The Ancients - The Great Serpent Mound

Episode Date: January 22, 2023

Located in the US State of Ohio, the Great Serpent Mound is an iconic monument of Ancient America. Nearly 1,400 feet long, and 3 feet high - it's hard to miss. But what do we actually know about this prehistoric colossus, and why was it constructed?In this episode, Tristan is joined by Dr Brad Lepper, Curator of Archaeology at the Ohio History Connection. A leading expert on ancient earthworks, Brad reveals what the archaeology tells us about the Great Serpent Mound. Looking at the site's history and uses - what can we learn about prehistoric America and the people who lived there?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, where we're going back to the Americas,

we're going to North America, we're going to the prehistoric USA. We are talking all about one of the most famous, well-known prehistoric sites in North America. It's called the Great Serpent Mound, and it's this monumental effigy shaped like a snake in the region, in the state of Ohio. Now, recently, it is very fair to say that the Great Serpent Mound has come under some scrutiny. There have been some controversial theories and opinions put forwards as to what the Serpent Mound was, when it dates to, how it was used by the prehistoric peoples that created it, and so on and so forth. You might know what I'm hinting

at there but I'm not going to say any more about it. We wanted to address this. We wanted to talk all about the prehistoric monument that is the Great Serpent Mount. We wanted to interview an archaeologist, a leading expert on this site to find out what the latest research, what the latest information is about the Great Serpent Mound, what it is, how it was used, the great debate around its state. When was Serpent Mound constructed? Well, to explain all, I was delighted to interview a few weeks back Dr. Brad Lepper. Brad, he is the curator of archaeology and the manager of archaeology and natural history at the Ohio History Connection. He is an absolute fountain of knowledge when it comes to all things prehistoric Ohio. Ohio is rich in wonderful, in amazing prehistoric monuments I've never been,

but I must visit in the future because I've heard so many things, I've seen so many incredible images online, not least the Great Serpent Mound. We kick off our chat talking all about the Great Serpent Mound but we also talk about some other prehistoric sites in Ohio too as part of the chat such as the enigmatic Sister effigy mound that is the alligator mound. Yes, you heard me right. There's a serpent mound and there's an alligator mound too. Pretty cool, right? So without further ado, to talk all about the great serpent mound, but also other sites as well, such as the alligator mound, here's Brad.

Brad, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Well, thank you. It's good to be here. You're very welcome. And I'm so delighted to be talking more about this incredible ancient prehistory of America, of the USA, particularly focusing on the Great Serpent Mound today. I see pictures of it online, I've never seen it in person, but the pictures when you type it in Google Images, it's incredible. And is it perhaps the most recognisable icon of ancient America? I think it is, but again, I'm biased, certainly as an Ohio archaeologist. But yeah, it's on the covers of books. It's a National Historic Landmark. It does seem to be sort of the iconic idea of an American Indian mound. Brilliant. Well, you mentioned that you're an Ohio archaeologist there. So Brad, just set the scene because Ohio, the state in the USA, of all states in the USA, Ohio seems to be

incredibly rich in prehistory. It is. It's partly probably due to its location between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley. But yes, it's been, 2,000 years ago, it was the ceremonial heart of much of North America. And so just describe it to us so we can really get an idea of it as we kick off this episode today. What exactly is the Great Serpent Mound? Well, it is an effigy mound, a mound built in the shape of an animal or a human. There are some of those too. It's incredibly huge.

There's some nonsense out there that says you can only see it if you're up in the air, like in a flying saucer or something. But that's not true at all. You can experience it by walking around it. And its scale is enormous. It's like 1,400 feet long if you stretch it out from its tail to the end of the effigy. The mound is about three feet high. And it occupies the top of this bedrock bluff that juts out into the Ohio Brush Creek Valley.

So it's on like a peninsula. And it basically inhabits that peninsula. And at one end, its coils are uncoiling. And its sinuous curves go down this bluff and its head and the other features associated with the mound are at the edge of the bluff. Right. So this serpent that's depicted, as you say, it's not a straight line almost of a snake's body. It weaves and weaves and weaves in its decoration and its design, doesn't it? Yes, it's an incredibly sort of elegant and naturalistic mound. And the curves may even have

astronomical alignments associated with them. So the design is not just artistic, it's also ceremonial to the extent that it sort of brings down the cosmic rhythms into the ceremonial architecture. And forgive me, when you were talking about the landscape surrounding the mound, you mentioned this plateau. So does the ground, does it get lower either side of the mound? How can we really picture the surrounding landscape? Yeah, it's a river valley or creek valley. And it's actually part of a 350 million year old meteor crater. And the rocks have been disrupted in that. So this is a jutting bluff. And if you're down in the valley looking at the bluff, the end of the bluff almost looks like a

serpent's head. And I don't think that's a coincidence. I think the indigenous people saw that and interpreted it as a serpent in the earth. So this serpent spirit was already imminent. serpent in the earth. So this serpent spirit was already imminent. And I think the creation of this effigy mound on top of the bluff was a way to acknowledge and honour that spirit. And if we go into more recent history, before we delve into the dating of the mound, the prickly thing around the dating and so much more, in more recent history, how much archaeological work has been done at the Serpent's Mound? Can we go back several centuries? Yeah, there's actually the most of the archaeological work that was done was done in the 1880s by Frederick Putnam from Harvard University, the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

He is actually responsible for preserving the mound. He visited it, was amazed by it, comes back a few years later, and there apparently had been a tornado that had cleared some of the trees on it, and the farmer had begun to plow it. And Putnam was devastated by that idea that this amazing earthwork might be obliterated just by somebody wanting a few more acres of corn. And so with some help from Alice Fletcher, who was an ethnographer studying the Plains peoples, she was also at the studying the Plains peoples. She was also at the Peabody. They worked together. They raised money with local people in Boston and

raised the money to buy it. And then when they bought it, Putnam did extensive excavations. It's not just the serpent mound on that plateau. There are three other mounds. There's a large conical burial mound that, based on what Putnam found there, we would now call it an Adena culture. They were the first mound builders in Ohio living here 300, 200 AD, even into the maybe 100 BC. Then there's another smaller mound that also would be in that same period. But then there's another more irregularly shaped mound, a little bit smaller, that dates to the Fort Ancient culture, which is about 1000 AD. Maybe a little later, maybe like around 1100. And Putnam excavated in the field adjacent to all this, a large Fort Ancient village that overlay a much smaller Adena occupation. Maybe a village, may have been a mortuary camp associated with the burial mounds,

but it was a much more limited occupation with fewer artifacts. So there are two major occupations on that plateau, this Adena culture, an early woodland culture, the first farmers in Ohioio the first mound builders in ohio of course there were earlier mound builders in the southeast and then not necessarily no occupation but a much more diffuse occupation by later cultures and then a reoccupation by the fort ancient culture at around 1100 a.d the base layer has therefore been laid down. When, therefore, which of these cultures, when do we think the Serpent Mound was constructed and is added to this incredible prehistoric landscape? Well, Frederick Putnam attributed the serpent to the earlier culture

because I think he had a bias against the later culture. He recognized that the later culture, the Fort Ancient culture, the Fort Ancient culture extends up to about 1600 or even later. And they're basically the ancestors of the American Indian tribes that were living in the Ohio Valley at the time of European contact. And he didn't have a great opinion of American Indians, apparently. I mean, he thought everything about that later occupation was sort of plebeian, not very sophisticated, and they certainly wouldn't have been the ones to build the elaborate mounds. It must have been this earlier culture that seemed to be more sophisticated, that were the mound building cultures of the Adena, of course,

that he didn't have that name for them, but that had built these other conical burial mounds and other mounds that were in Ohio. So he thought it belonged to the Adena. In the early 1990s, I was with a team that said, let's try to answer this question of the age of it. We put some soil cores to try to find one of Putnam's trenches that he dug through the mound because we wanted to do as little damage to the effigy as possible. Reopened Putnam's trench, found a clear profile. Putnam had described an ash layer at the bottom. And of course, we thought if we could get radiocarbon samples from a burned layer at the bottom, it would definitively date when the mound was built. Unfortunately, there was no ash layer in the area where we opened it. So we took flotation samples from two of the most intact portions of the earthwork, floated them, got charcoal from both of them. And both of those dates came back identical dates, really radiocarbon dates of about A.D. 1100.

And so we thought this shows that Serpent Mound was built by the Fort Ancient culture, shows that Serpent Mound was built by the Fort Ancient culture, which is, after all, contemporary with the effigy mound culture in Wisconsin that built thousands of effigy mounds and overlapped to a certain extent a date we'd previously gotten for the only other real effigy mound in Ohio, the so-called Alligator Mound. So we thought this fit nicely into a context, but there were other archaeologists who were still convinced, no, no, no, it's got to be Adena. And they applied much later in the 2000s to do research to get, they thought, a better date. They did soil cores across the mound and then dated what they thought was the base of the mound and some of the stuff up higher in the mound. And basically they were dating soil humates

because they said they found little bits of charcoal, but they were dated with bulk sediment samples, which is not the best way to date anything. And they got a number of dates. None of them were Fort Ancient. All of them were in between about 300 and 600 BC. So they thought this proves the mound was built by the Adena culture that didn't make sense to me I mean I was ready to accept it it's certainly possible that the mound could have been built by the Adena but the unreliability of the radiocarbon dates troubled me and I mean whoever built Serpent Mound serpents were hugely important in the religion They were central and there is virtually no, with one possible exception, serpent iconography in Adena art. Fort ancient

art, Fort ancient and contemporary Mississippian art, serpents are abundant in the art, represented on the pottery, on copper pendants, all kinds of things. Serpents are clearly important to them. So for the reasons that we thought our radiocarbon dates that said it's 4-Ancient were more reliable and that Serpent Mound fits into a clear cultural context of everybody who was building effigy mounds and being obsessed with serpents lived much later. So for all of those reasons, in spite of these new radiocarbon dates, I think that Serpent Mound is best understood as a

Mississippian, forward ancient culture, religious icon. Do you think therefore, Brad, that excavation is destruction, so of course treading lightly around it, but do you think there will be any future excavations at Serpent Mound, perhaps to try and find a potential ash layer or something like that to maybe try and put this date debate to bed in the future? I think that's going to be what it will take to, as you say, put an end to the debate. But the Ohio History Connection now works closely with the indigenous tribes that were in this area. So we're revising all of our research and interpretation proposals to take into account input from American Indian

tribes. So any kind of research projects will be reviewed by the indigenous tribes that have the closest historic ties to this area, particularly the Shawnee in Southern Ohio, but also the Miami who are in Southwestern Ohio as well. And both of those cultures seem to have strong ties to the Fort Ancient culture. So any research initiative is going to have to be, if not initiated by the tribal nations, certainly they will have to approve of it and think it's a good idea. Otherwise, you know, no, there won't be any intrusive investigations without that tribal authorization. You mentioned effigy mounds in nearby Wisconsin.

I believe that's nearby. Forgive my geography. The USA isn't the greatest. But with these effigy mounds, forgive my ignorance once again, but what do these sorts of effigy mounds look like in comparison to, let's say, the Great Serpent Mound? Wisconsin actually is quite a ways away. I can't think of miles, but it's up on the, almost on the Canadian border, up in the upper Great Lakes. And there is a big sort of gap in effigy mounds.

There's all these thousands of mounds in southern Wisconsin and neighboring parts of Iowa and other states, even into northern Illinois. But then there's a big gap. And then Ohio has these two effigy mounds. And for that reason, people have said, well, you know, there wouldn't have been much contact. And I think that's absurd. Of course, there was contact. Everybody knew what everybody was doing in eastern woodlands. So there is a gap, but I think it does suggest that there was influence, that people might have been inspired by seeing effigy mounds in Wisconsin.

Those mounds do look quite a bit different. They have serpent mounds that are similar, but they seem to be more simply rendered. There isn't the scale and the elegance of the design. They have mounds that look very much like our alligator mound, and they're considered to be underwater panthers and beneath world spirits. And interestingly, in that American Indian cosmos that has the sky world above and the beneath world below, and we live in the middle world, the two ruling spirits of the beneath world in many American Indian traditions are the great horned serpent and the underwater panther. And Ohio has two effigy mounds, and they appear to be the great horned serpent and the underwater panther. So if it does therefore date to this fort ancient time, the importance of the serpent to those people, it would almost make sense as to why of all creatures to draw for the effigy, it would be the serpent rather than a different type of animal.

Yeah, absolutely. And the folks that have these later radiocarbon dates, Bill Romaine and his co-authors, actually argued, we've replied back and forth in the journals, and they've said, well, it doesn't matter that serpents were popular. You know, in the 4-H culture, they said, like in the Edina, that there may have been all kinds of reasons why the Edina would not have portrayed images of something so sacred in their art. have portrayed images of something so sacred in their art. And one of the analogies they give is that there aren't contemporary images of Muhammad and Jesus, but that does not mean they weren't important. And my only reply to that is, well, if indeed the culture that built Serpent Mound had a prescription of making graven images of serpents, they certainly violated it in building the largest effigy of a serpent ever built in the world. So it makes no sense to me that they would have that argument that, oh no, they couldn't make imagery of serpents. But what about Serpent Mound?

I mean, of course they could make serpents. How interesting. And in regards to effigies, I'm guessing we're talking about these depictions. They're not of people. They're normally always representations of animals. In Wisconsin, there are a few representations of people. There's actually a mound that's partially preserved. I think his legs are cut off, called Mound Man, a park in Wisconsin. But yes, predominantly they're animals. In Wisconsin, there are lots of bears. There are lots of above-world imagery with birds and below-world imagery with the serpents and underwater panthers. And then there's sort of the middle area, like bears, that can sleep in the ground in the winter, you know, but come out

and sort of inhabit really the middle part and are part of all these worlds. Okay, so I'm going on a tangent right now because you've said that word a number of times now, underwater panthers. Yes, basically, it's a sort of translation, I guess, of the Ojibwe word, I think it's mishipeshu, and it just wonder if some European asked one of the American Indians what that mound represented. Because when you talk about the name Alligator Mound, the earliest documentation of it is in Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis's 1848 Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. And they say, yeah, it's called Alligator Mound. It doesn't really look like an alligator because it's got a round head and a curling tail, but that's what everybody calls it. And they're convinced that that's what it is. So, okay. And they sort of keep calling it alligator, but I think they put it in quotes even. But if those early Europeans

had asked an American Indian and they had said something like Mishupeshu and the Europeans, with an indifferent, inadequate understanding of the language are going, underwater panther? Panthers don't live in the water. What do you mean? And if they'd clarified it. And underwater panthers were, they were religious icons, but they were also very dangerous. And Europeans sort of got the idea that that meant they were evil because they lived in the underworld that hell that so they may have been demonic and that association is wrong they were dangerous but in the same way

that anything powerful like an electrical outlet is dangerous if you put your fingers in it so yes they had to be dealt with very carefully but they were sources of spiritual power so if that said well, these are beings with long tails They live in the water. Sometimes they eat people the European go. Oh you mean an alligator Native Americans said yeah, whatever, you know So and I don't have any evidence that any kind of conversation like that ever occurred But if it did it's a just so story to explain why People in this area would have been so convinced it was an alligator, even though it didn't look anything really like an alligator, because they thought

they had been told by the indigenous people who should know what it was. That's just an interesting, as I said, just-so story to account for the tenaciousness of that really inappropriate name. of that really inappropriate name. We try to bring you cold, hard facts on Gone Medieval, but January is all about mysteries. Impossible riddles from medieval history that defy efforts to solve them. How did the presence of a mysterious saviour from the East turn into devastation?

What secrets does a book written in an unknown code hide? Did kings and princes really die when history has assumed they did? I'm Matt Lewis and in January we'll see how close we can get to answering the unanswerable and ask how these mysteries might be solved in the future. in the future. Just explain to us a bit more what this alligator mount looks like and whereabouts this animal effigy is compared to the great serpent mount. Sure, there are similarities. It's on a bluff that sticks out into Raccoon Creek Valley and the Wisconsin effigies also all seem to be associated with water. So it's making a connection with streams and rivers and lakes are entrances to the

underworld. The underworld is a watery underworld. So the effigy mounds often seem to be associated with water, overlook it, or even are quite close to it. So they're both like that. They're both on bluffs overlooking water. The alligator is much smaller. Instead of being 1,400 feet long, it's maybe 200, 100 feet long. The exact length escapes me, but it's much smaller in scale. And it's splayed out. You can see all four of its legs splayed out. And it has a long tail that has a curve to it. And it has basically a little round head, nothing at all like an alligator's head. Right.

And so like with the Great Serpent Mound, you said excavations go back to the 19th century with that particular mound. How much excavation work has occurred at the Alligator Mound to try and find out more about its construction and its state, for instance? Sure.

There were only really early, poorly documented excavations. People had dug a trench into it and found stone mounds at the base. And before we dated Serpent Mound, I work at the Newark Earthworks mostly. And the curious thing was wanting to understand the age of the alligator since it was so closely associated with Newark. People were sort of, I think, making the same kinds of mistakes that just because they're near each other, maybe they're the same age. And I think that's the same mistake people were making with a serpent that, oh, there's an Adena burial mound right near it, so they must go together. These landscapes are a term lots of people use as palimpsests, parchments that have been written

over multiple times by successive generations. And alligator may be positioned where it is because of the gigantic Hopewell period Newark earthworks, but maybe a sort of a response to it. But I don't think they're directly related in terms of time because the Hopewell and the Adena cultures aren't known to have made any other effigy mounds. So we wanted to determine, let's try to figure out what the age is. And what had happened was it was owned by the local Licking County Historical Society. It was being donated, I guess, to them at this time. And a road had been built all the way around it so this developer could build houses on it.

than is Serpent Mound. Serpent Mound is, I think, very close to its original condition. It's in a very rural setting, lots of trees, lots of forests around. You go to Alligator Mound and it's on an artificial pedestal surrounded by upscale suburban housing. But in that process, someone called me and I went over to look and they had actually, in scraping away that pedestal that it's on, they'd done further damage to one of the paws and there was charcoal sort of washing down the slope. So I got permission from the Licking County Historical Society that owns it to do an investigation. And we wanted to make sure that we didn't get very near the surface. So we went in basically to the left armpit and excavated the trench. And even though it was right next to the leg where this charcoal was being revealed, we didn't find any charcoal.

So we dug like another meter into it and still weren't finding and dug another meter into it. And then we hit this small stone mound as it had been reported earlier. And right by it, we found a big couple of pieces of charcoal embedded in the floor

right next to the stone mound. So we took those samples out and dated those and got dates that were right around that the stone mound. So we took those samples out and dated those and got dates that were right around that 1100 AD period, the Fort Ancient culture. And that had been done before we dated the serpent. But that was just one of the other lines of evidence why I was feeling like if Serpent Mound was built by the Adena, then it was built like way at one end of the timeline and no one ever thought of building an effigy mound ever again for a thousand years, and then suddenly it caught on. Why would

the biggest, most elegant effigy mound ever built be this one-off and nobody ever followed up on it for a thousand years? Now, you mentioned there the newer Kurthwerks and the Hopewellian culture. We've already established the Adena culture around the turn BC to AD and the fourth ancient more than a thousand years later when about is the hopewellian culture also in regards to those two just so we can get our mindset on those dates yeah that's a good idea because the hopewell basically emerged from the adena culture and this what the late nomi grieber described as an explosion of art, ritual, and architecture, happens right around AD 1 and lasts up to about AD 400.

And then the AD 400 to 900 or 1000 gap is filled by what's called the late woodland culture. So Hopal, though, created these giant hilltop enclosures like the Fort Ancient Earthworks and geometric earthworks like at Newark, circles, squares, octagons. Okay, well, let's then focus on the Serpent Mound and the Alligator Mound, because as you've hinted, if they are dating to the similar time period to the Fort Ancient culture, from the excavations, from the work that you and other colleagues have done at these places, how do we think these indigenous Americans went about building these mounds? Well, that's one of the remarkable things is they built it with technology that was as simple

as you can imagine. Pointed sticks, clamshell hose, and baskets. But in spite of that simple technology, the artistry and the science that's incorporated in these mounds, particularly the Hopewell Earthworks with these lunar astronomical alignments, but also perhaps with Serpent Mound with the alignments to its curves. It's very sophisticated knowledge that went into their construction, not only that geometry and astronomy, but also the principles of soil science to know which soils to use that would create monuments that could endure for a couple thousand years or even more. Stone was used to stabilize it if it came near an embankment. But basically, the techniques were the same.

You pick these particular soils based on their properties. Clay helps them hold together more. But also, certainly with the Hopewell color. So a color was a big factor. And then you dig it up with your pointed stick and fill up your baskets and carry them one after another. But then you're piling them up where some religious leader who is the architect, the artist who designed it, would be directing all the families that were helping where to put the earth to fulfill the incredible design that was in their head and that they laid out on the ground. Right. And you mentioned that religious

leader there, and that's kind of something else which seems to link alligator and serpent mounds, forgive me if I'm mistaken, but the presence of an altar at both of them. That's correct. And these are often found with effigy mounds in Wisconsin as well. With the alligator, this was something I didn't mention in the description. From the right-hand side, there's a little peninsula of earth that connects it with a big, round, flat stone altar that the archaeologists that investigated it in the 1800s described it as the stones were much burned. Then serpent mound, the serpent head is clasping in its jaws apparently an oval and then there's another mound on the other side of it.

And within that oval, the very center of that oval, there was this stone altar. Now that's the term used by Putnam and used by Ephraim Squire and Edmund Davis in the 1800s. And we quit using it for a long time because it seemed to imply more than we knew about it. But I think that's a really good name. The analogy is very strong. I think that that's what these were. That stone altar also had much evidence of burning on it. And I think probably offerings were placed on these altars and burned. There's no evidence that humans were cremated on those, but offerings of some kind, I think, were offered there, or ceremonial fires were built there as part of the religious ceremonies that were taking place at these sites.

I appreciate we're probably going deep into theory now, but having looked at stone circles in Orkney and on the island of Britain and elsewhere, do you think it's significant that the religious structure, the altar, was placed within a very visible ring almost? I think so, especially when other colleagues and I that I've worked with subsequently think that oval is something very particular, that in addition to everyone knows about the serpent and the oval, and Putnam and others called it a serpent with an egg in its mouth, Everyone knows about the serpent and the oval, and Putnam and others called it a serpent with an egg in its mouth because it evoked Eastern Asian religions very specifically. And I think that connection is wrong. When you look at it in connection with similar imagery that's on the walls of Picture Cave in Missouri, pictographs made by the ancestors of the Deguia Siouan peoples, probably, there's very similar symbols. A serpent with a big oval

and a woman with splayed legs. And that's what I think is on the other side of the oval. There's the serpent head, the oval, and then a wishbone-shaped earthwork. The first archaeologists to really document and talked about it thought it was a frog. And he kind of made it ridiculous

by saying the serpent was striking at the frog and the frog is leaping away and the egg is squirting out of her but the egg is bigger than the frog so and I know when I read that as a grad student I thought that was silly and assumed that it was incorrect and that he was seeing things but other archaeologists map that horseshoe shaped mound as well so we think that's First Woman. And the oval between her legs is apparently, we think, a symbolically enlarged vulva. And First Woman, by mating with the Great Serpent, obtained his power of creation.

And she used that to create all life on Earth. And her vulva is where the sun sets in the evening. And it's a portal to the underworld. So offerings burned within that oval could be sort of directly funneling into the underworld as offerings of supplication or offerings of thanksgiving given to the great serpent for whatever sorts of powers they wanted, powers of healing, perhaps for telling the future. whatever sorts of powers they wanted, powers of healing, perhaps for telling the future. So therefore, the construction of the Serpent's Mound as it looks could potentially be very much linked to this creation story. Yes, my colleagues and I think it is this key pivotal moment in that

Deguia Suin creation story. And we're not saying it was built by the Degiasuan, even though the Degiasuan peoples do say they originated in the Ohio Valley. It's possible, but I mean, it may just be that their traditions are the most well-preserved. But for example, the Shawnee are one of the only Algonquian tribes that have a female creator. All the others have male creators. That may be an echo of First Woman. female creator. All the others have male creators. That may be an echo of First Woman. Also, the Shawnee are one of the only tribes, maybe Algonquin tribes, that have a snake clan. There are snake clans in some of the Iroquoian tribes, like the Wyandot. But so it suggests that perhaps these traditions actually go back. And it could be ancestors of Shawnee, it could be ancestors of Wyandot that shared this story. But the fullest account of this

creation story has come down to us, perhaps, in the Deguia Siouan traditions. So I'm not claiming I know which ancestors of which modern tribes built it, but our clearest window onto the traditions that we think it represents come from the Deguia Siouan peoples. That is so, so interesting. One more thing I'd love to ask, therefore, and I'd love to hear what you think about it, is what is the potential astronomical link or purpose of the Great Serpent Mound? That's an interesting question. I mean, we can certainly talk about the astronomical alignments and whether they're real intentional alignments or whether they're not. There's an alignment associated with the head that does

seem to work. I mean, I've been there and watched it. And the specific alignment is from the neck, where the jaws sort of intersect the body. It makes a point. And where the altar used to be, the altar is no longer there. It was dug up by people looking for treasure in the 1800s and supposedly thrown down. So it's not there anymore. But that center point in the oval where the altar was, that line between that point on the neck and that point to where the sun sets on the summer solstice. And then there were these three convolutions in the serpent's body. And it's been claimed, and there is a general alignment, that one of them points to the summer solstice sunrise, one of them points to the equinox sunrise, and one points to the winter solstice sunrise.

The problem with those, and I don't have any doubts that they could be aligned to that, but sort of the fly in the ointment is that another author said, no, no, no, it's lined up to the moon. The northernmost convolution is pointing to the northernmost rise of the moon, the middle convolution is pointing to the midpoint in the lunar cycle, and the other convolution is pointing to the southernmost rise of the moon. Well, those alignments are different. They're not the same. So what that indicates is that because the sight line is so short and there's no obvious place to stand to say, here's where you stand to watch the alignment, you can fudge those alignments of the curves. So I'm inclined to think the curves actually are aligned to the sun because solar alignments were really

important to the Fort Ancient culture. We have a sunwatch village in Dayton that's excavated in Dayton, Ohio, southwestern Ohio. And there was a four-digit village that was excavated by the Dayton Natural History Museum. And as they excavated it, when they would excavate a post mold, a post stain where a post had been set for a house, they put a post back in it and sort of rebuilt the houses and rebuilt the palisade wall around it. And it's almost like a colonial Williamsburg experience, but for ancient Ohio. At the very center of the village was this giant cedar post that acted like a sundial that turned the whole village into a sundial. And on important dates, that shadow cast by that pole would go right in like to the chief's house, the doorway of the chief's house,

the largest ceremonial house. So the sun is really important, I mean, in Europe and Asia too, for agricultural communities in particular. The solstice, the equinox are key dates for farmers, and the Fort Ancient were farmers. The Adena, not so much. So Adena and Hopewell also have solstice and equinox alignments in their earthworks. But at least we're at Newark, which has been the focus of my work. The moon is so much more important. And the alignments that include all the whole 18.6 year lunar cycle, those are built into the many of the Hopal earthworks in Newark, especially.

But so I fully believe that those alignments probably are intentional incorporating the sun into the structure of the serpent, but it's not like I'm confident in the one alignment. I'm not confident in the other alignments. They're probably to the sun, but it's not definitive. Right. One last thing on that. Is there any potential link to the Milky Way with this effigy mound? Well, if my colleagues are correct that it is the Great Serpent and that it's an indication of the moment when Great Serpent had sexual congress with the first woman and gave her those powers. In the Giyasuian traditions, the Great Serpent is the rainbow in the daytime sky and the Milky Way in the evening sky. That is manifestations of the great

serpent. So there is that connection. There we go. There we go. Well, Brad, this has been absolutely incredible. I mean, last before we completely wrap up, we've talked about so much about the Serpent Mounds and the Alligator Mounds and other effigy mounds, the Newark Earthworks, but is there anything else you'd like to shine a light on to talk about before we completely wrap up about these incredible monuments of prehistoric Ohio? Well, just briefly, I'd like to mention that we currently have submitted to UNESCO a World Heritage nomination, which personally I think is long overdue. It's the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, and it encompasses the Newark Earthworks with all its incredible geometry and astronomy, the Fort Ancient Earthworks,

which in spite of its name is not a Fort Ancient earthwork. It's a hilltop enclosure that was built by the Hopewell. A thousand years later the Fort Ancient Culture built a village there. Archaeologists in the 1800s excavated the village thinking, oh this is a new culture, it's not Hopewell, we'll name it after the site. So the Fort Ancient Culture is named after the Fort Ancient Earthworks, but the Fort Ancient Earthworks are Hopewell. So the Newark Earthworks, including the Great Circle and the Octagon, the Fort Ancient Earthworks. And then there are five sites in Chillicothe, which is really sort of the beating heart of the Hopewell civilization. Those are the five sites that currently make up Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.

And it includes Mound City and the Sipe Earthworks and the Hopewell Mound Group, where the Hopewell culture gets its name. Another circle and octagon, like the circle and octagon in Newark, which also has the same alignments to the moon. So this is a long overdue, I think, honoring of the indigenous Ohio Valley cultures that created these incredible monuments. And Serpent Mound is not included because it's either earlier, if the folks that prefer it to be Adena, or later, for those of us that think the evidence points categorically to Fort Ancient

culture, it's not part of that culture. It's not part of that Hopewell culture. But Serpent Mound is on the United States tentative list to hopefully be considered for inscription on the World Heritage List on its own merits at some point in the future. Good. Well, hopefully that will come to fruition in the very near future indeed. Brad, this has been absolutely fantastic. And it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Brad Lepper explaining what we know so far and the theories, the debates that still abound about the Great Serpent Mountain. I hope you enjoyed the episode.

We will be returning to the ancient Americas, to ancient North America, the USA, but also South America, Peru in the near future. We've got a couple more episodes lined up of that. So stay tuned. I love it when we go to the Americas because there's such an incredible amount of prehistoric archaeology surviving. And it's a privilege to be able to bring that archaeology, those sites, to the fore in this podcast today. Now, last thing from me. you know what i'm going to say but if you'd be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on apple podcasts on spotify wherever you get your podcasts from well we greatly appreciate it because it does help us to grow the podcast

which is paramount in our overarching mission which is to share these incredible stories from antiquity, from prehistory, with as many people as possible, with you, and also to share the expertise, the incredible expertise of the guests that we get on, these fascinating people who have dedicated so much of their time to their particular fields of research. It helps give them the spotlight that they so very much deserve. But that's enough from me, and I'll see you in the next episode.