The Great Serpent Mound
Four hundred metres of serpent, best seen from the air
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An effigy mound is an earthwork shaped as an animal or a figure, meant to be seen from above or from high ground nearby. The dating is contested: radiocarbon dates from the 1990s gave around 1070, while older and newer samples point to Adena, over a thousand years earlier. The dispute is unresolved, and the figure is a good example of how hard it is to date a structure containing nothing directly datable. Coincidence with the supernova of 1054 and Halley's Comet in 1066 has been proposed but not established.
For children
In Ohio lies an earthwork shaped as a serpent with open jaws, over four hundred metres long. It is not a burial mound — nobody is buried in it. The head points to where the sun sets at midsummer.
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