In Which I Drive to Ohio, Talk to a Stranger, Eat a Disappointing Bagel Sandwich, and Tour Octagon Earthworks in the Sleet

The teenager's Trashion/Refashion Show was also the occasion of my college student's very first weekend visit home. It was a pretty great weekend in which she picked back up right where she left off, walking the dog and gossiping about our favorite books and then reading more books while sitting side-by-side on the couch. 

Of course, like a good college student, she had class at 9:30 am the next Monday. So even though at 9:30 pm on Sunday we were on our way to get post-show ice cream with all the other cool teenagers--

--at 4:30 on Monday morning we were pulling out of the driveway and on our way to Ohio!

Not gonna lie--I am maybe about five years too old to pull off a four-hour drive at 4:30 in the morning. The airport, now? That's only like an hour away. I can do the airport at any old time. But a genuine 4:30 am road trip, with the dark, empty highways and nothing good on the radio and turning the headlights off bright whenever a car passes even though I can't see for shit without them on bright... yeah, I'll be fine if I don't have to do that too many more times in the rest of my life.

Fortunately, I had an alert and capable college student with me, so after I'd driven maybe an hour, just long enough to convince myself that I'd done my share for a bit, we switched and I had a good, long snooze while my kid drove the sun up.

It turned out that this day was also the college's Admitted Students Day--I remember when my kid and I were attending Admitted Students Day!--so campus was quite a bit busier at 8:00 in the morning than I'd anticipated, and when I swung over to park after dropping the kid at her dorm to freshen up, there was a line to get into the visitor parking garage.

A guy was attending cars as they pulled up to the garage, leaning into each driver's window to chat and then beckoning them on. I guess my sweatpants and hoodie and bags-under-eyes look didn't fit the vibe of all the other cars with family groups and teens in tow, because instead of just directing me to the parking, the attendant looked at me and then said, "Are you faculty or staff or..."

I said, "Hi! I'm actually just here visiting my freshman!"

The guy literally replied, "Visiting a freshman. Huh! I've never heard that one before!"

We both blinked at each other.

Finally, I was all, "So... the sign says there's visitor parking here? Where I can park while I'm visiting my freshman?"

The guy was just like, "Pull forward," and then turned to the next car.

THIS, you guys. When I tell you that I have a ton of social anxiety about talking to strangers and I hate doing it, it is because of THIS! I SWEAR to you that my social interactions with strangers are baffling and strange MOST OF THE TIME. It's definitely me, too, because every time I'm with Matt and I keep my mouth shut, his social interactions go fine. But if I am there and I happen to open my mouth, suddenly the Wal-mart cashier is telling us all about how all her friends think she's weird or the guy at the gas station counter is ranting about Ft. Lauderdale... that latter incident will happen to me approximately ten hours after this parking garage interaction, when all I want in the world is to buy my Diet Dr. Pepper, barbecue Pringles, and Flipz. 

Even though my kid had a full day of classes, I met her in the Student Union first for a breakfast that she'd been telling me all semester was gross--turned out, it WAS gross!--and then off she went, popping back in to check on me off and on all morning while I got some work done. After another sandwich, this one only slightly less disappointing, we finally said goodbye, so that I could spend the afternoon on my own Ohio adventure before trekking back home. 

Because as excellent luck would have it, Octagon Earthworks, which is currently leased by a golf course of all things and is only open to the public four days a year, was having one of its rare open houses THAT AFTERNOON!

Y'all KNOW how I feel about the ancient mound builders of North America. I am OBVIOUSLY not passing up a chance to see the Octagon Earthworks!

First, though, I revisited the Great Circle Earthworks for a guided tour and a look through the museum that was closed the last time I visited.

This is the view into the Great Circle, looking towards Eagle Mound.

This moat did once hold water, likely as an architectural feature to incorporate the reflections of the sky. Early archaeologists even observed standing water. When the site was used as Ohio fairgrounds, though, animals were kept in the depressions, and the area deteriorated enough that it no longer holds water. 

It was cold and raining the last time I visited the Great Circle. It was cold and raining again on this day!

Looking towards the three-lobed Eagle Mound, likely once the site of ceremonial buildings that were purposefully burned and buried over.

The guided tour was well worth holding my camera under my coat out of the freezing rain and furiously berating myself for thinking that my hoodie could effectively substitute for a wooly cap, though. We hardy few learned that the land that the Newark Earthworks was constructed on had been previously maintained as a prairie, even though this area of Ohio was traditionally woodlands. The prairie had been purposefully maintained via regular burnings, probably at least partially for hunting, and would certainly have made a temptingly perfect spot for the earthworks construction that began around 160 BCE. 

This site is currently the largest complex of earthworks known anywhere in the world. It was also likely a tourist or pilgrimage destination for much of North America, as objects were found at the site that can be traced to places as far-flung as Yellowstone and Arizona. Post-colonial farming, construction, and urban development destroyed most of the earthworks, but there are some enticing early archaeological records that hint at earthen walls running for several miles and crossing the river, pointing directly at the ancient Chillicothe Earthworks. 

The various parts of the Newark Earthworks were also created using the same base unit, shared by both the square and circle earthworks. Even Octagon Earthworks is that same square with the sides opened up. There are a lot of interesting equivalencies and patterns, and it's clear that there was some sort of overarching organization. 

Earthen walls also form lanes to connect different earthworks. In the photo below, you can see the opening in the Great Circle, with the visitor center in the background. Past that opening, on either side of the visitor center, are earthen walls that form a wide lane that once led to another circular earthwork that contained burial mounds. I believe that these were excavated, but as with Spiro Mounds, study can't really be done on the remains because it's hard to trace a direct lineage to a current Indian nation that can evaluate the ethics and give permission. 

Below is a map of the reconstructed site. We're in that circle up top, and you can see Octagon Earthworks below it and to the right. 

This map comes from an 1840s archaeological study of the site that was published by Smithsonian. That study is in the public domain now, so you can buy cheap reprints!

Here's a fun tidbit from the museum--Stonehenge was completed about 1,500 years before the Newark Earthworks!

I had fully intended to spend the entire afternoon wandering around the Great Circle and Octagon Earthworks, but being wet to the skin and mildly hypothermic, I instead chose to sit in the car after my Great Circle visit, blast the heat, and read on my phone until it was time for my guided tour of the Octagon Earthworks:

And then it started sleeting! YAY!

The Octagon Earthworks, though, is the site that I WAS THERE TO SEE, and I was not leaving. Thanks to the stupid golf course the site is only open to the public four days a year, and it was already a lightning strike miracle that I happened to be there on one of those days.

To be honest, though, I sort of figured the tour would be cancelled and I'd just wait around and then go home, but at 3:00 on the dot everyone's car doors opened and we all bundled our way over to meet our tour guide and go on our adventure.

The golf course idea would be kind of cool if it wasn't completely sacrilegious, because apparently they DO use the earthen mounds as obstacles, like large-scale Putt-Putt. Below, for instance, is a smaller earthen circle, possibly intended for visitors to stop and purify themselves before entering the Octagon Earthworks. The golf course uses it for target practice.

At every corner of the Octagon is an opening, but then in front of every opening, inside the Octagon, is a shorter earthen wall that hides that entrance from sight:

Through photos, you can share with me the scattered showers and bouts of sleet that came and went during our hour-long tour.

So when you stand inside the Octagon and look towards the edges, you're completely visually enclosed by earthen walls. 

It's also HUGE inside:

As with the Great Circle, these trees aren't original to the site and instead grew up afterwards. Part of the Octagon Earthworks was also used as a potato field once upon a time, so needed some reconstruction.

In the 1960s, speculation really ramped up about Stonehenge being an astronomical observatory, and it became trendy to make the same speculations about all kinds of early monuments. The rebuttal to this is that you can draw all the imaginary lines between rocks that you want to, and obviously some of those lines are going to happen to line up with interesting things. 

So two professors from Earlham (my kid was accepted to this college but we didn't really consider it because WOW, the tuition!) decided to debunk the whole "astronomical observatory" theory by bringing a group to Octagon Earthworks. The plan was to draw all the imaginary lines they could think to draw, then match up whatever could be matched up to solar phenomena, then run the math to show that the whole thing was a coincidence. 

Except that they couldn't match ANYTHING to a solar phenomenon, which is both statistically unlikely AND kinda points to the Stonehenge layout being a little more than coincidence, ahem. But when they switched to examining LUNAR phenomena, they started getting hits!

Once every 18.6 years, the Moon rises as far north on our horizon as it will ever rise. Over the next 9.3 years, the Moonrise shifts ever southward, until it rises at the southernmost point on our horizon that it will ever rise. Then it starts moving back northward for the next 9.3 years until it's back to that northernmost point. Octagon Earthworks marks both those points.

Probably once a day, I stop and think about that fact. If you were an ancient mathematician and astronomer, how the fuck would you KNOW THAT?!? You'd have to have direct observational records for the past hundred years to pick out that pattern. You'd have to map it in the sky, or physically mark it on the earth, to record it. Did they mark it, then build it and hope they were right, or did they wait until the timing was perfect, mark the rise that they observed, then build the walls afterwards?

We're lucky ducks, because the next major lunar standstill, this northernmost Moonrise, is in 2024/2025! 

Here's one of the walls that marks that rise:

Another interesting spot is this seeming gate at the opposite end of the Octagon, marked with curved walls:

It was originally thought that it might have once been an arch, but when it was excavated--nope! Just a cool-looking gate that was then built over!

It was still in the upper 30s and spitting down sleet and freezing rain at the end of our tour, but it was fine because a few hours earlier I'd re-rigged the loose windshield wiper back into place in a way that I was reasonably sure wouldn't come flying off again, at least if I didn't turn the wipers too high. 

So back in the car I got, shivering and wet to the skin, and blasted the heat and mapped myself back home. I waved as I passed my kid's exit, then managed to put myself in every single rush hour in every large city that I drove through for the entire trip home.

I'll see you on top of the Octagon Earthwork for lunistice!

The Story of Spiro Mounds, Or, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Syd walking through the Spiro site, 2014.

 Only eight years after the first time I requested it from my local university's library (ahem), I finally read Looting Spiro Mounds!

It is SO good, but the story that it tells is so sad, and now I am IN A MOOD.

As the story goes, once upon a time in the 1100s, Spiro was a town not like the other towns in what is the present-day US. It didn't have a palisade surrounding it like its contemporary, Angel Mounds, nor was it a rich population center like its contemporary, Cahokia. What it did, have, however, was an absolutely excellent location, on the banks of an Arkansas river that obligingly flooded at a predictable time every spring, laying down that precious silt, and within trading distance of other population centers in all the cardinal directions. At Spiro, you could get buffalo skins from the west, and conch shells from the south, and from the east and north you could get goods that had been traded to those locations from even further away. It was an awesome place to live, and the people of Spiro were known as great farmers and great traders.

It's theorized that Spiro was headed by a priest-chief, whose main jobs were to perform the rituals that controlled the weather, and to be in charge of the burials of the rich and fancy people. Rich and fancy people were buried with their fabulous, luxurious worldly possessions, and there was a very involved multi-step, years-long process. It kept them busy!

At Spiro, mounds were built for various reasons, but mostly when a building was burned to the ground, then dirt was hauled to cover it. Repeat that a few times, and you've got a decent mound! Mounds also covered some of these burials, but mostly they probably weren't ceremonial. 

Will learning how mounds were formed at Spiro, 2014.

So for a long time, things went GREAT at Spiro. They were super into trading, and so they gathered a ton of exotic goods. This also covers the time period that Cahokia dissolved as a population center, and the people of Spiro seem to have collected a ton of luxury, ceremonial, and religious goods from Cahokia, as well. Like, the people of Spiro had SO MUCH SWAG!

And then came the Little Ice Age. The Arkansas river stopped its predictable flooding pattern, and drought killed off so many trees that many of the animals that people usually hunted simply died or moved elsewhere. No ceremonies that the priest-chief did seemed to help the situation.

After generations of this, the priest-chief got do-or-die desperate. The people collected every fancy nice thing they owned and placed them in a chamber they were building, roofed with a teepee made of cedar posts. They broke into the burial chambers of their ancestors, and moved their bones and their fancy grave goods to this chamber, as well. They surrounded it with engraved conch shells and mounded dirt on top. It looked something like this:

It's possible that the cedar posts were meant to work like a funnel, channeling all the power from the fancy goods up through their point and towards the priest-chief standing above it on the mound, who then could perform the very best, most powerful ceremony ever performed.

The ceremony didn't work. The weather remained unconducive to the farming and hunting traditions practiced there, and so the people eventually just left. Nobody's entirely certain where they went, although there are some good theories about other nations they could have joined or even founded. Possibly they simply scattered, and joined or founded lots of other nations.

A few more centuries passed, and yet nobody else ever moved onto that particular land... until 1832, when the American government forced the Choctaw Nation out of their own country and onto this land in present-day Oklahoma. And then even later, they forced them to reallocate even this land from communal property to individual holdings, also for nefarious reasons. 

Some citizens of the Choctaw Nation had kept enslaved Black people, even during the Trail of Tears and into their possession of this land in present-day Oklahoma. When they were required to emancipate these people during the Civil War, they were also required to make them Choctaw citizens. This became a Whole Other Thing, and it's still going on today. Because of racism, though, when it was time to divvy up the land, the Choctaw Nation gave the Choctaw Freedmen the shittiest bits.

If you're a farmer, what counts as a shitty bit of land? Well, land that has a bunch of stupid hills on it!

They did know that these hills were mounds created by indigenous peoples, but they weren't their indigenous peoples, so they didn't fuss over them too much, although they didn't flatten them, either. And it was a pretty common hobby to wander around the area and pick up artifacts, mostly arrowheads and ear gauges, etc. For some reason, people in the US were both obsessed with the genocide of Native Americans AND obsessed with their ancient history, and artifact collecting and buying and selling were major pastimes and were thought of as a pretty good side hustle.

This side hustle picked up big-time during the Great Depression, and dealers would drive around the countryside in cars with advertising painted on, looking for artifacts to buy. Collecting artifacts was mostly a hobby people would engage in to make a little extra cash, and people didn't particularly mind that stuff got broken or that they were just pulling it out of the land and selling it without any context or interest in what it could say about history--they just wanted to find it and sell it!

Then a few guys got the bright idea to go into business together, lease the land that some of the mounds sat on from their owners, the descendents of those original Choctaw Freedmen, and see what they could dig up.

It was a great idea for them, in that they immediately started digging up some excellent stuff. As fast as they could roughly haul priceless artifacts out of the ground, the local dealers would swindle them away from them for a pittance, then the dealers would turn around and sell it an inflated price to private collectors. It got so bad that after a while even the dealers had to reduce their prices by a ridiculous degree, because they had completely flooded the market.

When savvy museum curators saw all these artifacts suddenly flooding the market, they knew some major find had to have been made. It wasn't hard to trace the flow back to Spiro, and many curators even visited in person, and were rightly horrified when they saw a few guys with shovels, digging away and breaking half of what they found. But they still wanted this stuff in their collections, so they bought things, too.

And then this anthropologist from the University of Oklahoma, Forrest Clements, found out what was going on, and he came charging in to screw everything up even further. What he wanted was for the guys who'd leased the land to stop pulling stuff up willy-nilly and selling it off to the highest bidder. But of course, in expressing this to the guys, he talked to them like they were stupid, copped a big attitude, and essentially made himself their enemy for life. And he couldn't do anything about it, anyway, because they'd leased the land fair and square and there weren't any laws to say they couldn't do what they wanted with whatever they found.

So Clements changed his focus to lobbying for a law that said they couldn't do what they wanted with whatever they found. And because he was rich and they weren't, and he had lots of rich friends and they didn't, he actually got that law passed. It was one of the first antiquities laws in the country, and it was a big deal. It made it illegal for the guys to sell any antiquities that they found, so even though they still had their lease on the land for a few more months, they were effectively cut off from benefiting from what they'd paid for. I'd be pissed, too!

And if I'd been the mastermind behind that law, and therefore knew good and well that these guys who were sitting on a national treasure hated me, I sure wouldn't do what Clements did next, which was fuck off to California for three months. He figured all he had to do was wait until that lease ran out, and then go over to the landowner and lease it for the university. He could have his own nice, big, leisurely excavation and have all the nice antiquities for his own museum. Might as well spend the time until that could happen in California!

Yeah... no. The second he was out of the way, these guys said, "Screw it. Let's just tunnel straight through the middle of this-here big mound, and whatever we find we'll just sell it on the black market."

So that's what they did, and as their luck would have it, they essentially tunneled straight into that ceremonial burial chamber, bounded by the engraved conch shells, reinforced by the cedar beam teepee, full of every rich artifact that the priest-chief and all of his people could obtain. It was National Treasure levels of loot, with the added bonus of being embedded in a matrix of cultural context and untouched history, as fresh as if these ancient peoples had closed it off the day before.

And these guys absolutely destroyed it.

As in, they literally destroyed it. They pulled out thousands of intact priceless treasures, but they were so excited that they also broke tons more priceless treasures, and other priceless treasures they didn't know were priceless treasures, so they just carted it out and dumped it. Nobody knows what those engraved conch shell bits contained or what they could have meant, because the guys dumped them in a pile outside on the ground and people walked all over them until none remained intact. Nobody knows the provenance of the cedar posts or what they could have told about the time and place in which they were made, because they guys burned them in a bonfire. 

And when their lease was almost up and they guys figured they didn't have time for more excavation, they filled the chamber with gunpowder and exploded it.

Clements was BIG MAD when he found out. But then when it was his turn to lease the land, he proved himself to be just as short-sighted and money hungry because his excavation literally leveled the mound. Literally. He made his team dig away every last shovel of dirt, just to make sure he got every last artifact, because that was all he was really after.

This mound is a modern reconstruction, recreated decades later on the same spot as the original mound:

And this is why, whenever we've visited a natural history or art museum anywhere in the world, I often find artifacts from Spiro! Much of what was originally sold to private collectors is lost to time, because it already came with so little provenance that all it would take is one unappreciative grandkid and just like that, it's thrown away or put in a yard sale. But some museums did snatch up artifacts as they were first uncovered, and other private collectors did eventually sell or donate their artifacts to other museums. But apparently even displaying many of these pieces is problematic, because they're counted as funerary objects so the holders of those items have to consult their descendents for permission to display them, but again, who are the descendents of the Spiroans? A couple of nations claim the Spiroans as ancestors, and that's caused so many additional problems that many museums won't even let researchers study the artifacts for fear of running afoul of the law.

Meanwhile, the Spiro Mounds Historical Site, run by the Oklahoma Historical Society, has very few artifacts of its own to display and educate visitors with. It barely scraped together the money to buy the land and recreate the destroyed mounds, and it'll never be what it should have been. Nearly every mound site that I've been to has been the same way, obviously less funded and less lauded than it should be. It's racist, is what it is. There's a national park site for every house that every president used the toilet at, pretty much, while many of these locations of astounding history are left to figure out their own funding. 

Here are all the mounds I've so far seen in person:

• Ocmulgee National Monument
• Spiro Mounds
• Cahokia
• Angel Mounds
• Sugar Loaf Mounds
• Serpent Mound
• Hopewell Culture National Historic Park
• unnamed mound at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park
• Alligator Mound

Of the ones that I still really want to see, apparently Hiwassee Island is mostly inaccessible, but there's Etowah in Georgia, Toltec Mounds in Arkansas, and Moundville Archaeological Park in Alabama. There's also this totally bonkers book that I got the public library to buy a few years ago--the author definitely believes that angel/human hybrids are buried in the mounds, BUUUUUUT he lists all these minor mounds that exist in backwoods and down old country roads, etc., and sussing all of them out would basically be my most epic summer ever.

With that and my apparently new hobby of getting chiggers in old cemeteries, I can *probably* keep myself entertained when Will goes off to college!