America Before
Page 29
The answer to this question, he suggests, has everything to do with the sun:
It is probably not a coincidence that at Watson Brake the distance along the horizon from where the sun rises (or sets) on the winter solstice to where it rises (or sets) on the summer solstice defines an arc of 59 degrees. … Their triangle was probably derived from [this].37
THE DIRECTORS
AS AT SERPENT MOUND, AS at Cahokia, as at Newark, as at High Bank, and as at Poverty Point, the primary concern of the designers of Watson Brake seems to have been to manifest, memorialize, and consummate the marriage of heaven and earth at key moments of the year. This notion of sky/ground communion—summarized in the Old World in the Hermetic dictum “as above so below” but part of a universally distributed package of astronomical and geometrical memes—can involve the moon and the earth, specific stars or constellations and the earth, other planets and the earth, the Milky Way and the earth, and the sun and the earth.
At Watson Brake, it’s the sun and the earth that take center stage, as Norman Davis ably demonstrated in 2012 across 18 pages of the journal Louisiana Archaeology.38 The principal assertions concerning solstitial and equinoctial alignments that he makes there have stood the test of time and won the support of leading archaeoastronomers.39
In brief, Davis includes the twelve recognized mounds, A through L, in his survey but he also takes note of two natural mounds “possibly modified”40 that in his view were intentionally left near the center of the oval in antiquity when the rest of the plaza was artificially leveled. These he designates Mounds 1 and 2.
Among his key findings the most immediately striking is that no fewer than five separate alignments running through the site each independently and redundantly target the summer solstice sunset. “Even if the alignments were not to the sun,” Davis writes, “the ability to establish five perfectly parallel, nearly equidistant sightlines across several hundred meters would be remarkable. The sightlines had to have preceded construction. Their pattern suggests a master site plan, with construction to the plan taking years, or perhaps centuries, to complete.”41
Impressively, the alignments target the sun not exactly where it rises and sets today but rather precisely where it would have risen and where it would have set in the epoch of 3400 BC—which, at the latitude of Watson Brake, was at azimuth 119 degrees for the winter solstice sunrise and at azimuth 299 degrees for the summer solstice sunset.42 As the reader will recall, solstice alignments are reciprocal. If you are facing the setting sun on the summer solstice, then 6 months later on the winter solstice the sun will rise in the exact opposite direction, 180 degrees around the “dial” of the “azimuth clock.”
The “azimuth” of an object is its distance from true north in degrees counting clockwise. North is nominated as 0 degrees, so azimuth 90 degrees is due east, azimuth 180 degrees is due south, and azimuth 270 degrees is due west. An azimuth of 299 degrees will therefore be 29 degrees north of west. An azimuth of 119 degrees is 29 degrees south of east.
There are no alignments to the summer solstice sunrise or to the winter solstice sunset at Watson Brake. But the clear alignments to the summer solstice sunset (azimuth 299 degrees) and the winter solstice sunrise (azimuth 119 degrees) identified by Davis are as follows:
From Mound A to Mound B.
From Mound J to Mound 2.
From Mound D to Mound L.
From Mound I to the southern edge of Mound D.
From Mound E to the outside edge of the double bulge on the Mound E platform.43
“The Mound J to Mound 2 sightline,” Davis adds, “continues on and passes through the center of the gap between Mounds C and D. The Mound D to Mound L sightline passes through the center of the gap between Mounds I and J. The sightlines have azimuths of 119 degrees and 299 degrees.”44
Could Watson Brake’s multiple alignments to the summer solstice sunset and the winter solstice sunrise have come about by chance? It already seems vanishingly unlikely, but what settles the matter is that the site’s concerns turn out to be not only with the solstices but also with the spring and autumn equinoxes—those special times of balance around March 21 and September 21 when night and day are of equal length and the sun rises perfectly due east and sets perfectly due west. Davis has identified four equinoctial alignments at Watson Brake, as follows:
From Mound A to Mound C.
From Mound 1 to Mound 2.
From Mound E to Mound F.
From Mound G to Mound H.45
In addition, several of these equinox sight lines, notably Mounds E–F and mounds G–H, extend to other mounds and features of the earthwork in such a way, Davis notes, that their east to west alignment “had to have preceded construction. This suggests that equinox alignments were … used to engineer this site.”46
And not only the equinox alignments.
The length of the Watson Brake earthworks is defined by the alignment to the summer solstice sunset of the two ends of its principal axis, Mound L in the southeast and Mound D in the northwest. Its breadth is defined on one side by the Mound E to Mound E-platform alignment, and on the other by the Mound A to Mound B alignment, both also solstitial.47
All in all, Davis makes a strong case that the entire design of the site is an artifact of its solstitial and equinoctial alignments. They came first; everything else followed. The question that remains unanswered, however, is … why? Davis sidesteps it, stating that his purpose is only “to demonstrate that solstice and equinox alignments are present at Watson Brake.”48 There’s no doubt he has succeeded in this enterprise, as his findings regarding the site’s solstice alignments have subsequently been confirmed at a higher level of technical precision in a Lidar survey by archaeoastronomer William Romain.
Joining earth to sky. All equinox and solstice sight lines at Watson Brake.
Lidar confirmation and refinement of the solstitial alignments in the Davis survey by William Romain.
Building on the discoveries made by Davis, Romain’s conclusions are striking:
Watson Brake incorporates sophisticated geometric designs tied to astronomical sightlines in multiple ways. As someone who has worked mostly in the field of Hopewell archaeology, I am still trying to wrap my head around the fact that all this anticipates Adena and Hopewell by thousands of years. Indeed, the significance of these findings is that Watson Brake appears to be the earliest-known celestially-aligned mound complex in North America. That’s a big deal.49
The fact that it’s a big deal only makes the unanswered “why” question more urgent, but Davis admits he’s unable to think of any “practical reason why the site should have been designed and engineered around solar sightlines. In fact it must have added to the difficulty of construction.”50
The logical conclusion, he suggests, is that “using solar azimuths to design and build Watson Brake may have had more to do with cosmology [beliefs about the origin and nature of the universe] than astronomy [the scientific study of the heavens].”51
None of the other Middle Archaic sites have yet had the benefit of the sort of thorough archaeoastronomical survey that Davis, and subsequently Romain, have been able to carry out at Watson Break. However, Davis estimates from map analysis, within a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent, that the Caney Mounds site has “one equinox alignment and two summer and winter solstice alignments. Frenchman’s Bend has one equinox alignment and one winter solstice alignment.”52
The mystery, although the sites so far investigated “show no evidence for the development of astronomical knowledge over time,”53 is that “the people who directed the construction of Watson Brake … had an advanced knowledge of the solar and probably lunar cycles, and they used this knowledge to design and engineer their sites. Who were these directors, and how did they get others to build the sites one container of earth at a time?”54
REINCARNATIONS
OTHER QUESTIONS SHOULD BE ASKED.
How were these “directors” able to manifest geometrical
and astronomical knowledge, and advanced combinations of the two, more than 5,000 years ago when no prior evidence of the existence of such abilities has been found in North America at such an early date? Set aside for a moment the issue of the organizational competence necessary to motivate and manage the workforce. The bigger problem is that the scientific skills and the knowledge required to create the earthworks just seem to appear out of nowhere, with no evolution and no buildup.
One minute they’re not there. The next, almost magically, they are. And then, at once, the Middle Archaic mound-building phenomenon bursts into full bloom.
We know it starts earlier, but for convenience let’s take the florescence of Watson Brake around 3400 BC as a benchmark.
What follows, there and at the other sites, is roughly 700 years of stability, continuity, and—we must assume given the similarities—communications and connections. As noted earlier, these were all different cultures, but they all shared the same mound-building obsession and continued to express it in the same ways.
Until sometime around 2700 BC.
That was when, for some unexplained reason, the ancient sites were all abandoned and the whole mound-building enterprise came to an abrupt and complete halt. I’ll let Joe Saunders, the acknowledged expert on the subject, take up the story of the mysterious end of Middle Archaic mound-building:
New radiometric data indicate a sudden and widespread cessation of mound building in northeast Louisiana. The clustering of the ten youngest dates from seven mounds at four sites is remarkable. The median probability for seven of the ten samples falls between 2884 BC and 2739 BC. Equally remarkable is that the cessation of mound construction may have lasted up to 1,000 years, or until the emergence of the Poverty Point culture. … To date, not one mound site dating to the Late Archaic (2700 BC to 1700 BC) has been identified in the Lower Mississippi Valley.55
Saunders declines to speculate in any depth about the reasons for this precipitous end to the precocious early mound-building phenomenon in North America. He’s open to the possibility, suggested by some, that climate change might have been involved, but states his own view that “the ‘synchronous’ event may be better understood as a social phenomenon. The abandonment of an ideology or change in ethos can occur simultaneously within a diverse range of environments. Also the absence of environmental change would be consistent with the documented continuity in economy from Early to Late Archaic periods—before, during, and after mound building.”56
Whatever the reason, the facts are not in doubt. Mound-building, with all its sophisticated geometry and astronomy, stopped dead in its tracks around 2700 BC. For the next thousand years not a single mound was built and not a single earthwork was raised. There’s not a hint of geometry or of monumental architecture. The only reasonable conclusion is that those skills had been utterly lost.
But then, as suddenly and mysteriously as the “mound-building movement” had vanished, it appeared again, at around 1700 BC, in the spectacular and sophisticated form of Poverty Point.57 All the old geometrical and astronomical skills were redeployed there—and by practiced hands—as though they’d been in regular use all along.
Poverty Point thrived for the next 600 or so years, only to be abandoned in its turn at around 1100 BC. Then it seems that mound-building was interrupted again until relatively late in the development of the culture archaeologists call the Adena. The label “Adena” is in fact the name of the country estate in Ohio on which the “typesite” was found.58 We have no idea what that culture called itself. Its origins can be traced back to around 1000 BC.59 However, no early Adena mounds exist and those that have been dated, such as the Adena Mound typesite,60 cluster around 200 BC or, in the case of Serpent Mound, 300 BC,61 but not significantly earlier.62
It looks very much as if there was another hiatus, perhaps not of 1,000 years—let’s say 800 years—between the end of Poverty Point and the rebirth of the mound-builder movement late in the Adena period. Thereafter it grew again to full force in its Hopewell and later Mississippian manifestations until finally being brought to an end by the European conquest.
Despite the fact that different cultures were involved at different periods, every resurgence of mound-building was linked to the reiteration and reimagination of the same geometrical and astronomical memes.
This was not “chance” or “coincidence.”
Witness, for example, the way that Lower Jackson Mound was used as the base datum from which the entire geometry of Poverty Point was calculated.
Or, at a more human level, consider the case of the highly polished hematite plummet—a valuable item—that was made at Poverty Point at around 1500 BC but that some pilgrim carefully carried to the by then long-abandoned and deserted site of Watson Brake and deliberately buried half a meter deep near the top of Mound E.63
This kind of behavior—the incorporation of ancient sites into younger ones, pilgrimage, an offering—has the feel of a religion about it. Religious institutions have proved themselves throughout history to be extremely efficient vehicles for the preservation and transmission of memes across periods of thousands of years.
It’s not unreasonable, therefore, to suppose that some kind of cosmic “sky-ground” religion lay behind the alignments to the solstices and the equinoxes at Watson Brake and at the other early sites—a religion sufficiently robust to ensure the continuous successful transmission of a system of geometry, astronomy, and architecture over thousands of years.
John Clark is in no doubt. “The evidence,” he says, “suggests very old and widely disseminated knowledge about how to build large sites. The building lore persisted remarkably intact for so long that I think we can, and must, assume that it was part of special knowledge tied to ritual practice.”64
Where did this special knowledge come from before it appeared at Watson Brake?
How old is it really?
And why, like the serpent that changes its skin or the phoenix reborn from the ashes, does it possess the extraordinary ability to vanish for millennia and then to reappear, as Clark puts it, “with no apparent distortions, loss of measurement accuracy, or shifts in numeration?”65
If it was carried in religious ritual among the ancient civilizations of the Mississippi Valley, then perhaps there will be clues to its origins, and its purpose, in what survives of the spiritual ideas of those long-lost people.
QUIETUS?
IN MAY 2017, ON A research trip for this book across the American Southwest, I awoke in my hotel room in the small town of Bloomfield, New Mexico. It was deep in the night and very dark. I felt nauseous and assumed I’d picked up a stomach bug somewhere along the way. I didn’t imagine it was anything serious. I remember getting out of bed without disturbing Santha, who was sleeping deeply after a long day of photography in the sun. I found my way to the bathroom, switched on the light, and stood hunched over the toilet, waiting to throw up.
The next thing I knew I was returning to consciousness, deeply confused, wired to a drip and lying in a hospital bed. It was full daylight and Santha was standing over me, looking scared.
“Where am I?” I asked. My voice sounded slurred, my tongue thick in my mouth. I had difficulty forming words. “What the fuck happened?”
“You had a seizure, my love,” Santha replied, “but they say you’re going to be okay.”
The hospital was the San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington, New Mexico, about 15 miles west of Bloomfield. I recall nothing of the paramedics coming, or the ambulance journey, or what happened in the emergency room. What I do know, because Santha subsequently told me, is that at around 3:30 am she had awakened, sensed my absence, seen that the light was on in the bathroom, and called my name. I didn’t answer so she called again, and when there was still no reply she hurried from the bed to find me lying on the floor, half in the bathroom and half out of it, writhing uncontrollably with powerful muscular convulsions and blood pouring from my mouth where I’d bitten my tongue.
After tur
ning me on my side to stop me from choking, Santha called 911 and woke our traveling companions, Randall Carlson and Bradley Young, who were staying in neighboring rooms.
I remember none of this. It seems, however, that I’d been stabilized in the ER and then transferred to the bed where I regained consciousness and quite rapidly began to get my wits back. That evening I was discharged and was able to return to our hotel in Bloomfield, where I read my medical notes. It turned out I was suffering from a previously undetected heart condition known as atrial fibrillation and was now to take anticoagulant medication daily to prevent a possible recurrence of what was diagnosed as a transient ischemic attack—in other words, a “mini stroke.” I suffered some loss of memory of events that had taken place in the weeks before the attack but there was no obvious neurological damage visible on the scans. The medical staff at Farmington were absolutely brilliant. I’m deeply grateful for their rapid and effective intervention.
I do indeed have atrial fibrillation, which can and does cause strokes (the blood pools and clots in the heart). I’m still taking anticoagulants. However, the diagnosis I’d been given was very far from complete, as became clear around noon on Monday, August 14, 2017, when I suffered further, far more severe, seizures at my home in Bath, England.
Again I was rushed to the emergency room and then to the ICU. Again the medical staff, now at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, were completely brilliant, caring, and engaged with my case far above and beyond the call of duty. This time the convulsions racking my body were exceptionally violent and continuous and Santha was taken aside by the neurologist who advised her she must prepare herself for the worst. The medical team was having no success in stopping the seizures and it was possible I would die or end up so badly brain damaged that I would effectively be a vegetable.