Great Serpent Mound

Lonely Monuments

We were honored to spend the summer solstice at the Great Serpent Mound, watching the sun set into the mouth of the snaking earthworks as it has for the last thousand years.

We know shockingly little about the Great Serpent Mound and about the indigenous people who constructed it. We refer to them as the Fort Ancient culture, but we don’t even know what they called themselves.

Their civilization was brutalized by European diseases, and most of their physical remains were destroyed or looted by the settlers who followed behind the germs.

These particular mounds are internationally recognized as a cultural treasure both for their scale and their sophisticated astronomical alignments. We can sadly only guess at the nature of the rituals that once must have been celebrated here on the solstice.

It is a discomforting thing to look upon a lonely monument who creators were destroyed by one’s ancestors. It seems wrong to ignore its existence, like burying the evidence of a crime, and even more wrong to celebrate in the space.

We quietly bore witness, contemplated our complicity, and committed to try to be better than our predecessors.