Grave of the Great Serpent - Serpent Mound

As the name suggests, the Serpent Mound looks like a slithering snake from its shape.

Great Serpent Mound, Ohio

The world's largest mound of prehistoric animal sculptures, the Highland Serpent Mound, is located in Adams County in southern Ohio, USA. The serpent mound stretches 411 meters (1,348 feet) and ranges in height from 1.2 to 1.5 meters (3.9 to 4.9 feet) and width from 6.0 to 7.6 meters (19.7 to 24.9 feet). The shape of the snake is crescent-shaped, oriented with the head in the east and the tail in the west, with seven winding groups in the middle. The shape of the head has caused the most speculation, with some scholars seeing the oval shape as an open eye, while others see an egg or a frog that is swallowed by the open mouth of the large snake.

Ohio's Serpent Mound is the largest surviving mound of animal statues in the world from prehistoric times to the present and is a U.S. National Historic Landmark.

The Serpent Mound at Loch Ness

In 1883, Scottish travel writer Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming published an interesting account of her visit to the "monster" of Loch Ness, which was anatomically perfect. Standing on the land of the serpent mound, she found that the entire length of the spine was carefully constructed from regularly and symmetrically placed stones at an angle that led her to believe that this feature helped protect the structure from erosion. She also saw that the "spine" was a long, narrow causeway made of large stones, like the vertebrae of some large animals. On the mound she called the "head," she found a stone circle that corresponds exactly to the solar circle, such as the mysterious serpent heads of Egypt and Phoenicia and the solar circle represented on the Great Serpent Mound in the United States. Emanating from the head, a variety of ridges may represent the claws of a reptile. Gordon Cumming also noted that the location of the burial sarcophagus and the serpent mound appears to have been carefully designed so that someone could stand on the serpent mound.

The origin of the Serpent Mound remains a mystery

The ancient comet impact theory

Located on high ground about 73 miles east of Cincinnati, overlooking Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio, Serpent Mound is located at the site of an ancient meteor impact about 300 million years ago. The 8 to 14 kilometers (5.0 miles to 8.7 miles) diameter crater is known as Serpentine Mound Crater.

Deity worship claims.

Many native cultures of North and Central America attribute supernatural powers to snakes or reptiles and incorporate them into their spiritual practices. In particular, the natives of the central Ohio Valley often made snake forms out of pieces of copper. Thus the serpent mound may have had a spiritual role in deity worship, and many local natives believed that the construction of the mound came from the spirits.

In addition, the graves and burial grounds near the site suggest that the construction of the serpent mound may have been for some important earth burial, but the mound is not a grave or historical artifact.

Ancient timekeeping claims.

The serpent mound may also have functioned as a timekeeper, with the serpent's head aligned with the summer solstice sunset and its tail pointing to the winter solstice sunrise. Thus, ancient peoples may have used the structure to mark time or seasons.

Constellation directions say.

The design of the serpent mound also coincides with the shape of the constellation Draco, which (thought by Tuban from the 4th to 2nd millennia B.C. to be the North Star) is aligned with the first curve of the serpent's torso from the head, an alignment that suggests another purpose for the serpent mound: a kind of compass that would help determine true north.

Excavation of the Great Serpent Mound

The earliest scientific excavation of a serpent mound was conducted by Harvard archaeologist Frederic Ward Putnam in the late nineteenth century.

Archaeologists attributed the serpent mounds to two Amerindian cultures: the early Woodland Adena culture (500 to 200 B.C.) and the late prehistoric Paleo culture (1000 to 1650 A.D.).

Putnam originally dug a conical mound 200 meters (656 feet) southeast of Snake Mound and excavated multiple burials and associated artifacts, including pottery and cannonball points. In the 1940s, archaeologist James Bennett Griffith analyzed the artifacts and identified them as Adna, thus attributing the statues to that culture.

The new evidence again suggests that Adna was the original builder of the Serpent Mound. The team concluded that the ancient fortress people may have modified or renovated it, and noted that other nearby monuments also show evidence of restoration or modification by prehistoric groups.

The Serpent Mound later became the property of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society, and the Mound is being considered for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List.