I am originally from south west Ohio, close to the big river which gave the State it's name. One of my happiest childhood memories is going on picnics to the many mounds built by that lost -- and until fairly recently -- mysterious, ancient people. I consider those early visits to the little museums that sprung up in their vicinity, a major inspiration for my love of history.
When I was small, we often visited Fort Ancient and the justly famous Serpent Mound, going there for family picnics. I remember one visit to Fort Ancient when I was disappointed not to see the skeletons that had been there before. My father - or perhaps my grandfather - read all the careful labelling to me, as the bones fascinated me. Together, we studied the worn teeth, the signs of arthrithis and injuries on the bones, caused, my elders explained, by hard work and chewing cornmeal full of stone ground grit.
Serpent Mound
I'd spent a lot of time with these skeletons, lost in imagining what their lives had been like, so hard and so short. Most had died in the thirties, and I pictured them hauling the materials from which the mound had been so carefully constructed, or growing corn and hunting deer in the valley below. With the help of museum imagery, I imagined mothers in their bark houses, grinding corn, or tending to babies, and children learning from their elders and sometimes playing too.
A docent explained that it would have taken 19 generations of workers to create that great "fort." Even in the fifties, it was shown in the dioramas that this massive construction was not a simple heap of earth, but had been constructed carefully, to some unknown plan, and begun with a strong, stable foundation of stone and timber. My father, an engineer, remarked on the skill involved and on how much earth had been moved by a people without draft animals, all of it carried in baskets on their backs, and steadied by a tump line wrapped around the forehead.
The bones were gone, though, and I was disappointed. My family reminded me that the skeletons belonged to someone's family, and that it had been decided, after Indigenous complaints, to hide them away. "You wouldn't want your family dug up and displayed in a museum, would you?" (I don't know if these bones were re-buried as they often are today, but, back then, probably not.) Although I accepted this, the museum somehow seemed empty to me, as if people I had come to know were absent.
At that time, Mound Builders were considered a "mystery." Even the local Tribes - Miami and Seneca -had had no stories to tell curious settlers about who had built these mounds or what their fate had been. Over time, I learned that these ancient people built their mounds, not just in Ohio and Indiana, but all over the Mississippi drainage basin, from Louisiana to Georgia. Some are as far north as Canada! We are now learning that these mounds were great ceremonial centers, many used only seasonally, as centers for trading and religious festivals in honor of the Sun, Moon, and the Circle of the Year. In some places, actual cities formed in places like Cahokia, near St. Louis, Mo. and Poverty Point in Mississippi. These contained thousands of inhabitants, their numbers rivaling and often exceeding the size of the greatest European cities in existence at the same time.
About twenty years ago, scientists began to see the mounds in new ways. As time had progressed, and ever more ancient sites were explored, it became apparent just how many people had been in the Americas before the Spanish arrived. The extent of the deaths caused by European "Guns, Germs & Steel,"* was at first estimated at a quarter of the native population, then at fifty percent, and now, the latest studies show that almost 95% of the original population of the Americas may have died!
Hernando DeSoto's two year travels searching for gold, spanned 1540-1542. He traveled from Florida's west coast through today's Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and back over the Appalachians again into North Georgia, then on to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. He left a record of all the numerous cities he saw, and of all the battles he fought along the way, as the Indians had swiftly learned to fear and resist him. The worst consequence of his visit was to spread smallpox and all the other European diseases, to which the Indians had no resistence, all along the way.
By the 1600's, when English and French settlers began to enter these same areas, they found these once bustling cities standing empty. The tribes who remained claimed to know nothing about the mounds, nor about those built them. Perhaps this was a kind of social amnesia after what had been, after all, a cultural apocalypse. Perhaps it was simply a refusal to share anything sacred with these invaders, who stole, murdered and enslaved whereever they went.
Since the early 2000's, more research has been conducted at various mound sites, including my childhood happy places, Fort Ancient and The Serpent Mound. Some of this research has been accepted by mainstream archeology, though much is still under review. (As history teaches, new theories and discoveries often find difficulty in being accepted by the establishment.) Another new thread has been scientists discovering that the "old tales" that are still told by the few remaining Shamen to be found among modern American tribes are surprisingly synchronous with the stories and "myths" connected to European standing stones and mounds. It has begun to appear that ancient people alike, all over the world, carefully watched the skies for the same stars and the same seasonal changes.
Now, Fort Ancient has many gaps in what have been for all these years assumed to be walls, but the new field of archeoastronomy has begun to demonstrate that these openings were set where they are in order to observe the rising and setting of certain stars and star groups, ones associated with death rituals and the safe passage of the soul into the Other World. At the Serpent Mound, these same sightlines are set at the apex of each curve the great snake, himself a symbol of the underworld.
Astonishingly similar to many ancient Egyptian beliefs, these same stars guide the soul into the land of the ancestors, using the Milky Way and the same stars which were so important to the Egyptians, such as Sirius and Deneb. A glowing circle where the cloudy shine of another galaxy is visible to the naked eye, was, to those ancestral people, the goal of each and every traveling soul.
Juliet Waldron
All my books @
Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley, A guide to the Mounds and Earthworks of the Adena, Hopewell, Cole, & Fort Ancient People, Published 2002, by Susan Woodward and Jerry N. McDonald
Guns, Germs & Steel, Pulitzer Prize Winner 2002, by Jared Diamond
https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies-ebook/dp/B06X1CT33R/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2I4CR3L33JWN9&keywords=jared+diamond+books&qid=1669681681&sprefix=Jared+Diamond%2Caps%2C76&sr=8-1
And for some convincing speculation:
The Path of Souls, Gregory Little
https://www.amazon.com/Path-Souls-American-Skeletons-Smithsonian/dp/0965539253/ref=asc_df_0965539253/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312174369544&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6480905854475676947&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9006604&hvtargid=pla-567617217296&psc=1
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