America's Ancient Effigy Mounds
By Frank Joseph
FATE :: April 2003

Our schools are very deficient in educating their students about the human prehistory of North America. For example, most Americans are unaware that their predecessors here created an art form on a colossal scale unmatched anywhere else in the world. More than 10,000 earth sculptures once spread from eastern Minnesota, throughout Wisconsin, down to northern Illinois, across Indiana, and into Ohio.

The majority of these effigy mounds were concentrated in Wisconsin. Sometimes over a thousand feet long, they were superbly molded images of birds, dogs, snakes, bears, panthers, buffalo, men, fish, and turtles, referred to by archaeologists as "biomorphs." Others, known as "geoglyphs," were abstract shapes, linear embankments, ridge-topped mounds, and conical pyramids. Still others were crafted into designs clearly representing beasts which the pre-Columbian inhabitants of our continent were supposed to know nothing about; namely, elephants and horses.

To these early artists, the rolling plains of the Upper Midwest comprised a vast canvas for a regional menagerie of oversized animal figures. But they signified far more than artistic achievement, however monumental. Each effigy mound marked a particular sacred site, a concentration of Earth energies used by tribal shamans and their initiated followers. The effigy mounds were places of spiritual power epitomized in the shapes of animals. Birds were synonymous with the soul, bears signified rebirth, as did snakes, but what the other creatures symbolized to the prehistoric mound builders is less certain.

Comparably ancient hill figures, such as the White Horse of Uffington or the Cerne-Abbas Giant, may still be seen in Britain, while Peru's Nazca desert is famous for its prehistoric and gigantic illustrations of animals such as spiders and condors. But North America once boasted by far the largest collection of zoomorphic landscape art on Earth. Tragically, most of it was destroyed by the farmer's plow, as settlers moved across the upper middle western states in the early decades of the 19th century. Archaeologists hurried from one effigy mound to another, preserving them at least in pencil sketches, and surveyed measurements, prior to the Earth-sculptures' obliteration, sometimes before the very eyes of scholars.

Only a few examples survive as testimony to the creative skill and nature-oriented spirituality of a vanished people. The most impressive specimen lies atop a steep hill in the Ohio Valley. Visitors enter the site off the main road via an ascending driveway that ends in a parking lot before a small museum. An aerial view of the one-quarter mile-long geoglyph is afforded by climbing to the top of a 20-foot observation tower nearby. From this overlook, the snake appears to writhe across the ridge in seven humps, its huge jaws agape before an egg-shaped mound, its tail ending in a spiral.

With an average width of 20 feet and a height of 5 feet, the serpent's overall length is 1,254 feet, following its coils and humps. Although the Great Serpent Mound is clearly discernible at ground level and more so from the observation tower, it may be fully appreciated from the vantage point of an airplane at 300 to 500 feet above the structure. From any point of view, however, its fine proportions testify to the technical and artistic sophistication of its creators.

Who they may have been and when they built the mound are questions still debated by investigators, more than 170 years after its discovery. Answers range from the dogma of conservative scholars certain the image was built by ancestors of local Indians only a few centuries ago, to the controversial conclusions of archaeo-astronomers who argue that the structure, which appears to represent the constellation Draco, was oriented to that area of the night sky around 2000 b.c.

Whoever its builders may have been, they thoroughly cleaned up after themselves. Not a trace of tools, implements, or weapons of any kind have ever been excavated from the site. Its construction involved careful planning. Flat stones were selected for size and uniformity, and lumps of clay were laid along the ground to form a serpentine pattern. Then basketfuls of soil were piled over the pattern and finally molded into shape. This process formed an interlinking reinforcement of various materials that have preserved the Great Serpent Mound's configuration over centuries, or perhaps, millennia ...

Read the rest of this article in the April 2003 issue of FATE

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