Creation stories similar in Ohio, Wisconsin earthworks
Ancient American Indians in eastern North America built a variety of earthworks over many centuries and for many different purposes.
Ohio’s Adena culture, around 2,300 years ago, built conical burial mounds and small, circular earthen enclosures. The succeeding Hopewell culture built huge enclosures in a variety of shapes. And about 1,000 years ago, the Fort Ancient culture built at least two mounds in the shapes of animals – the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County and the so-called Alligator Mound, actually an Underwater Panther, in Licking County.
Both the Great Serpent and the Underwater Panther are powerful spirits of the Beneath World in the traditions of many American Indian tribes.
A few centuries before Ohio’s Fort
Ancient culture built their Serpent and Alligator, people in Wisconsin and neighboring states already had begun building animal-shaped, or effigy, mounds. Archaeologists assumed Ohio’s effigy mounds had nothing to do with them, but in a paper published online last month in the journal North American Archaeologist several colleagues and I propose that Wisconsin’s and Ohio’s effigy mounds are telling the same, or a closely related, series of stories.
Robert Boszhardt, an expert on the effigy mounds of Wisconsin, contacted me after reading a paper I co-authored with Jim Duncan and Carol Diaz-granados, experts on the symbolism of the rock art of eastern North America, and Denison University soil scientist Tod Frolking.
We had argued that Serpent Mound was actually a grouping of three mounds – the serpent, an oval, and a wishbone-shaped mound, which we interpreted as a key episode from a creation story of the Dheghian Sioux tribes who once lived in the Ohio Valley.
In this interpretation, the serpent is the Great Serpent, the wishboneshaped mound is First Woman, and the oval is the opening to her womb. The grouping depicts the moment when First Woman mated with the Great Serpent, thereby acquiring his powers, which she then used to create all life on earth.
Boszhardt was intrigued with our interpretation and had independently come to a similar conclusion about a group of mounds in Wisconsin.
The Willow Drive Mound Group includes a sinuous Underwater Panther, a wishbone-shaped mound, a conical mound, and a bird effigy. Boszhardt interpreted this grouping as a serpent/ panther spirit impregnating a woman who gave birth to an egg (the conical mound), which then hatched into the bird.
Boszhardt shared his idea with Duncan, Diaz-granados and me and we all agreed that these two mound groups, separated by nearly 500 miles, were telling versions of the same genesis story.
We began looking at other effigy mound groups in Wisconsin and neighboring states, as well as in the Ohio Valley. We also considered imagery recorded in the rock art of the region.
We found numerous examples from across the Midwest of mounds in the shapes of Beneath World spirits paired with conical or oval mounds. At the Hensler site in Wisconsin, the rock art includes images of a serpent, a spiral reminiscent of the tail of Ohio’s Serpent Mound, and a woman with a circular glyph between her spread legs.
This all supports the idea that Ohio’s Serpent and Alligator are intimately connected to the effigy mounds of Wisconsin.
They are the culmination of a rich tradition of religious symbolism that spread across America’s midcontinent from between AD 700 and 1200.
Brad Lepper is an Archaeology Curator at the Ohio History Connection.
blepper@ohiohistory.org