Serpent Mound OH

The most delightful and understandable mound we visited was Serpent Mound. Located between Chillicothe and Cincinnati in southern Ohio (if not exactly in the middle of nowhere, then certainly within shouting distance), it's another one that is worth the time off the interstate to visit.

Initially thought to have been created by the Adena, recent radiocarbon dating places the creation of Serpent Mound around 1070 CE by the Fort Ancient culture. Like both the Adena and Hopewell groups that preceded it, the Fort Ancient culture inhabited land along the Ohio River. They are contemporaneous with and influenced by the Mississippian culture (which is coming up) but they descended from the Hopewell peoples.

Other mounds are, indeed, mounds. As significant and meaningful as they undeniably are, a pert of you looks at it and says "Yup, that certainly is a mound." Serpent Mound, however, is a snake - and therein lies its charm.

At a quarter mile long, it's the largest effigy mound in North America. So although there's a tower platform you can observe from, a diagram is the best way to view the overall shape. The mound is a squiggly snake that has its mouth around an oval object. Now what that oval object is is subject to debate. Is it an egg? Is it an eclipse? Your guess is as good as any scholar's. The Fort Ancient culture, like all the other mound building folks, neglected to leave behind the owner's manual for the mound.

There are some weird and interesting astronomical facts about the Serpent mound.

• The head and some of the snake's coils are aligned to solstice and equinox events.
• Its construction took place relatively shortly after both the Crab Nebula supernova of 1054 and the appearance of Halley's comet in 1066.
• It generally aligns with the pattern of stars composing the constellation Draco.

But correlation is not necessarily causation. So again without that owner's manual one cannot say if these observations are intentional.

And there's one more strange fact, this one for the geologists. Serpent Mound is built on the western edge of a very old (Permian) meteor impact crater five miles wide. The normally flat and stable Ohio bedrock is here extremely faulted and displaced up to 1000". But even with this additional fact I, for one, will resist calling this mound Space Snake.

If you're visiting Serpent Mound I recommend stopping by the Fort Ancient, another nearby mound builder site. Unfortunately we didn't have time to stop, we had a bourbon distillery tour to catch (priorities, donchano).

Next, a detour in the westward progress to Moundville AL.