Crocodile Rock
Michael
Thursday. October 11, 1973. We are still on for meeting Eileen Gill at the Alligator Mounds on Thursday morning: Marshall, Archie, and Morris. Flight for Huntsville takes off around 8 pm from Columbus airport.
Eileen Gill is in her mid-to-late '20s, and is in casual field attire, jeans and a light jacket, when she meets the three Sandmen at the Alligator Mound. "Just registered on the National Register of Historic Places a couple of years ago," she says. "Before that, it was just pasture." She goes into a rehearsed spiel on how the original 1840s Smithsonian expedition believed the head of this effigy was home to an "altar," a place of sacrifice with an altar but that view has since been considered to be wildly speculative on the part of Squier and Davis. There have been no burial sites found in or around the Alligator Mound, which of course differs from many pre-Columbian mound builder sites.
"There's debate in the archeological community now about the dating of the effigy and the mound. Most archeologists date the mound to the Hopewell culture, around 100 BC to 500 AD, like the Newark Earthworks we'll be seeing later today. But some have pointed out that Hopewell settlements didn't largely create landscape-scale effigies, although they definitely used reptile, serpent, and other animal effigy motifs on a smaller scale in their metal-working and pottery. These larger-scale animal effigies are more properly classified as Mississippian, which would date anywhere from 1000 AD onwards. Of course, both could be true: the Alligator Mound could have been created under Hopewell settlement and after a cultural change or migration, the effigy built later."
Michael
Morris sort of meanders off up the hill a little ways, slowly heading in the direction of the effigy's head, while Eileen is giving her tour spiel.
Brant
Marshall will follow along on the tour, taking the occasional photograph. He has adopted the pose of a businessman in Columbus for work, with a hobbyist's interest in Red Indian culture. He is reserved, quiet, attentive. At some point either during or after Eileen's tour, he will ask Morris if he picked up anything unusual.
Michael
(If Archie wants to probe or press Eileen on any specifics historically or otherwise, I'm all ears. But in the interests of time and speedy response, I'll get Marshall and Morris vibing here:)
After we've done our survey of the Alligator Mound, at a point where Archie and Eileen are walking ahead to the car, Morris will sidle up to Marshall, and speak very quietly in Danbe. "All the energy in the lizard is coming out of its head. Pointed south-west. The tail feels like an antenna [lit. "metal-rod"], drawing energy from the earth."
Morris slows his walk even further, ponders switching to English, "It's not … " and then returns to Danbe. "It's not connected to History B. I wonder if, since it was built after the Ontoclysm, the effigy was meant to protect these people from History B returning. A lot of people helped build it. One man commanding many men. Their sweat and blood is in the earth. Their belief in this entity stains the ground, still. That's all I've got."
Brant
Marshall nods and pats Morris on the shoulder.
Rob
Archie makes curious, cheerful conversation with Eileen. I don't know how much he knows about the Hopewell culture, etc but he's got Archaeology-14 and Anthropology-17 so he's not too much at sea. He asks her how they know / why they think the mound is meant to be an alligator specifically ("There aren't many alligators in Ohio, as far as I know, ha ha.") He also follows up on what she says about talk of sacrifice being "wildly speculative." If it wasn't a place of sacrifice, and it's not a burial mound, what was done here? What was it for?
"And wild speculation is okay," he says with a wink. "I won't tell your professors."
Michael
"Oh, the Alligator is an interesting story. Legend and oral tradition has it that the white settlers, when they asked the local Indians about the identity of the effigy, said it was a creature who lived in water. Combine that with the lizard-like body and the whites decided to name it Alligator Mound. And alligators might not have even been totally unknown to the local pre-Columbians! Before the fall of the Hopewell Culture, there were extensive trade routes. Rich head-men were often buried with shark's teeth and obsidian weapons, undoubtedly brought up here from the Gulf and even from present-day Mexico. But most likely that underwater animal the Indians were referring to was the great Underwater Panther, Mishipeshu, a kind of … chimera of dangerous native beasts: cougar, stag, porcupine, serpent. A chthonic deity, it lived in the Underworld, flowing along underground rivers and caverns, occasionally dragging the greedy or unwary to death in a river's watery whirlpool: an entity to be propitiated for protection from untimely death. Also associated with the use and refinement of copper. This is all, of course, very hypothetical, but the Underwater Panther appears on textiles and pottery throughout the Great Lakes region and throughout the Mississippian world."
Rob
Well, obviously he's interested in the Underwater Panther. But he does ask his follow-up question above, about what Eileen thinks the place was used for. Or if that was her answer to his second question, he presses her on it a bit more. "So this whole site could be a kind of … talisman? Or a tribute to some protector deity? Protection from what, do you suppose?"
Michael
Eileen gets very serious. "There has been a lot of dismissive hand-waving among … older historians towards those of us concerned with climatic, ecological and meteorological history, but so many mini-ice ages throughout recorded history have demonstrably led to enormous social and political disruption. I think about those poor people dealing with the impact of, say, a global climate cooling event in the 6th century AD … all of a sudden, the skies are dark, the crops are dying, the winters getting inexplicably longer, and colder... wouldn't it seem to you like it was the end of the world? Everything would have changed for the pre-Columbians around that time: hunting grounds, the crops and cereals you could cultivate, even the very trails and waterways. That kind of catastrophe has to change how people see their patron deities, their relationship with cycles of life and death, with the seasons. European historians have been talking about this for decades, but anthropologists and archeologists of the American continents … well, of course there's so much we don't know without a written record. But our dating systems, our ways of seeing into the past through textiles, and pottery, and places like this! They all seem to bolster this theory: before the climate changed, the inhabitants of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys had a completely different way of living from afterwards."