Measuring Ancient Works

Measuring Ancient Works Presented by Don Teter, PS ©2015 Donald L. Teter Measuring Ancient Works Cover page illustrations are a Scioto Valley burial mound and skull excavated therefrom by Squier and Davis “I can testify to little beyond the giant Mounds that the Savages say they guard as Curators, for some more distant Race of Builders. I have fail’d to observe more in them, than their most impressive Size, tho’ Mr. Dixon swears to Coded Inscriptions, Purposive Lamination, and Employment, unto the Present Day, by Agents Unknown of Powers Invisible.” Charles Mason, in Mason and Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon The Builders Adena (Early Woodland), Mississippian 1,000 BC – 200 BC 800 – 1600 AD Hopewell Fort Ancient 200 BC – 500 AD 1000 AD – 1750 AD Late Woodland Monongahela 500 – 1000 AD 1050 - 1635 Page 2 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works Page 3 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works Page 4 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works The Armstrong Culture is named for a creek in Fayette County, their mounds are smaller and less complex than the Adena. During the same period the Wilhelm Culture, named for a mound in Brooke County, was prevalent in the northern Panhandle and nearby areas in Pennsylvania. Page 5 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works Hopewell variants replaced the Armstrong and Wilhelm Cultures. The Armstrong seems to have evolved into the Buck Garden, named for a creek in Nicholas County. They used stone burial mounds and rock overhangs for their dead. The Watson Farm Culture, named for a mound in Hancock County, lived in the northern part of West Virginia. Montane area mounds are smaller than others, but grave goods show a Hopewell influence. Page 6 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works Many of the groups in West Virginia in this period were influenced by the Mississippian Culture, with more agriculture and stockaded villages. Middle Woodland traits persisted in many areas, and the Fort Ancient Culture, named for a Hopewellian site in Ohio, was apparently a mixture of Middle Woodland and Mississippian cultures. The Monongahela Culture resembled the Fort Ancient, but with less Mississippian influence. The Potomac Monongahela Culture in the Eastern Panhandle was a later stage of the Monongahela, arising in about 1630. Page 7 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works The “Discoverers”, 1845-48 Ephraim George Squier, 1821- 1888; studied engineering, edited Scioto Gazette Edwin H. Davis, 1811- 1888; practiced medicine in Chillicothe Davis had been studying the works for some time when Squier arrived at Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1845. They began to cooperate and Squier later wrote “I had not proceeded far before I became satisfied that it was hopeless to enquire of residents for facts respecting [the earthworks], and finally that the only mode of acquiring information was to take the compass and chain in one hand and the mattock in the other and go into the field in person.” Page 8 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works In 1848 the first Volume of the Smithsonian Institution’s Contributions to Knowledge series was published: Ancient Monuments of The Mississippi Valley: Comprising the results of extensive original surveys and explorations by E.G. Squier, A.M., and E.H. Davis, M.D., with a sample map of Marietta, Ohio shown below: Page 9 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works The “Discoverers”, 1880’s-90’s Cyrus Thomas, 1825-1910; Associated with the Smithsonian The work of Cyrus Thomas is generally considered to have proven that Native Americans were buried in and had constructed the mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, rather than those monuments being the work of some mysterious vanished civilization of “Mound Builders”. He was often critical of the work of Squier and Davis, as he wrote in 1889 (in the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology report The Circular, Square and Octagonal Earthworks of Ohio). Thomas said the work of the Mound Exploring Division including making new surveys, “and incidentally to call attention to some errors in … Squier and Davis in regard to them.” He noted that Squier and Davis had surveyed only 26 of the works themselves, relying on the manuscript work of others for the other two-thirds of their maps, and reported that: “So far as a comparison on the ground has been made … their figures appear, to the eye, generally to be correctly drawn, and in this fact lies the chief value of their work, as their descriptions are brief and usually void of minute details.” “The lack of these details, the fact that their measurements are in most cases given in round numbers, and their omission to state whether these measurements were taken from the middle, the inside, or the outside of the walls … “ Page 10 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works Thomas plat of the Newark Octagon Notes for Thomas plat Thomas noted that “The southern portions, a to b, and b to c, remain almost uninjured, being still more or less covered by the original forest growth. The other lines of wall have been considerably worn by the plow, though they are still quite distinct, the height being not less at any point than 2 ½ feet ash shown by the figures of the field- notes. Nevertheless, the wearing makes it difficult, often impossible, to determine with absolute certainty the middle line, though there is never any good reason why the survey should vary from the middle line of this or any other of these Ohio inclosures, distinctly traceable, more than 3 feet at most.” Thomas reported diameters as: h to b – 1,218 ft.; d to f – 1,213 ft.; b to f – 1.708 ft.; a to e – 1,483 ft.; b to d – 1,219 ft.; f to h – 1,202 ft.; h to d – 1,720 ft.; g to c – 1,487 ft. Page 11 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works Thomas also noted “The angles at the crossings of the diagonals and diameters at the center o are so nearly right angles as to be worthy of notice … For instance, the angles at crossing of the diagonals bf and dh differ but 10’ from true right angles; while those at the crossing of the diameters ae and cg differ but 2’.” Frederic Ward Putnam, 1839- 1914; Peabody Museum at Harvard University Putnam was instrumental in the preservation of the Great Serpent Mound. Page 12 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works The “Moundbuilders” Myth Most people believed the mounds could not have been built by the ancestors of the Indian tribes now living there, and subscribed to the theory of a very ancient and superior race of Moundbuilders. As noted in the “Mound Builders” article of the West Virginia Encyclopedia: “It was thought that a lost race or civilization, such as the Lost Tribes of Israel, had built mounds in North America. Many people believed that American Indians were savage and primitive, and would have been incapable of constructing large earthworks.” As The Cincinnati Chronicle put it on February 2, 1839, reporting on excavation of the Grave Creek Mound: “There are circumstances which go to show that the period of the world at which this gigantic monument was erected, was very remote, perhaps more than four thousand years before the flood.” Squier and Davis subscribed to the same basic theory, as related by David J. Meltzer in the introduction to the 1988 reprint of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley: “Squier and Davis had little doubt from the start that the moundbuilder race was separate and, in all ways, superior to that of the recent Indians of North America – even down to the sculpted nuances of stone pipes. Nothing in their research convinced them otherwise, and everything they saw confirmed the idea. The result is that Ancient Monuments is one long argument that the moundbuilders were a numerous, widespread, and homogeneous race of semi-civilized agriculturalists, deeply religious and of necessity militaristic, whose monuments, customs, symbols, artifacts, and cranial anatomy bore unmistakable traces of a deep historical connection to the semi-civilized peoples of Mexico and Peru.” Apparently F.W. Putnam shared that view as late as 1890, when he published The Serpent Mound of Ohio in The Century Magazine (April 1890). He wrote: “Was this a symbol of the old serpent faith, here on the western continent, which from the earliest time in the religions of the East held so many peoples enthralled, and formed so important a factor in the development of succeeding regions?” He appears to at least partially answer when he says: “That the serpent was prominent in the religious faiths of the Americans is beyond question, and that, to a certain extent, in combination with phallic and solar worship, it extended from Central America to Peru and Mexico, cannot be doubted, whatever its origin. Its existence in Yucatan is shown, as in Cambodia, by sculptures on the ruined buildings which can only be properly designated as temples.” In speaking of the “egg” in the Great Serpent’s mouth he notes: “… here we have associated the several symbols which in Asia would be accepted without question as showing the place to be a phallo-solar shrine combined with the serpent faith.” He claimed that examination of the Great Serpent revealed that it had Page 13 of 60 Measuring Ancient Works “all essential points in the fulfillment of special religious rites connected with the older faiths, which, so far as we know, had their greatest development in Asia, which is the land, more than any other, that we have reason to consider as the original home of the brachycephali, one of the early peoples of America.” Adena Culture 1,000 BC – 200 BC The Adena people occupied parts of present-day Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

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