Mounds of Memory
notes
An Opening
Mounds cover what is currently called the United States and are also found throughout the world, but nobody really knows who built them. Who were the “mound builders”?
This is the great Adena Mound: 26 feet tall, Woodland period Ohio, first officially excavated in 1901. It contains 36 human remains and hundreds of art objects, including the famous human effigy pipe. At the very bottom of the mound is a gravel-lined pit where the first dignitary was laid to rest.
Do you think these art objects were buried in the mounds to be preserved or to be destroyed?
Giants and aliens
Were they giants? Richard J. Dewhurst’s book, The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America, meticulously chronicles the missing giant skeletons of one of the Smithsonian’s greatest cover-ups. See details here.
The mounds were destroyed by archaeologists in order to be observed. You know the joke: Dig up a European grave, go to prison; but dig up a Native American grave and get a P.H.D.!
EFFIGY MOUNDS
Burial mounds are everywhere, but only in North America/Turtle Island do we find effigy mounds.
Effigy means an “image” or representation, and effigy mounds can be considered GEOGLYPHS
-low-relief sculptures
-monumental dry-paintings, “earthworks” “precontact land art”
-do not always contain art or human remains.
They are anachronistically referred to as “earthworks,” a term coined by Robert Smithson, founder of an art movement in the so-called United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Radical, ‘new’, large scale art
- Art “liberated from the gallery walls!”
- The landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked!
Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty resembles the thousand-year-old Serpent Mound and other effigy mounds created by Indigenous people. Nothing he did was really that original. Check out Lucy Lippard’s book, “Overlay.”
Adena Serpent Mound
This is one of the most famous effigy mounds. Is it a snake, a map, a ritual, a clock, a comet? Some scholars suggest that Serpent Mound may reference a large comet that was seen around the year it was made. Now it’s a site for protest, prayer, and new-age Harmonic Convergence.
Many effigy mounds cannot be seen clearly from the ground and encourage an imagined bird’s eye view.
There are actually two serpent mounds, and they both point to the summer solstice sunset point, making them large clocks.
If the mound reflects a constellation, it may be a place of sympathetic magic.
As a sight for gathering, the large effigy drawings hosted events, increased the efficacy of rituals, and held memory (“Wisdom sits in places”). But, if we cannot see the images clearly from the ground, who else are they for?