© Wikimedia CommonsOpening of a ditch on the southern side of the gate to the Great Circle Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, United States; note the nearby person for scale. Along with the Octagon and Wright Earthworks, the Great Circle was built by prehistoric Hopewellian peoples. The three sets of earthworks compose the Newark Earthworks; they have been designated a National Historic Landmark.
The main axis of the Octagon Earthworks at Newark, for example, lines up to where the moon rises at its northernmost point on the eastern horizon.
Clearly, ancient Americans were paying close attention to the sky, but why?
This question is considered in a paper by Canadian archaeologists Brian Hayden and Suzanne Villeneuve published in the current issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
One of the most commonly proposed answers is that farmers need to know when to plant and harvest their crops, and the solar calendar determines the growing season.
But ancient farmers, more attuned to nature's rhythms than most modern folk, didn't need gigantic astronomical observatories for that. Moreover, the 18.6-year-long cycle of the moon, encoded in Newark's monumental earthworks, wouldn't be of any help at all in determining the best times to sow and reap.
In search of an explanation, Hayden and Villeneuve turned to a review of how and why historically-documented hunters and gatherers kept track of the sky. Their results have important implications for our understanding of why Ohio's ancient earthworks are aligned to celestial cycles.
Hayden and Villeneuve surveyed 79 complex hunter-gatherer societies from around the world and discovered that 63 of them "exhibited some solstice observation or monitoring, and/or calendars (most often lunar)."
This means that people were doing more than simply noticing that there seemed to be recurrent patterns in where the sun and moon rose and set. In most cases, there was "careful and accurate monitoring of solar rising/setting positions by specialists using tree, post, or rock alignments viewed from special locations."
According to Hayden and Villeneuve, people were not doing this simply to determine the best times for picking berries. The lunar and solar calendars were used for "setting the dates of feasts together with the rituals and ceremonies that accompany them."
Such decisions were fraught with social and political ramifications. The food had to be gathered and prepared, but there also was a delicate web of social obligations to consider. Anyone who has planned a large wedding can appreciate that.
Hayden and Villeneuve write that in order to successfully hold a large feast, the leaders would need a precise method for figuring out "how many years, how many months or lunations, and which specific day all debts would be called in so that the required provisions would be delivered on time at a given location."
In addition, feasts could be timed to coincide with visually impressive astronomical events, such as moonrises in alignment with monumental earthwork walls, which might seem to confer a cosmological legitimacy on the authority of the leaders who organized the feast.
Seen in this light, Ohio's Hopewell earthworks, with their precise astronomical alignments, might be the creations of groups using their hard-earned and closely guarded knowledge of celestial movements to vie with one another for political and religious dominance.
Bradley T. Lepper is curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society. blepper@ohiohistory.org
Reader Comments
go through the trouble of developing an earthen-works calendar with a period of at least 18.6 years? In other words, what sort of recurrent event could usefully be marked by cylindrical technology having a period greater than that of a solar year? The researchers assume the event was societal. This need not be the case, though. At least they've dispensed with the typical bunk. However, although the noted researchers say it wasn't simply for the marking of annual seasons and associated feasts - an grossly assumptive and typical response - they still believe the earthen-works point to a larger cycle of celebrations, feasts and the like - a sort of calibration of seasonal celebrations through time and not just from year to year. In light of their comments, I think the critiqued view (i.e. "that farmers need to know when to plant and harvest their crops" from year to year) is fluff; but, this is emblematic of their expanded view, too, which can be characterized as extended-fluff.
Have they thought of it this way: would the need for social organization, regulation and the like of large-period cycled festivals and whatnot account for (or, said another way, adequately serve as cause for) the necessary generational observation of natural events; and, would this necessarily manifest in the design and construction of such structures? I don't think so, although perhaps. I can see their point, given the appropriate societal contexts (which they have not clearly indicated... but, then again, this may be more a mark of the second hand nature of this particular report than the quality of their scholarship... I'm not familiar with the latter, admittedly). What seems as viable is the assumption that the society was marking natural externalities with some recurrence for which a large-period, precise calendar would be useful, not merely a moon alignment occurring every 18.6 years for the sake of debt collection.
I would assume, given what I've read and due to what I've experienced of more "traditional" cultures, that the consciousness the mound-builders carried in regards to time was of a wider berth and nature (i.e. cyclical rather than linear) than that of the present culture inhabiting that ground and investigating the former. And, as such, the counting of "season" was inter-generational and to some cosmic (and I don't mean "airy") purpose beyond the purview of a debt-focused civic life.