|
Newark Earthworks and
Interpretive Archaeology
2011.01.06 -
Newark Earthworks is one of several Ohio earthworks
being considered for U.S. Department of the Interior
(DoI) submission to the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World
Heritage List. I write to focus attention on
an important issue the submission brings to the
fore, the would-be naming of Ohio monuments as the "Hopewell
Ceremonial
Earthworks." At issue is employing
archaeological interpretation to name ancient
monuments. Had this practice been in vogue in
the 19th century, we would today be discussing "The
Ten Lost Tribes Mounds" or some other similar such
misnomer. Transistory ideas should never be
employed to name antiquities.
On Dec. 14, 2010, National Park Service (NPS)
provided a "30-Day
Notice of Opportunity for Public Comment on U.S.
Nominations to the World Heritage List and
Potential Additions to the U.S. World Heritage
Tentative List" (PDF).
Comments
are
accepted
on
or
before
thirty
days
from
the
date.
The
public
notice
seeks
comment
on
the
next
potential
U.S.
nominations
and
on
possible
additions
to the U.S. list. A Tentative List is a
national list of candidate sites a country intends
to consider for nomination. A country can
nominate a property after it has been on the
Tentative List for one year, and is limited to
nominating only two sites in any given year.
NPS last submitted to UNESCO World Heritage in
January, 2008.
Earthworks on DoI's Tentative List include Fort
Ancient State Memorial, Hopewell Culture NHP, Newark
Earthworks State Historic Site (Wright Earthworks,
The Octagon Earthworks, and Great Circle
Earthworks), Serpent Mound, and Poverty Point
NM. DoI is considering whether to nominate any
of the properties. If a site is selected for
nomination, public notice will be made of the
decision, and draft nominations will be reviewed,
amended if necessary, then provided to the World
Heritage Centre no later than Sept. 30, 2011. The
World Heritage Committee makes final decisions in
the summer of 2013.
Back to the issue at hand, interpretive archaeology
and naming sites. Why did officials designate
a list of Ohio archaeological monuments the
"Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks" in the first
place? I think and expect that they should
know better. The historian who e-mailed me "I
consider it the best interpretation I know of at
this point" reinforces my argument suitably!
An individual consideration at some point in time is
exactly the problem because interpretations not only
change with time and with advances in knowledge,
but, as is often stated in jest, "There are more
interpretations than archaeologists because
everybody wants to be one." Perhaps the
responsible officials were not archaeologists.
I've previously presented some Woodland Culture
earthworks in a series of photo galleries
and discussed them in various articles.
I employed Newark as an example while addressing
methods in Temporal Epoch
Calculations, an introduction to research
considerations regarding temporal variables.
The material in my next blog post is new and will be
permalinked as an additional entry in Newark
Archaeogeodesy, Assessing Evidence of Geospatial
Intelligence in the Americas. In
2009, I alsocommented
on misinterpretating earthworks when ancient
religious beliefs were seemingly being divined and
applied to the long deceased:
"Contemporary
religious interpretations of the past have entered
into recent popular dialogue about the Great
Hopewell Road. Several archaeologists are equating
the earthwork with 'pilgrimage' and Newark with a
presumed 'Holy Land' of some sort, attracting
distant travelers along the 'holy pilgrim's path'
because the 'basic idea is pilgrimage.' Old World
religious conceptions should not be super-imposed
on Native American cultures. Just like it was
wrong to say the Ten Tribes of Israel built
Newark, so also it is wrong to call Newark a
Jerusalem or Mecca, especially when there is no
material evidence to go with the belief."
The distinction between material evidence and
interpretation is too frequently blurred in
archaeological writing, and is often non-existent in
popular literature. This issue is compounded
when pet interpretations are used to name
sites. The logic of the problem is so obvious,
I do not feel I need to present more
argumentation. Instead, I want to move forward
and release some important evidence reinforcing a
very different interpretation. The
interpretation I favor is that the builders
possessed geodetic capabilities and advanced
knowledge of astronomy far exceeding their
contemporaries across the Atlantic, knowledge their
eventual conquerors and agents of their genocide
were blind to. The astronomy interpretation of
Newark and other earthworks has significant
supportive empirical evidence, and, unlike the
religious/pilgrimage/ceremonial ideation, at least
the evidence is incontrovertible science no matter
how it is interpreted.
"What is the evidence?" should be your first
question, of course. I present new findings in
the next ArchaeoBlog entry. I've
added a lunar standstills section to Eclipses, Cosmic
Clockwork of the Ancients, a
discussion in the broader context of fundamental
astronomy. Also, I amended AeGeo code and
added related terms (aegeo_calc_v2011.xls).
Updates
of
applets
will
follow,
including
some
fundamental
reformulations
to
improve
the
precision
of
temporal
terms
of
astronomical
constants
and
derived
variables.
The precision of relationships of Newark Earthworks
to other global monuments required improving the
temporal accuracy of my applications to assess the
hypothetical accuracy of the ancient astronomers.
Newark Earthworks and the Lunar Standstill
Period
One long-standing interpretation of Newark Octagon
is intentional alignments to the lunar standstill
rise and set extrema. The hypothesis first appeared
in John A. Eddy's article Archaeoastronomy of North
America: Cliffs, Mounds, and Medicine Wheels (in In Search of Ancient
Astronomies, E.C. Krupp). Eddy's map
examination revealed the alignment as possible.
Hively and Horn's survey (1982) determined
standstill rising and setting positions coincide
with the architecture of the earthworks.
Azimuth identifies horizontal direction, while
elevation corresponds to vertical direction. The
azimuths of the octagon sides closely correlate with
the lunar standstill horizon extrema as observed in
the three-dimensional landscape surrounding the
Octagon. Most importantly, the primary axis of
the entire earthwork (octagon, circle, and
connecting parallel walls) aligns to the lunar major
moonrise, the northern-most moonrise position of
each standstill (arrow in image above). I
discuss details and other possible interpretations
of the Octagon Earthwork primary alignment in Temporal Epoch
Calculations.
Recently, Google Earth updated some Andean areas
with high-resolution imagery. One of the
important sites now visible in detail is a UNESCO
World Heritage site, the Chavin
Archaeological Site in Peru. The Google Earth
illlustration below incorporates an image overlay of
CyArk's
archaeology
map. While ground-truthing with GPS equipment
needs to be accomplished for precise coordinates,
especially when rugged Andean terrain is combined
with oblique camera angles, reasonably accurate
coordinates can now be derived using Google Earth.
The first image below identifies newly-derived
coordinates for specific site features.
The Chavin latitude
arcsine equals one-sixth (asin 0.1666... =
9.5941 degrees). Given a right triangle at
Chavin with sides extended to the pole star and
to the geodetic center,
the axis is the hypotenuse equaling six and the
geodetic radius equals one. Latitude
properties expressing integral number
relationships to the pole and equator reinforce
astronomical observation interpretations of
major monuments. Today, the precise asine one-sixth
geodetic triangle intersects the latitude of
Chavin's Building F. Plate motion has
shifted local latitude slightly since
monument construction.
In the next image, a tessellated line extending
from Newark to Pachacamac, Peru, is visible
passing 2.5 km east of Chavin de Huantar.
Newark, Chavin, and Pachacamac form a nearly
straight line spanning 5,826 km. The
Archaeological Complex of Pachacamac is on the
UNESCO World Heritage Centre's Tentative List.
|
South
America Sites
|
|
code
|
site
|
latitude
|
longitude
|
source
|
|
chhap
|
Chavin de Huantar
Huaca A Portal
|
-9.594358
|
-77.177889
|
GE 2011-01
|
|
pachs
|
Pachacamac Huaca Sol
|
-12.262789 |
-76.901822 |
GE 2011-01
|
The Newark to Pachacamac arc distance equals four
times the angular motion of the moon per rotation
(r27). The mean arc distance from Pachacamac's
Huaca Sol to the two great circles at Newark
(pachs-nocc-nccm) equals 4.000014 r27, an excess of
only 20m (1.0 : 1.000004 accuracy). This arc
distance, if interpreted as an intentional
construct, implies accurate knowledge of lunar
motion per rotation along with the geodetic
capability to situate monuments accurately.
The three sites
together may also express a more complex
understanding of lunar astronomy, the
fundamental astronomical constants which
determine lunar standstills. The arc
distances from Pachacamac to Newark and to
Chavin (pachs-chhap and pachs-nocp) present the
ratio 1.0 : 19.59995. From Chavin (chhap)
the ratio of the arcs to Pachacamac and Newark
is 1.0 : 18.59999. The lunar standstill
constants below for 900 BCE, the approximate
epoch of Chavin construction, precisely match
these proportions.
|
Lunar Standstill
Period, 900 BCE values
|
|
code
|
term
|
value
|
|
et
|
eclipse nodal
intervals per lunar orbit turn
|
19.600125
|
|
ot
|
orbits per lunar
orbit turn
|
18.600125
|
|
es
|
eclipse nodal
intervals per lunar standstill period
|
19.61407
|
|
ys
|
years per
lunar standstill period
|
18.61407
|
|
os
|
orbits per lunar
standstill period
|
18.61339
|
|
x - 1 = y
x =19.600125
eclipse nodal intervals per lunar orbit
turn
y = 18.600125
orbits per lunar orbit turn
x = 19.61407
eclipse nodal intervals per lunar
standstill period
y = 18.61407
years per lunar standstill period
|
Another set of numbers repeats the ratio of the
arcs. The astrogeodetic module s22
represents mean angular solar orbit of the moon
and earth per lunar nodal period. The arc distance
from Pachacamac to Chavin equals one-tenth of s22
(pachs-chhap = 0.100004 s22). The arc from
Chavin to Newark Octagon (chhap-nocp) equals
1.86007 s22, that from Pachacamac to Newark
(pachs-nocp) equals 1.96007 s22, one-tenth
multiples of the values in the table above (see
codes et and ot). The difference between
these two arcs is precisely 0.10000 s22. The
mean arc from Pachacamac to Octagon centerpoint
and to Observatory Mound is 1.960012 s22
(pachs-nocp-noom), precisely a one-tenth multiple
of the "et" value (19.600125).
This post is permalinked as part of
http://jqjacobs.net/archaeology/newark_arcs.html:
Newark Archaeogeodesy
Assessing
Evidence of Geospatial Intelligence in the
Americas
|
