The Grand Mounds at Little Talbot Island State Park in Northeast Florida, GPS 30.4519° N, 81.4189° W, near Jacksonville, Florida, mark the Ecliptic in the "upper" part of Pisces, very likely also the Celestial Equator and Celestial Meridian ca. 200 B.C., and, if our analysis be correct, may even calculate the movement of Precession over a space of 200 years.
The mound location placements below are based on a map diagram in William N. Morgan, Precolumbian Architecture in Eastern North America, Ripley P. Bullen Series, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, FL, 1999, http://www.upf.com/, for which we are most grateful, since they are nowhere else to be found, also not at the Little Talbot Island State Park website.
In our decipherment, we have redrawn the small image in Morgan's book to much larger size here, so that any errors vis-a-vis the original are ours, and not Morgan's.
Morgan writes in the above-cited book: "Three platforms ... and an unusual sand mound to the west ... that rises impressively above the plaza level. A shell midden extends ... to the northwest.... An unusual ramp extends ... from the south mound into the central plaza. The ramp seems to be aligned with the center of the west mound." [emphasis added]
As we have discovered, that "northwest line" that Morgan identifies surely marked the ecliptic at the three-star corner formed by HIP 8588, HIP 8888 and HIP 8859 in the "square" of the Grand Mounds in the "upper"as marked by three other corner stars: HIP 8306, Omicron Piscium, and HIP 8883.
Since the ecliptic is constant regardless of era, it is likely that these mounds date to ca. 200 B.C. (240 B.C. would be a good estimate) when the Vernal Equinox was marked on Earth by the "unusual" sand mound to the west. The fact that precession "moves" the point of the Equinoxes in the stars is perhaps the reason that this mound was constructed of sand, because the location of the Equinox in the stars would have been seen to "move" like a natural sand dune does, just as one saw the celestial meridian migrating forward with precession.
Additional speculative analysis is possible if the vertical outer lines in Morgan's drawing are actually marked on the ground by changes in elevation and are not merely drawing constructions. The same is true for the line-marked inner areas.
In such a case, there is a plausible explanation possible for the divisions.
If we take each long vertical line gap to mark 10 years, then the Grand Mounds would in size correspond to the actual time that it took the Celestial Meridian to move from HIP8883 (the sand dune in the West) to HIP 8306 and Omicron Piscium in the East. The distance between the former and the latter is about 10 gaps, i.e. about 200 years. We find that a count of all the marked areas, also the long verticals, which are split in the middle perhaps to form two separate counts, results in an 8 x 24 count plus 8 i.e. 192 + 8 as set-off areas = 200.
We think that could intentionally have been done to actually mark the years individually, even if already marked by 10-year intervals in the vertical lines.
The strange marked areas to the right of the mounds are then immediately made understandable if we view the top to be a crossing path of the celestial equator horizontally and the long vertical ribbon to represent the ecliptic. Then the entire design of the figure makes perfect sense as matching the stars.
Our placement of the Grand Mounds in Pisces is mandated by our previous decipherments and by our subsequent decipherments of other nearby mound sites. In the next posting we look at the "fish hook" at the mouth of Pisces.
THIS POSTING IS Posting Number 65 of
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America
The Grand Mounds at Little Talbot Island State Park in Northeast Florida near Jacksonville mark the Ecliptic, Vernal Equinox, and Calculate Precession ca. 240 B.C.
The mound location placements below are based on a map diagram in William N. Morgan, Precolumbian Architecture in Eastern North America, Ripley P. Bullen Series, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, FL, 1999, http://www.upf.com/, for which we are most grateful, since they are nowhere else to be found, also not at the Little Talbot Island State Park website.
In our decipherment, we have redrawn the small image in Morgan's book to much larger size here, so that any errors vis-a-vis the original are ours, and not Morgan's.
Morgan writes in the above-cited book: "Three platforms ... and an unusual sand mound to the west ... that rises impressively above the plaza level. A shell midden extends ... to the northwest.... An unusual ramp extends ... from the south mound into the central plaza. The ramp seems to be aligned with the center of the west mound." [emphasis added]
Grand Mounds at Little Talbot Island State Park in Florida
Stars in Pisces Corresponding to the Grand Mounds
at Little Talbot Island State Park in Florida
As we have discovered, that "northwest line" that Morgan identifies surely marked the ecliptic at the three-star corner formed by HIP 8588, HIP 8888 and HIP 8859 in the "square" of the Grand Mounds in the "upper"as marked by three other corner stars: HIP 8306, Omicron Piscium, and HIP 8883.
Since the ecliptic is constant regardless of era, it is likely that these mounds date to ca. 200 B.C. (240 B.C. would be a good estimate) when the Vernal Equinox was marked on Earth by the "unusual" sand mound to the west. The fact that precession "moves" the point of the Equinoxes in the stars is perhaps the reason that this mound was constructed of sand, because the location of the Equinox in the stars would have been seen to "move" like a natural sand dune does, just as one saw the celestial meridian migrating forward with precession.
Additional speculative analysis is possible if the vertical outer lines in Morgan's drawing are actually marked on the ground by changes in elevation and are not merely drawing constructions. The same is true for the line-marked inner areas.
In such a case, there is a plausible explanation possible for the divisions.
If we take each long vertical line gap to mark 10 years, then the Grand Mounds would in size correspond to the actual time that it took the Celestial Meridian to move from HIP8883 (the sand dune in the West) to HIP 8306 and Omicron Piscium in the East. The distance between the former and the latter is about 10 gaps, i.e. about 200 years. We find that a count of all the marked areas, also the long verticals, which are split in the middle perhaps to form two separate counts, results in an 8 x 24 count plus 8 i.e. 192 + 8 as set-off areas = 200.
We think that could intentionally have been done to actually mark the years individually, even if already marked by 10-year intervals in the vertical lines.
The strange marked areas to the right of the mounds are then immediately made understandable if we view the top to be a crossing path of the celestial equator horizontally and the long vertical ribbon to represent the ecliptic. Then the entire design of the figure makes perfect sense as matching the stars.
Our placement of the Grand Mounds in Pisces is mandated by our previous decipherments and by our subsequent decipherments of other nearby mound sites. In the next posting we look at the "fish hook" at the mouth of Pisces.
THIS POSTING IS Posting Number 65 of
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America
The Grand Mounds at Little Talbot Island State Park in Northeast Florida near Jacksonville mark the Ecliptic, Vernal Equinox, and Calculate Precession ca. 240 B.C.
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