regarding all three of these unknown factors of when designed, when built, and by whom.
Over the years, scholars have proposed that the mound was built by members of the Adena culture, the Hopewell culture, or the Fort Ancient culture. In the 18th century the missionary John Heckewelder reported that Native Americans of the Lenni Lenape (later Delaware) nation told him the Allegheny people had built the mound, as they lived in the Ohio Valley in an ancient time. Both Lenape and Iroquois legends tell of the Allegheny or Allegewi People, sometimes called Tallegewi.
They were said to have lived in the Ohio Valley in a remotely ancient period, believed pre-Adena, i.e., Archaic or pre-Woodland period (before 1200 BCE). Because archaeological evidence suggests that ancient cultures were distinct and separate from more recent historic Native American cultures, academic accounts do not propose the Allegheny Nation built the Serpent Mound. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal discovered within the mound in the 1990s indicated that people worked on the mound circa 1070 CE.
In 1987 Clark and Marjorie Hardman published their finding that the oval-to-head area of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset. William F. Romain has suggested an array of lunar alignments based on the curves in the effigy's body. Fletcher and Cameron argued convincingly for the Serpent Mound's coils being aligned to the two solstice and two equinox events each year. If the Serpent Mound were designed to sight both solar and lunar arrays, it would be significant as the consolidation of astronomical knowledge into a single symbol. The head of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset and the coils also may point to the winter solstice sunrise and the equinox sunrise.
If 1070 CE is accurate as the construction year, building the mound could theoretically have been influenced by two astronomical events: the light from the supernova that created the Crab Nebula in 1054, and the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1066.[citation needed] The supernova light would have been visible for two weeks after it first reached earth, even during the day. The Halley's Comet's tail has always appeared as a long, straight line and does not resemble the curves of the Serpent Mound. Halley's comet appears every 76 years. Numerous other supernovas may have occurred over the centuries that span the possible construction dates of the effigy. However spectacular, the light from the Crab Nebula would not have inspired the particular design of the Serpent Mound.
A depiction of the serpent mound that appeared in The Century periodical in April 1890 The Serpent Mound may have been designed in accord with the pattern of stars composing the constellation Draco. The star pattern of the constellation Draco fits with fair precision to the Serpent Mound, with the ancient Pole Star, Draconis-alpha, at its geographical center within the first of seven coils from the head. The fact that the body of Serpent Mound follows the pattern of Draco may support various theses.
Putnam's 1865 refurbishment of the earthwork could have been correctly accomplished in that a comparison of Romain's or Fletcher and Cameron's maps from the 1980s show how the margins of the Serpent align with great accuracy to a large portion of Draconis. Some researchers date the earthwork to around 5,000 years ago, based on the position of the constellation Draco, through the backward motion of precessionary circle of the ecliptic when the star Thuban, also known as Alpha Draconis, was the Pole Star. Alignment of the effigy to the Pole Star at that position also shows how true north may have been found. This was not known until 1987 because lodestone and modern compasses give incorrect readings at the site.
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