A cache by [DELETED_USER]
Hidden
:
10/19/2008
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A short walk on trails within Mounds State Park in Anderson, Indiana.
If you cannot travel to Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids, this cache is as close as you will get to the likes of them in Indiana. It is located at one of the oldest examples of ancient societies and their link to astronomical activities. While there, you will visit seemingly benign mounds and valleys that are actually a very accurate way to track the movements of the sun and stars - and, amazingly, they were built over 2,000 years ago!
To log this Earthcache you must post in your log a picture of yourself at the Great Mound. You must then email me either 1) the circumference of the Great Mound (just set your odometer & walk around it!), or 2) the number of fence posts in the fence around the Great Mound. Please do not include your answer in your log entry or include the information sign in your picture & please follow all Indiana State Park regulations in the pursuit of this Earthcache. LOGS NOT MEETING THE CRITERIA WILL BE DELETED.
Mounds State Park is an Indiana State Park, which is located in Anderson, Indiana. It features prehistoric Native American heritage in the form of an intricate complex of 10 ceremonial mounds built decades before the birth of Christ. The largest earthwork, named the Great Mound, is believed to have been constructed around 160 B.C. The Great Mound is a circular earth enclosure with an internal ditch and south/southwest entrance. The earthworks measure 394 feet across from bank to bank. The nine-foot tall embankment is 63 feet wide at its base. Its ditch is 10.5 feet deep and 60 feet across at its top. The central platform is 138 feet across and is occupied by a four-foot high central mound 30 feet in diameter.
These mounds, although built by ancient humans, were possible because the glacial activity through Indiana. About 12,000 years ago, a glacier, commonly known as the Wisconsin Lobe, covered parts of Indiana up to a mile thick. The glacier brought with it rocks, known as erratics, from as far away as Canada to this area. It also acted like a bulldozer, scraping off the earth and depostiing gravel called glacier till to the area over the exisitng bedrock. This till is why so many gravel pits exist in Indiana. It also made it possible for humans to create the Mounds. Had the glaciers not covered Indiana, this area might have been bedrock, thereby making mound construction impossible.
Don Cochran, a Ball State University archaeologist, believes was used as an observatory. Dips in the earthen walls surrounding the largest mound’s central platform helped observers track the movement of the sun and bright stars. The west side of the Great Mound features alignments that follow the setting of the sun on the days of winter and summer solstice, which are the shortest and longest days of the year. It also tracks sunset on the equinox, when the hours of daylight and darkness are virtually equal.
Like many discoveries, the breakthrough at Mounds State Park was an accident. It began in June 1988 as an attempt by Cochran & a group of Ball State archaeology students to update the only existing map of the mounds. The last map that was made was back in 1870, or thereabouts, and it had some things out of place.
Cochran used a survey transit to help confirm his discovery at Mound State Park. The survey tool helped confirm the alignment of smaller companion mounds with the dips in the earthen wall surrounding the park’s Great Mound. His discovery was made on December 21, 1988 - winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Cochran believed that if he was right with his computations and if they worked out in real life, the implications could be staggering. Just after 5:00 p.m. the big moment of truth was almost at hand, but something didn’t look right. The sun was sinking on a track that would take it too far to the left to line up with a flag marker. It seemed it was going to miss the slot in the Great Mound, but, as the sun slipped closer to the horizon alignment began to drift slightly back to the right. Cochran watched as the sun swung into line with the embankment dip. At 5:23 p.m., it sank into darkness. His theory was on target. These modest heaps of dirt were not only burial mounds or amphitheaters, as archaeologists had thought for decades, they were sophisticated observatories shaped from the earth by prehistoric humans.
For more than 2,000 years the mounds had been silently keeping track of the heavens spinning above central Indiana while no one had suspected, until that short winter day in 1988. The smaller earthworks had aligned with dips in the Great Mound’s embankment and probably helped their creators sight the sun and stars. Fiddleback mound, for instance, is on a line with the summer solstice sunset, the circular mound is aligned with the winter solstice sunset, and the shallow earthwork tracks the rise of a bright star known as Fomalhaut.
Cochran has since plotted the locations of four other ancient mound groups built around the same time. There is one near each New Castle, Richmond, Cambridge City and Winchester. Cochran has sketched in lines connecting the sites and the result is a pattern that eerily resembles the Big Dipper. And, although he has stopped short of suggesting the mounds were located in an attempt to recreate the constellation, he does marvel at the resemblance.
The tribes who built the mounds are known as the Adena and later the Hopewell, who were prehistoric Indians who lived in Indiana centuries before such better known historical tribes as the Miami and Delaware. Much of their sophisticated culture is shrouded in mystery, lost forever in time. There are no written records, and the clues they left behind are scant: shards of pottery, bits of jewelry, assorted stone tools. Very little is really known about the Indians of that time and adding to the mystery is the absence of anything archaeologists can identify as the remains of a village near the Anderson Mounds.
Information from the Indiana Historical Society on the Great Mound indicates that on the platform surrounding the earth mound were numbers of small post molds. This suggests that an irregular brush screen had guarded the activities occurring in the central region or that saplings had been bent over and tied to the heavy support posts located near the center to form a roofed shelter. Artifacts recovered, though few in number, included plain and distinctively incised pottery, mica, a plain platform pipe, and bear effigies (crude sculptures), which were drilled and carved from bone.
Questions that still puzzle historians are: Just where did the Adena leave off and the Hopewell begin? and, What was their relationship to each other? Most estimates date the Adena from 1,000 B.C. to about 100 B.C., with Hopewell flourishing from 100 B.C. to 400 A.D. Current theory is that the Anderson earth-works were built by the Adena from 1,000 B.C. to about 100 B.C. and they were later used by the Hopewell.
The Great Mound was probably first recognized by non-Indians before 1803 when land reports were sent to General Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory. Frederick Bronnenberg first purchased the land in 1821 & then protected the mounds until his death in 1853. His house still stands within the park grounds. The park's property remained in the Bronnenberg family until 1879. Shortly thereafter it was owned by the Union Traction Company and eventually developed into an amusement park. A carousel was operated atop the panduriform “Fiddleback” mound. Much alteration and destruction of mound surfaces occurred at this time due to amusement park activity, and in some areas, cultivation. Thankfully, visitors are no longer allowed to walk on the mounds.
The first reported excavation of the mounds was a few years before 1874 & some people believe it may have even began while Frederick Bronnenberg was still living. The target of these operations was the Great Mound. Years later, on May 5, 1931 the renowned archaeologist of the day, Warren K. Moorehead with Glenn A. Black visited the park and made a number of auger borings of various earthworks including the Great Mound. Many more years later, Indiana University, under permit and financial support of the Department of Natural Resources, extensively excavated the Great Mound during the summer of 1968 and 1969. It was then that a small secondary mound situated on the central platform surface of a large primary mound was revealed.
Indiana University’s excavation revealed the most artifacts in the Great Mound. They discovered burials, log tombs, crematory basins, garbage pits, numerous postholes, and some pottery. The pottery is decorated in zones, with thin incised lines, often forming up to five nested diamond designs. This design is similar to an excavation of Ball State University at New Castle twenty miles to the southeast. This New Castle site is dated around the beginning of the Christian Era. Since Middle Woodland Hopewell pottery has also been recovered from New Castle it is reasonable to assume that the mound complex at Mounds State Park is also Hopewell.
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