Not many Americans realise their country has a vast prehistoric legacy that comes close to equalling that of the great monument builders of Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid. There’s a reason for that.
Take Monks Mound in Illinois, just one of several vast prehistoric ritual sites in the country. Aligned to true north, the earthworks and causeway is part of a huge ritual complex including more than a hundred other mounds and a woodhenge – a wooden circle like the one found near Stonehenge. Archaeologist William Romain says it’s designers conceived it as an Axis Mundi – a junction between heaven and earth to observe the stars.
Yet when archaeologist Dr A R Crook investigated it in 1914, he said it was a natural formation…because he couldn’t believe Native Americans could build something so complex. As developers prepared to demolish it, other archaeologists rushed in and discovered many levels of construction and buried artefacts. They attributed it to an unknown white race…because they couldn’t believe etc etc
We have a dewy-eyed view of the evidence-based scientific process, but it’s still rooted in the same human prejudices as everything else. Monks Mound is at least one thousand years old, but it’s been connected culturally to the Serpent Mound in Ohio which has now been dated to at least ten thousand years.
There are several other sites along the Mississippi River basin which have been systematically destroyed.
The remaining parts of one in Newark, Ohio, now lies within a private country club and golf course. The promotion material says, “it is designed around famous prehistoric Native American Earthworks that come into play on eleven of the holes.” Hard to imagine that happening in many other places.
The alignments, the henge-making and the geometry suggest a shared knowledge-base that reaches across America, across the Americas and perhaps (whisper it) even further afield.
Prejudice has denied generations of Americans the knowledge of a sophisticated, star-gazing prehistoric culture, a lost history that should reshape the way the world sees the Americas, and America sees itself.
You can find all the fully-referenced archaeological papers in America Before by Graham Hancock.
Thanks again for sharing! I’ve been to many of these sites including a Serpent Mound ritual at dawn led by Native Americans. I hope to tell a tale enabling us to relearn prehistoric wisdom from ALL our ancestors. We’ve been taught to think of them a dirty & dumb, again the legacy of erroneous white supremacy thinking. We’ve been taught to think of ourselves as competitive by nature, when in reality we’re the most social & cooperative species the planet has ever produced. It’s how we survived & how we’ll get ourselves back to the garden now. Remembering all the wisdom we’ve been so carefully taught to forget.
I’d very much like to go to one of those Serpent Mound rituals.