Saturday, February 07, 2015

Effigy Mounds in Native America: Poverty Point, West Carrol Parish, Louisiana as Astronomy: Thunderbird of the Pleiades

Sometimes the simplest decipherment is the best and here it is: the "Thunderbird" "of (near to) the Pleiades" (to the right of them), whose stars are marked at Poverty Point, West Carrol Parish, Louisiana, USA.

We show below first an idealized map image of the Poverty Point mound site (only a model, not definitive) and then an image of the decipherment:


Below is the image of the decipherment, the "Thunderbird of the Pleiades" at Poverty Point as marked out in the stars to the right of the Pleiades.


Not only is the bird shape apparent but the curved portions clearly mark the body of feathers of "the thunderbird". We do not know how the ancients marked the back, so we leave that to imagination. We are also not sure where the exact point of the Vernal Equinox was located in the mounds. An accurately surveyed map of the mound site should reveal that fairly clearly as the crossing of the ancient trails.

Our decipherment in the previous posting of the Iowa effigy mounds enabled us to find the stars marked at Poverty Point, Louisiana, which is considered the oldest location of an effigy mound in Native America, with the Poverty Point era starting in ca. 1700 B.C. and lasting until about 500 B.C. See Dan F. Morse & Phyllis A. Morse, Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley, Academic Press, May 10, 2014, http://books.google.de/books?id=hTq0BQAAQBAJ, originally published by the New York Academic Press in 1983.

The decipherment image above was made using Starry Night Pro (http://astronomy.starrynight.com) -- the best astronomy software out there (!) -- and we say that as a magna-user, this is not an ad, but pure conviction.

The four major mounds at Poverty Point are found -- nicely constructed by Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa) -- in a graphic map at the Wikipedia article on Poverty Point. We used that map as a reference together with a useful image of Poverty Point as found at Andrei Apostol, North American Indian Effigy Mounds: An Enigma at the Frontier of Archaeology and Geology, Journal of Scientific Exploration , Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 549-563, 1995, image p. 551, Figure 1, Poverty Point, West Carrol Parish, Louisiana (1,700-700 B.C.) showing a drawing by Jon L. Gibson as found in Richard Balthazar, Remember Native America! the Earthworks of Ancient America.

We looked at those maps and made a conglomerate simple one for purposes of illustration, as shown at the start of this posting, but that map is not definitive. A very accurate map should be able to date Poverty Point very accurately.

Dan F. Morse & Phyllis A. Morse, Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley, Academic Press, May 10, 2014, http://books.google.de/books?id=hTq0BQAAQBAJ, originally published by the New York Academic Press in 1983:
"There are no radiocarbon dates from Poverty Point period sites in the Central Valley. The Poverty Point period is normally dated to around 1700-500 B.C. in Louisiana. Recent work in Mississippi at the Denton site, where rich lapidary-industry examples dated to 3000 B.C. and earlier, extends one of the primary characteristics of Poverty Point culture back in time (Connaway 1977)."
THIS POSTING IS Posting Number 12 of
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America

Effigy Mounds in Native America: Poverty Point, West Carrol Parish, Louisiana as Astronomy: Thunderbird of the Pleiades


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Sky Earth Native America


Sky Earth Native America 1:
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2:
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."


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