BY DAN KOIS (SEPT 24, 2023):
“Among the most curious submissions was the United States’ proposal: a group of eight sites in southern Ohio featuring earthen mounds and walls, collectively called the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. For nearly two decades, a mostly volunteer group of dedicated archaeologists, historians, and Native American tribal officials has been patiently making the case that these mysterious, not particularly photogenic piles of dirt are as culturally and historically significant as Stonehenge or the Colosseum. They’ve battled local opposition and national obscurity, and in some ways, the sites themselves, which are sprawling, sometimes heavily forested, and at several locations, plowed over by centuries of farmers. One is across the street from a federal prison. Another has been turned into a golf course…
Glenna Wallace was a professor and college administrator when she was elected chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma in 2006…A year after Wallace’s election, she visited Ohio State University to hear a talk by the author of a book on the Shawnee warrior and resister (sic) Tecumseh. The next day, she drove about 45 minutes east of Columbus, with the author and others, for a scheduled visit to Native American earthworks in the town of Newark, Ohio. To her surprise—she’d never heard of the Newark Earthworks—they were enormous. To her dismay, a substantial part of the ancient structures was located on a golf course owned by a local country club.
“There was a golf tournament happening that Saturday,” Wallace told me (Kois). As her group made its way toward the small observation platform that overlooks the course and earthworks, they got into an altercation with a group of golfers on carts.
“They said, ‘You need to step back, you need to come back another day,’ ” Wallace recalled.
“They actually said, ‘You don’t belong here.’ ”
When she made it onto the wooden platform, she said, she was
overwhelmed with admiration for the ancestors who had made these monumental
geometric shapes. She watched as golfers teed off from atop ancient mounds and drove their carts over the
earthen walls. She told me, “The longer I stood there, the sadder I became,
because of how they were being used—abused. There was no knowledge. No
reverence.”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/hopeton-earthworks-ohio-unesco-world-heritage-history.html
Or Indigenous Qusukqaniyutôkanash
Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, Vol. 77, No. 2 Fall 2016
“Some of the more remarkable rows (of
stones),” Curtiss Hoffman writes in Stone Prayers: Native American
Constructions of the Eastern Seaboard (2018), “have what appear to be serpent
heads at their ends. These and the more sinuous walls have been reclassified
within the effigies category." - Page 61
A single boulder head is perhaps the easiest to identify:
Qusukqaniyutôk (2023): “A row of stones artistically stacked
or laid using elements of Indigenous Iconography, sometimes obviously resembling
a Great Snake, often composed of smaller snake effigies as well as other effigies
both zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, sometimes appearing to shapeshift into
another effigy, possibly related to control of water or fire (sometimes both) on
Sacred Cultural Landscapes that are beginning to be recognized as Indigenous Ceremonial
Stone Landscapes.”
From a perspective of distance, the largest of the Stone Snake
Qusukqaniyutôk snake across the
landscape, crossing over others, sometimes connecting great boulders or bedrock
outcrops, sometimes along streams – and sometimes stacked over and hiding a
stream, a Musical Row of Stones - the sound of water is the Great Snake
contentedly “purring.”
Inside some enclosures, there were “gardens,” plant
resources perhaps tended by fire, perhaps protected from fire, something living
kept in balance, kept in production by someone offering tobacco to a serpent
guardian before entering, someone singing while stacking stones, picking up and
replacing her grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ stones that have fallen.
“Evaluations of
máunumúetash* by parties who do not test their hypotheses against Northeast
Algonquian cosmology and rituals are doing, at best, only half an investigation,"
writes Nohham.
“Evaluations of qusuqaniyutôkansh (“stone walls”) by parties who do not test their hypotheses against Northeast Algonquian cosmology, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and Rituals of Renewal on Ceremonial Stone Landscapes are doing, at best, only 3% of an investigation,” remarked Sherlock Stones to his associate, famed Rocket Surgeon John Possum. "The late Dr. Brian Jones, the Connecticut State Archaeologist spoke and wrote about that "Other 97% of the Human History," the Indigenous Peoples' History, that most people are almost entirely unaware of - or are greatly misinformed about."
I’m just a guy with
a blog, inspired to overlay “Serpent Imagery” on photos to kind of “make the
structures come alive” by adding horns and eyes, and perhaps even point to a
similar structure or a variation, illustrating the repeated existing patterns of Indigenous Iconography, the Artwork, in the stacking of these Stone Prayers, these "Stones of Intention:"
One Snake Head
At the Beginning (Not the End) of a “Stone Wall” is Nothing
While Three Snake Heads at Three Stone Walls is a Conspiracy, as the old archaeologist joke goes,
May be more than:
“a juggernaut of wishful thinking masquerading as science”
“a shakedown culture complete with lawyers, fake science, and internal schisms (that) makes Timothy Ives’ book both a microcosm and a warning about the direction of our country"
“farming relics” and “pseudoscience that goes into determining that the stone piles are related to Native American rituals.”
*Máunumúet(ash) - place(s) of ceremonial gathering (ehenda
mawewink, Lënapeuw, mawighunk, Mahhekanneuw). Themes of connectedness,
reciprocity, prayerfulness and continuity are expressed through máunumúetash.
Nohham Rolf Cachat-Shilling
Bulletin of Society for Connecticut Archaeology (2018)
https://www.academia.edu/40876479/SCASubmission
Káhtôquwukanuk “in the pile”
Tûnuppasuonk Kodtonquag
- turtle effigy in (stacked) stone(s)?
(Nipmeuw).
.jpg)
