Fig. 9.18. Serpent Intaglio earthwork from central Kansas. (Painting from the Coronado Quivira Museum, Lyons, Kansas)
Another interesting Kansas monumental artifact is the Serpent Intaglio,*17 a 160-foot (48.7 meters) earthwork resembling a serpent in Rice County. It has the shape and theme of a serpent facing east with a disc in its mouth. Intaglios are geoglyphs or ground sculptures created by removing or scraping rocks on the surface to achieve a design with a contrast of color and are found throughout the world. The Kansas Serpent Intaglio was first noted by schoolchildren attending a nearby one-room schoolhouse in the 1920s and is one of more than 600 that have been reported in the southwestern United States. It is generally accepted that Native Americans created it around A.D. 1200, and the same mythological snake-and-egg imagery is found at the Ohio Serpent Mound (see chapter 13) and in California (see chapter 10), among many other places.
EQUINOX SUNSET CAVE NEAR RUSSELL, KANSAS
The final expedition of our trip was to witness the equinox sunset at a remote cave near Russell, Kansas, in the middle of the state. Because of high water, we had to hike energetically several miles up and over a swampy and bush-covered hill to find the rock shelter to observe what Keith Jeffries described as an equinox sunset alignment. It proved to be more than the “little hike” we had anticipated, but we found the location in time to prepare for the equinox sunset. Neither our companions nor anyone else had visited it in a long time, and overgrowth now created shadows on the cave entrance. With some effort, we trimmed trees to the west to allow the sunlight into the cave at sunset.
The triangular opening of the cave faced west (see color insert), and inside we were rewarded with the sight of numerous petroglyphs of figures, animals, and Ogham-like inscriptions.
Crystal then pointed out an image of a woman on a horse, whom she identified as Epona, the horse goddess of the Celts (see Epona-like photos, chapter 8). There were also many other remarkable images, including a serpentlike glyph and an image with a strong resemblance to a dragon.
Fig. 9.19. Petroglyph in the shape of a dragon inside the equinox sunset cave.
Several of the other cave walls were etched with collages of petroglyphs, many difficult to recognize. A large panel on the cave’s western wall contained a multitude of glyphs, and I could make out a man and woman, a large rectangle with a vertical line, and an abraded downward-pointing arrow. Unfortunately, the panel was punctuated with graffiti such as “Dave 1968” and “P. F. 1976.” There was also a wide array of pecked or abraded lines. Some of these were probably day counts, but others appeared to be well-formed Ogham. However, as yet, no interpretations have been attempted.
Other tantalizing rock art features in the cave also needed to be studied, but as the sun was getting close to setting, Monahan and I had to ready the camera equipment so we could document the equinox sunset alignment.
We waited for the alignment, not knowing what to expect. Our group was now squeezed into the rock shelter and huddled around cameras on tripods. There, we were finally rewarded for our long trek when the light from the setting sun began to strike the wall in the distinct shape of a fish (see color insert).
Over the next fifteen minutes, the illuminated image sharpened as it rose up the rock surface while the sun moved downward toward the horizon. Then, as the light began to dissipate, the image disintegrated, and the last image of light on the panel was an upside-down triangle that fit neatly within the abraded arrow-looking glyph on the cave wall (see color insert).
Fig. 9.20. The shelf of the equinox cave, creating alignment imagery.
As we packed up to leave the shelter it was getting dark, and we still had to navigate the return trek to our cars at dusk. In spite of our exhaustion we were excited with having made the journey to observe the equinox alignment.
By the time we left Kansas the following day, Monahan and I had visited nearly a dozen sites within a hundred-mile radius, and our excursions had been enriched by meeting fellow explorers and researchers.
Later that year, Monahan returned to Kansas to photograph a cross-quarter day alignment identified by Keith Jeffries. Like the Sun Temple in Colorado, this alignment had an engraved circle about one foot in diameter where one can sit and look from the center of the circular petroglyph outward to the sunrise. When looking toward the west on the equinox, the sun fit under a square notch formed by a rock outcropping.
Thus, evidence from our Kansas excursions complemented the existing evidence of Celtic travelers at Crack Cave, the Anubis Caves, and the Sun Temple. But there was even more to document about Celtic movements in Kansas and elsewhere.
Fig. 9.21. August cross-quarter day alignment in Kansas similar to the one at the Sun Temple, Colorado. (Filmed by Kean Scott Monahan, © 2005 and 2008 by TransVision)
FURTHER INDICATIONS OF CELTIC MIGRATIONS IN AMERICA
The Old World petroglyph sites documented by McGlone, Leonard, and others make a convincing case that Celtic travelers made it to Colorado and surrounding areas. Ida Jane Gallagher also documented the archaeoastronomical details of a Wyoming County, West Virginia, rock shelter where she saw Ogham writing that had been identified and translated by Barry Fell.
Gallagher observed the sunrise over the mountain ridge and how its rays entered the rock shelter through a three-sided notch formed by the rock overhang and cliff face.12 As Fell’s reading had predicted, the light of the rising winter solstice sun struck a sun figure and moved across the petroglyph. After Gallagher reported her observations Fell declared that for the first time in modern history an Ogham site that recorded the winter solstice had been predicted and successfully demonstrated.13
Fig. 9.22. Old Irish petroglyph in Wyoming County, West Virginia. (© Ida Jane Gallagher)
Fig. 9.23. Horse Creek petroglyph in Boone County, West Virginia. According to Fell, the Ogham Old Irish inscription memorialized the Nativity of Christ. (© Ida Jane Gallagher)
Professor Robert Meyer, an authority on Old Irish from the Catholic University of America, also confirmed the West Virginia Ogham and expressed his opinion that the inscriptions were made by Irish monks of the sixth century A.D.14 However, despite noting that the markings were likely Ogham, McGlone and Leonard rejected most of Fell’s translations of the West Virginia petroglyphs as containing errors in transcription and translation.
Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the West Virginia Old Irish Ogham inscriptions described by Gallagher, along with the Celtic Ogham inscriptions from Colorado and other locations demonstrate a Celtic and later Old Irish presence throughout much of North America. Assuming these people arrived from across the Atlantic, McGlone suggested they had come into the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi and its major tributaries, including the Arkansas River. Alternatively and at other times, they could have arrived from fortified strongholds in New England and the mid-Atlantic region, including the Susquehanna Valley between Maryland and Pennsylvania. From there, they would have made their way inland, perhaps down the Mississippi and up the Missouri River, first to Kansas and then to the Arkansas River tributaries of Colorado and Oklahoma.
The Celtic expansion westward seems to have included what is now Colorado, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Peterborough, a city in the Canadian province of Alberta, where there are Norse figures that have Tifinag and Ogham inscriptions. However, the Celts’ progress seems to have stopped at the Rocky Mountains.
In summation, it would be a mistake to believe Old World inscriptions are plentiful. They are extremely rare especially in light of the vast repositories of Native American petroglyphs and pictoglyphs throughout North America. However, in making the case for diffusion, Phil Leonard argued that of all the evidence of Old World visitors, the “smoking gun and slam-dunk” cases are to be found at the Celtic archaeoastronomy sites in Colorado and Oklahoma. According to Leonard, if the skeptics were ever to visit Crack Cave, the Anubis Caves, and the Sun Temple, they could no longer deny the ancient Celtic presence in North America. “We have inscriptions,” he w
rote, “which can be read as Ogham and in a Celtic language. The inscriptions are readily dated as pre-Columbian. Whoever inscribed them had to be skilled in the Ogham script, the Celtic language, archaeoastronomy, and religious symbolism.”15
Yet after decades and despite the evidence presented by McGlone, Leonard, Gallagher, and others, the old archaeological paradigm remains dominant and the New History virtually unknown. As for the markings, mainline archaeologists continued to claim that Ogham and other signs were merely random marks made by Indians sharpening their spears. But how do you sharpen a spear by grinding it into a rock and leaving indentations that would dull their edges? Rubbing on a flat rock would seem to serve the purpose better.
10
Westward to a Dwelling Place of a Great Spirit
WESTWARD TO CALIFORNIA
My focus on Celtic rock art sites in the New England, Colorado, and surrounding states was about to change as I became aware of sites in the expansive states west of the Rocky Mountains. The region between California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Rocky Mountains in Colorado contains the largest repository of ancient petroglyphs in the world. In modern times it is a mostly dry and arid region, but in earlier days it was a different landscape altogether because the climate and availability of water provided ample opportunities for the survival of animals and humans.
I was first drawn to an eastern California site north of the Mojave Desert, located on public lands. The location has an official government site designation, but because it is unprotected and extremely vulnerable to any disturbances it will simply be referred to as Mojave North.*18
Despite Mojave North’s obvious importance and its many mysteries, the site remains virtually unknown outside of a few early archaeologists, a handful of diffusionist rock art enthusiasts, and anyone who has visited the Equinox Project website created by Roderick L. Schmidt.1 Schmidt was a colleague of Barry Fell in his later years, and both had described the site in papers presented at the Epigraphic Society. Since 1986, Schmidt had focused on researching Mojave North and creating his website, which provided enough information to suggest an Old World origin, contrary to assertions by archaeologists and local tribe members that it was created by Native Americans.
Fig. 10.1. Rod Schmidt was the resident expert on Mojave North until his tragic death in a house fire in 2012. (Photo by Julianna Satie)
Schmidt and I had been in e-mail contact during 2003. There was an immediate clash in our first communications, and our initial e-mails were quite contentious and inflammatory. He was an arch defender of Barry Fell and saw Bill McGlone and Phillip Leonard, my mentors, as Fell detractors. The e-mail arguments went back and forth for several months, hashing over controversies revolving around Fell and Gloria Farley’s methods of rock art research and her conclusions during the 1980s and 1990s. However, despite our prickly beginning, Schmidt welcomed our meeting in California and enthusiastically agreed to serve as a guide for my 2004 spring equinox expedition to the site.
Almost from the onset, Schmidt and I were able to work through our arguments, and a healing transpired with a mutual memorial of the passing of Fell and McGlone and the fact that the feud and accusations between the two were insubstantial in light of the overarching dichotomy between the diffusionists and the archaeopriests. Soon after that first visit, we became good friends, and over the next seven years we would often meet before equinox sunrises, waiting for first light to grace the obscure California rock art site that had become my new obsession.
A DESTRUCTIVE LEGACY
The Mojave North site has only been superficially documented and researched by archaeologists. In 1929, Julian Steward noted it, which was followed by a site survey in 1931 by Clifford P. Baldwin. In 1962, J. C. von Werlhof briefly visited the location. These early archaeologists all believed that Mojave North was a rather typical Great Basin–style petroglyph site, and their work was summarized by Robert Fleming Heizer and Martin A. Baumhoff in Prehistoric Rock Art of Nevada and Eastern California.2 They all assumed the place was related to “sheep hunting” because some of the prevalent petroglyphs resembled sheep. Unfortunately, none of these or any government archaeologists had any insight into the possible Old World influences that were discovered during the 1990s or of Mojave North’s immense importance as an archaeoastronomical center.
The site is located on the edge of a dried lake bed and contains outcrop-pings of weathered dolomite limestone over an area less than one acre. The rock outcropping contains abundant rock art and archaeoastronomy, much of which is still visible. For millions of years, wind and water erosion created smooth white surfaces covered by an almost-black combination of patina and discoloration from acid rains that followed volcanic eruptions. This made the rocks perfect for inscribing petroglyphs. However, most of them are now quite aged, worn, and often difficult to see for untrained viewers.
Fig. 10.2. Mojave North site, facing north, with the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range in the background.
Unfortunately, many of Mojave North’s petroglyphs have also been destroyed by human activities, beginning in 1865, when a famed silver and lead mine was discovered and worked by Mexican prospectors during the Great Basin silver mining boom. Although mining operations continued into the 1950s, a boomtown located near the site was completely destroyed by a major flood in 1872, and by the 1880s most of the silver had been removed.
This very special place also received disrespectful treatment from modern commercial interests, and the damage was quite extensive. In clear violation of the 1903 Antiquities Act, a mining company leased the area for its dolomite limestone and dynamited the cliff side sometime prior to 1929, causing huge chunks of stone to rain down and damage the site.3 Next, sometime in the mid1950s, a contractor for a federal road construction project blew the top off the cliff face and crushed it for road fill while professional archaeologists did nothing to save the site. Schmidt reported that at least 30 percent of the petroglyphs have been lost since the first survey by Baldwin in 1931.
Then, in 1985, locals Anne and Vince Yoder identified a morning equinox marker, which is called the Light Serpent (see here). Following this, in the early 1990s, diffusionists Alan Gillespie and Jon Polansky became interested in the site and visited Schmidt. They had studied the Anubis Caves equinox alignments in Oklahoma with McGlone (see chapter 8) and wanted to look for equinox alignments. What they discovered were an evening marker, a summer solstice alignment, and one cross-quarter day alignment. Schmidt and Earl Wilson, a local videographer, also found several key alignments, including a display that marks the winter solstice.
Fig. 10.3. Damage to petroglyphs at Mojave North from blasting (light areas). The pecked circles are targets for a summer solstice sunset alignment.
Other researchers have made it to the site, too, including Farley, who visited in 1992 and discovered an image of the goddess Tanith (briefly discussed in chapter 8). After seeing a Colorado image of Tanith as drawn by Farley, Fell wrote that “as usual [the goddess] is draped in a doll-like crudely represented dress” and that she “holds aloft the Phoenician word for sun-disk.”4 The Mojave North image also holds a similar-looking disc above its head.
Schmidt pointed out what he called, because of its shape, the Shepherd’s Crook petroglyph at Mojave North, but it showed signs of repecking, and his close inspection revealed that the upper crook could have been added by much later travelers. Both Roderick Schmidt and independent researcher Dorian Taddei believe the top of the Shepherd’s Crook petroglyph was added at a later time based on visual inspection. It is apparent from several other glyphs on this rock that different images were carved at varying times.
Fig. 10.4. The Mojave North Tanith image. (Author-enhanced photo)
Fig. 10.5. The Shepherd’s Crook petroglyph at Mojave North. Below the crook but on a separate rock is the six-line equinox marker.
THE EQUINOX SUNRISE LIGHT SERPENT AT MOJAVE NORTH
Schmidt recognized that the morning equinox marker discovered by the Yoders was a
heliolithic animation involving a “light serpent.” As the sun rises above the eastern horizon on the equinox, for more than an hour a sun dagger in the shape of an open serpent’s mouth moves across a south-facing side of the boulder that contains a circle surrounded by a spiral curving around it four times.
The precise conjunction of the Light Serpent’s open jaws consuming the pecked inner circle produces a heliolithic animation in the early morning of the equinox, best viewed with time-lapse photography. The open jaws of the Light Serpent fit perfectly around the inner circle or egg, as Roderick Schmidt called it (see figures 10.6–10.8 below).5
Fig. 10.6. An enhancement of the target petroglyph for the equinox Light Serpent animation and cross-quarter day lunar alignments described in chapter 11. A spiral uncoils from an inner oval, referred to by Schmidt as an “egg.”
Fig. 10.7. Mojave North equinox morning Light Serpent. The Light Serpent progresses toward the target (see also color insert).
Fig. 10.8. The equinox alignment as the Light Serpent consumes the pecked ring (drawn in white).
Schmidt wrote, “The image of a snake, made from sunlight, emerges from the stone. This begins shortly after the sun rises. . . . It is in slow but constant motion. The serpent continues directly to the innermost circle and begins to ‘eat’ it. During this portion of the display, the serpent starts to expand as if to join the illuminated portions of the site. Once the center is consumed, the serpent merges with the sunlight that has now almost totally enveloped the site.”6
Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers Page 16
