“USA 🇺🇸 Leaf-Peeking Road Trip Part 5 of 5 ~The Serpent Mound an Amish Community in Ohio, then Back to North Carolina” October 2024

• November 11, 2024
• By Pen
• 0 Comment

LEAF-PEEKING ROAD TRIP

~Mid October

Part 5 of 5

Day 6

The next morning, we were up with the crowing roosters at the Historic Sulphur Lick Hotel, in Chillicothe, Ohio, and back on the road to find the Serpent Mounds in Peebles, Ohio and more Earthenwork mounds, if we could find them.

The countryside drive was just lovely and we enjoyed it very much. Along the way, we went through a small Amish community, which is always fun.  In fact, this community had an Amish Bakery, and we had had nothing to eat, yet. It was perfect, and we never pass up Amish bakeries, ever, anyway!

57 minutes

39 miles

We saw an abandoned Church,  up on a hill, from the highway, so we turned around and checked it out.

Serpent Mound, in Ohio 

Serpent Mound is an internationally known National Historic Landmark, built by the ancient American Indian cultures of Ohio. We paid $8 to gain entrance to this state park. 

It is an effigy mound (a mound in the shape of an animal) representing a snake with a curled tail. Nearby, are three burial mounds: two created by the Adena culture (800 B.C.–100 A.D), and one by the Fort Ancient culture (A.D. 1000–1650).

Thousands of years ago, Native Ohioans populated the landscape with mounds and massive earthworks. In the late 19th century, Harvard University archaeologist Frederic Ward Putnam excavated Serpent Mound, but he found no artifacts in the Serpent that might allow archaeologists to assign it to a particular culture. Based largely on the nearby presence of Adena burial mounds, later archaeologists attributed the effigy to the Adena culture that flourished from 800 B.C. to 100 A.D. This theory on the site’s origin was accepted, until a 1991 site excavation used radiocarbon dating to determine that the mound was approximately 900 years old. This would suggest that the builders of the Serpent belonged to the Fort Ancient culture 1000–1500 A.D).

In 2014, another team of archaeologists presented new radiocarbon dates for the Serpent, suggesting that it was built by the Adena culture at around 300 B.C. More work is needed to clarify the age of Serpent Mound.

The significance of Serpent Mound and other ancient Ohio earthworks has garnered international attention. In 2008, Serpent Mound and eight other Ohio American Indian earthworks were selected by the United States Department of the Interior for inclusion on the United States’ Tentative List of sites to be submitted to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for inscription on the prestigious World Heritage List. If it is, eventually inscribed on the World Heritage List later this decade, Serpent Mound will join the ranks of the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, Pompeii, Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal, all of which are World Heritage sites.

World Heritage status has the potential to elevate local and international awareness about the site’s value, and draws in more interests by tourism.

Maps of Serpent Mound showing (a) general location in southwestern Ohio; (b) grey-scale LiDAR elevation map of the Serpent Mound area showing topography, soil core locations and outlines of selected archaeological structures and features; and (c) outline of Serpent Mound showing locations of excavations and cores from this and previous investigations.

Conical Mounds

Here, conical mound located 656 feet southeast of Serpent Mound contains multiple burials and artifacts, including pottery and projectile points. Archaeologist James Bennett Griffith identified these artifacts as Adena, in the 1940

Ash Bed

An ashy soil horizon, north of the conical mound contains many prehistoric artifacts, including wood charcoal that was carbon dated to between 1041 and 1211 A.D.

There are no human remains or artifacts inside Serpent Mound in Ohio, but there are burial mounds and graves nearby:

This is the head of the Serpent

The purpose of the Serpent Mound in Ohio is a matter of debate among scholars, but there are several theories:

The valley beneath the effigy is really the western rim of a mysterious, four-mile-wide, circular crater – the eroded remains of a huge, catastrophic event geologists call “The Serpent Mound Disturbance.” About 300 million years ago, either an asteroid collision or an underground explosion blew apart more than seven.

We found another, smaller Earthenworks location and made a stop. I gotta say, they make me very curious.

Seip Earthwork Unit, in Ohio

Between 1 – 400 A.D., southern Ohio witnessed an extraordinary blossoming of cultural development. Even though they did not live in villages or practice large scale agriculture, Indigenous people of the Hopewell Culture made amazing advances in the fields of mathematics, engineering, art, trade and astronomy. However, why they built so many enormous ceremonial complexes in this area remains a mystery.

There is no evidence that people lived within these earthworks. Rather, these huge architectural wonders appear to have been designed for large ritual gatherings. The timing of these special ceremonies was perhaps determined by astronomical cycles. Pilgrimages may have been made to these sacred enclosures by celebrants from far away.

It is clear that complexes like the Seip Earthworks were not the result of a haphazard heaping of earth. The geometric shapes are precise in their symmetry. In fact, the design and dimensions of Seip Earthworks are so similar to four other complexes around the Chillicothe area that they all must have been the result of engineering plans produced by the same group of people.

Baum, Frankfort, Works East, Liberty and Seip Earthworks are all comprised of a small circle, a large circle and a square. When early American archeologists Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis mapped and measured these five earthwork complexes in the 1840’s, each square was the same size: 1,080 feet to a side, 27 acres. This impressive feat suggests that the Hopewell people had a common unit of measure 2,000 years ago. Also, the dimensions of the three shapes indicate that the Hopewell even understood mathematical relationships between circles and squares.

Sometimes referred to as Seip Mound, this enormous reconstructed mound in the center of Seip Earthwork’s great circle enclosure is the third largest burial mound the Hopewell are known to have built: 240’ by 160’ by 30‘ high. It covered the floors, fire pits and burials of two very large connected buildings with a small building between them.

Among the beautiful artifacts, found here by archeologists of the Ohio Historical Society in 1925, is the famous clay Seip Head, now on display in the Ohio History Center in Columbus, Ohio. Also, between stacks of copper breast plates, some of the few intact samples of Hopewell cloth were discovered, preserved by the cooper salts that formed over the breastplates. Woven of milkweed fibers, the clothes were dyed to create patterns of circles and curves reminiscent of Hopewell earthworks.

As large as the central mound is, it is only a small part of an enormous earthwork complex. Only the central mound has been fully restored. The remnants of the rest of the complex can be difficult to appreciate without a guide, but with some effort, clues to its glorious past can still be found here. While exploring Seip Earthworks, please stay on trails and avoid agricultural fields.

Bainbridge, Ohio

Moving on down the road….

Once we reached an area around Princeton, West Virginia to check out an abandoned amusement park, we had to figure out where that next stop,  actually was. We would eventually find it and make a visit, and once I post that blog, related to this amazing property, I will post a link, here. For now, the blog is unfinished, because it’s quite complicated to post about.

Now, I can get the rest of this Leaf-Peaking trip, posted.

….Not far down the road, we spent our last night of this trip, in Virginia, before getting the rest of the way back to The Whale, in North Carolina.

Big Walker Motel

Day 7

The next day, in Virginia, was our final day on this fabulous adventure. I didn’t set the alarm, and we slept in, past sunrise. We then got up and leisurely got going, to make our way home to The Whale.

5 hours

319 miles

We missed the kiddos so much, we called ahead and invited them for dinner at Olive Garden in Jacksonville, not far from home. That was so fun. I love my family!

If you missed Part 1 of this 5 part Blog series, click this link to go to the beginning:

https://2gypsiesinthewind.com/northamerica/united-states/west-virginia/usa-leaf-peeking-road-trip-part-1-of-5-driving-thru-north-carolina-to-shenandoah-national-park-in-virginia-then-to-harpers-ferry-west-virginia-october-2/

Thank you for following along!