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Here's a pic from the group that maintains the grounds' website of the winter solstice sunrise. This is what I hope to see on Monday. The coolest alignments at this particular site (Fort Ancient) though are these really cool stone-covered mini-mounds that look down parallel walls to the summer solstice sun rise and another to the sunset.
It's funny you ask whether or not I'll be allowed to take pics (I don't know) and bring up Graham Hancock's show as well. I believe one of the most controversial parts of that show is when they don't let him in to see Serpent Mound. That's the world's largest effigy mound, which has a massive amount of solar and lunar alignments. I grew up taking field trips from Dayton to Serpent Mound all the time, back when it wasn't controversial and people just viewed it as really cool.
It's always been ultra-mysterious though. To this day, we don't know if it was built by the Adena[1] (older than Hopewell), the Hopewell (my bet), or the Fort Ancient[2] (contemporary to Mississippian, but less cosmopolitan). It sits on top of this hill in a meteor impact crater, near a handful of Adena and Fort Ancient burial mounds. I don't remember why Graham Hancock was interested in it, but I think the coolest thing is the missing coil! Some ancient people at some point in time realized that one of the lunar alignments of one of the serpent's coils was off and just deleted it. They rebuilt that part of the mound without the coil. I just love the idea of some ridiculously smart group of hunter gatherers coming to a site their ancestors brilliantly built. They look at the complex lunar alignments, the artistic prowess, and the logistical flex (since they're doing this carrying baskets full of dirt with no central leader or slaves or other cheat codes) of their forefathers, and say, "hold my beer. They messed up this one part."
That was a bit of a tangent, so to answer your question, I don't know. There are often times a handful of Miami and Shawnee descendants at these things, and if they're offended by people taking pictures, I won't.
It would be super cool if it turn out the Adena built this because it would show they had all the astronomical knowledge that the Hopewell did. ↩
This people group was named for the site that I plan to visit Monday, which was actually built by the Hopewell. All the names are arbitrary as we have no clue what they called themselves. ↩
For quite some time, I’ve had an interest in the Hopewell specifically. They were hunter gatherers that travelled in small communities, and there’s no sign they ever developed a centralized leadership structure. Despite what I’m about to write, they were incredibly egalitarian: no kings, no wars, no castes, no ritual sacrifice.
Yet they would join together and create massive earthworks that were perfect geometric shapes with interesting proportional relationships to other massive geometric shapes. But these earthworks also have precise astronomical alignments (I’m planning to visit one to watch the sunset Monday). Many ancient societies built solar alignments into their architecture, but the Hopewell (remember these guys have no kings, agriculture, or cities) would build dozens of precise alignments into these huge earthworks that track the phases of the moon as well.
While the Mississippians continued a lot of these traditions, they had huge cities, kings, agriculture, and were pretty violent, much more ideal for accomplishing feats of engineering, mathematics, and astronomy. One of the theories about the decline of the Hopewell I find most convincing is the introduction of new technologies. The bow and arrow made its way south from Canada and human-bred corn made its way north from Mexico around the same time they stop doing Hopewell culture type things. It makes me think of smart phones and social media.
I’ve been visiting a lot of the remaining sites for decades, but a bunch of them just became a UNESCO world heritage site and I’m curious what’s going to come of it. The rabbit hole goes quite deep, but there are still so many mysteries. One of the biggest for me is what the sites were actually used for. Most scholars just say “religion” generically. Most conspiracy theorists say aliens. I like to think, and there’s precedent for this, that they were just for recreation. It’s kind of a silly analogy, but I find myself walking through amusement parks or malls and just imagining future scholars talking about them as sacred ceremonial sites.