The Great Serpent Mound
The Ancients
00:00
The Age of the Serpent Mound
In the early 1990s, I was with a team that said, let's try to answer this question of the age of it. We thought if we could get radiocarbon samples from a burned layer at the bottom, it would definitively date when the mound was built. Unfortunately, there was no ash layer in the area where we opened it. So for all of those reasons, I think that serpent mound is best understood as a Mississippian religious icon. It fits into a clear cultural context of everybody who was building effigy mounds and being obsessed with serpents lived much later.
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