The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America Begins!

OK, are you ready?!

At Google Earth did you find the large "Native American" viz. "Indian" mound not far from Judaculla Rock and virtually directly South of the Great Serpent Mound of Ohio? We will turn to these mounds and others shortly.

We are about to begin a marvelous journey into a study and understanding of the mounds, petroglyphs and painted art of Native America, showing that Native Americans viz. American Indians (or their ancestors) did not place these by chance throughout the landscape, but rather according to a reconstructable astronomical system of geographic orientation, "as above, so below", as precedentially described for the Pawnee Indians of Nebraska, and cited at our Megaliths.net website on megalithic cultures, where we write:

"As observed by Alice Cunningham Fletcher (Alice C. Fletcher) in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist, there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska, geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens. FLETCHER, A. C. (1902), STAR CULT AMONG THE PAWNEE —A PRELIMINARY REPORT. American Anthropologist, 4: 730–736. doi: 10.1525/aa.1902.4.4.02a00050."

We honor in memory A.C. Fletcher. THANK YOU! She wrote that more than 100 years ago and no one, except for the present writer, has paid any attention.

You will now see in subsequent postings that this practice was not restricted to the Pawnee, but characterized the entire culture of Native America.

To make this fun for all, we will not reveal the entire solution at once, but will travel through the great land of North America (mostly the present USA, but also including Canada and Mexico), individual location by individual location, and show how many of the mounds, petroglpyhs and painted rocks of Native America "were located ... according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens".

Have your "Google Earth" or comparable geo-program at the ready!

Let us now head to West Virginia.
The Cygnian Swan of Moundsville is our first in presentation of many,
because the correspondence at Moundsville between the mounds, appurtenant earthworks and the stars is so simple and so obvious, even to a lay person ...

We are off to the mounds!

THIS POSTING is Posting Number 1 of
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America

Prehistoric Mankind's Primary Technologies Were Rooted in Astronomy and the Prevailing Economies Were Based on Land and Property

To understand the development of human civilization, it is important to recognize that mankind's first "scientific" technologies were arguably based on primitive "stargazing", i.e. what we modernly call "astronomy".

No less a thinker than Bertrand Russell wrote in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and  Limits (Simon and Schuster, Clarion Books, New York, 1948) that:

"Astronomy is the oldest of the sciences, and the contemplation of the heavens, with their periodic regularities, gave men their first conceptions of natural law."

Furthermore, in terms of both land survey and land or sea navigation, as written at the Wikipedia under Surveying:

"The primary way of determining one's position on the earth's surface when no known positions are nearby is by astronomic observations. Observations to the sun, moon and stars could all be made using navigational techniques. Once the instrument's position and bearing to a star is determined, the bearing can be transferred to a reference point on the earth and which can then be used as a base for further observations. Survey-accurate astronomic positions were difficult to observe and calculate and so tended to be a base off which many other measurements were made. Since the advent of the GPS system, astronomic observations are rare as GPS allows positions to be determined adequately over most of the surface of the earth."

Since human survival has at all times depended on either ownership or control of actual physical territory on our planet Earth, that same astronomy served as the simplest way to map out that territory, with maps made to mirror the ever-present and ready-made sky map of the heavens, "as above, so below". At our Megaliths.net website on megalithic cultures we write:

"As observed by Alice Cunningham Fletcher (Alice C. Fletcher) in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist, there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska, geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens. FLETCHER, A. C. (1902), STAR CULT AMONG THE PAWNEE —A PRELIMINARY REPORT. American Anthropologist, 4: 730–736. doi: 10.1525/aa.1902.4.4.02a00050."

To the importance of astronomy for ancient peoples we can add timekeeping, as written at Curious About Astronomy:

"In ancient times, the practical need for timekeeping and navigation was one of the primary reasons for the study of astronomy. The celestial origins of timekeeping and navigation are still evident. "

In spite of the above observations, anthropologists and archaeologists worldwide generally proceed in their academic work as if the ancients knew more or less nothing of astronomy and, furthermore, placed little or no importance upon it for land survey, navigation, timekeeping and chronology, whereas the probative evidence that we have increasingly found presents exactly the opposite picture. Astronomy DOMINATED the ancient world.

Hiawatha as Atlas and Orion, the Iroquois Aron-Hiawagon with Hiawagon = Hiawatha, the "Holder of the Heavens"

If Hiawatha was the "Holder of the Heavens", as suggested in our previous posting, then "what" and "where" was he holding those heavens?

We think these were almost certainly the stars of Orion, with ORION = ARON and found in Iroquois language variants such as "Aron-Hiawagon" viz. "(Aron)-Hiawatha".** The Iroquois nations were Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora. Cherokee is also an Iroquoian language.

The image below shows
-- in thick colored lines that we have added to our clip as taken from the astronomy software Starry Night Pro (http://astronomy.starrynight.com/) --
just how Orion "holds up the heavens", whether we apply this "holding up" concept to the ecliptic, celestial equator, or both of those "celestial spheres".

Compare Lee Lawrie's colossal bronze Atlas at Rockefeller Center, New York.


The positions of the ecliptic and celestial equator in our illustration are from 3117 B.C., but we remain uncertain about the exact era that this system began to be used in Native America, and that is a question to be resolved at some future time. Our purpose here is just to show how the concept of "holder of the heavens" fits Orion well in terms of groupings of its major stars.

These stars need not have been grouped by the ancients exactly as we see them today in the Orion constellation, but the main groupings of the brightest stars are quite prominent, and were so surely also seen in prehistoric times by ancient stargazers, so that they were likely grouped similarly.

Greek mythology had its "holder of the heavens" as in the image above, Atlas, a name whose root is traced to Indo-European terms. We quote the Wikipedia:

"Traditionally historical linguists etymologize the Ancient Greek word Ἄτλας ...as comprised from copulative α- and the Proto-Indo-European root *telh₂- 'to uphold, support' (whence also τλῆναι) .... [we add here to that analysis the Indo-European "r"-form as in Latvian tur-, turēt "hold", which is useful further below*]

A common misconception today is that Atlas was forced to hold the Earth on his shoulders, but Classical art shows Atlas holding the celestial spheres, not a globe...."

Greek myth states that Atlas tried to trick Heracles (Hercules) into carrying the heavens ... in astronomy, the stars of Hercules are directly opposite Orion. Moreover, the Orion-near Pleiades stars were said to be the daughters of Atlas, so that a link of Atlas and Orion is not impossible, though one may simply be the human mythological manifestation of the heavenly other. The key thing is that Atlas holds up "the celestial spheres", the ecliptic and the celestial equator as it were, as Orion also does.

Traditionally, in Europe, Orion was seen as a mighty giant of a hunter, perhaps the same mighty giant of a hunter that according to Cherokee legend allegedly came down from the mountains to carve the Judaculla Rock, which we also think marked Orion in the era of the Judaculla Rock's petroglyphs.

The above general astronomical understanding now puts us into position to embark upon a marvelous journey via Google Earth to attempt a reconstruction of what appears to us to be an ancient survey of "Native America" via the stars of the heavens, "as above, so below". We are not alleging point blank that it was as we shall describe it, but it could have been. At the least, "land survey by astronomy" should be considered in formulating an explanation of many of the petroglyphs, painted rocks and mounds in Native America.
 
By the way, what intrigued us initially to conduct this analysis was that Judaculla Rock was nearly straight South, but not exactly South, of the famed Serpent Mound in Ohio. Was there a large mound anywhere near Judaculla Rock that was on a nearly exact perpendicular line to the Serpent Mound?

Check out Google Earth to see if you can find it.

__________

* P.S. Atlas (A-Tlas) in the r- variant as in Indo-European Latvian turiens ("hold") could speculatively be related in language origin to Iroquois variant names of Hiawatha such as Tearon-hiaonagon, Taon-hiawagi, or Tahi-awagi ... Tayon-watha ... Thanna-wege. However, this is not a main query of our writing.

** P.S.S. The similarly of "Aron" in the Iroquois to our modern word "Orion" and to the ancient phrase "Aron Haberit" gives grounds for thought in view of the still mysterious origin of Haplogroup X in Native America. This anthropological question is not the main focus of our current writing and we leave the issue for now to genetic research, but we do mention here the perhaps chance similarity.