Some 400 years before Columbus was born, Indians living near what is now Peebles, Ohio, built the Great Serpent Mound, shown in the photo. The mound is shaped like a snake, tail coiled and mouth open—perhaps in the act of devouring an egg or spitting it out. Why the Indians built the mound remains a mystery, especially since the effigy is so huge—a quarter of a mile long—that it can only be identified as a snake from high in the sky.
Perhaps the snake functioned as a territorial marker, rather like the graffiti urban gangs use to scare rivals. Perhaps it was a religious symbol; snakes figured prominently in the beliefs of later Indians. Perhaps the serpent conveyed astronomical meanings: Its shape mirrors the constellation Draco; and on June 21st, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the snake's head points exactly at the spot where the sun sets. (Was the serpent gobbling up the sun?)
Perhaps the mound is some type of memorial to the dead; skeletons dating from the period are found in nearby mounds.
We may never know what the mound meant to those who built it, but we should not imagine that they were all that different from ourselves. Consider the other aerial photo. Built in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC is a V-shaped granite wall. Maya Lin, the twenty-one-year-old Yale architecture student who designed it, stunned even herself in winning the nationwide competition.
What does it mean to us? Lin herself wasn't sure. She decided against including statues in her design; no figure or group of figures could possibly "represent" all of those who died. Instead, she chose to inscribe the names of all 58,256 Americans who died in the war, listed in the chronological order of their deaths. Those viewing the wall would experience "a journey in time." She hoped that the memorial might function "as a way we can teach the next generations." "I might be making up for all the history courses I didn't take," she added.
¦ First Peoples
¦ The Demise of the Big Mammals
¦ The Archaic Period: Surviving without Big Mammals
¦ The Maize Revolution
¦ The Diffusion of Corn
¦ Population Growth After AD 800
¦ Cahokia: The Hub of Mississippian Culture
¦ The Collapse of Urban Centers
¦ Eurasia and Africa
¦ Europe in Ferment
¦ Mapping the Past:
Debate over the Earliest Route to the Americas
({••-[Hear the Audio Prologue at www. myhistorylab. com
This book attempts to explain the past; it assumes that we are not much different from those who came before us. By learning about them, we learn about ourselves. Our journey begins where theirs left off.
Readers may fairly point out that this book is entitled The American Nation. What does it have to do with peoples who lived many generations before George Washington? The answer is that the early peoples of the Americas made decisions and took actions that, like ripples on a pond, radiated far beyond their world and into our own. They changed the land itself, as illustrated by the Great Serpent Mound. They hunted some animals to extinction; they devised new crops and cultural systems, repeatedly adapting to changing environments. Yet nothing in their experience prepared them for the sudden appearance of strange, bellicose peoples from Europe. Possessing formidable weapons, riding terrifying animals, and endowed with an unfathomable power to wreak sickness and death on entire villages, these invaders swiftly seized much of the Western Hemisphere. The American nation was one product of these developments.
But first things first. ¦
A woolly mammoth consumed about 400 pounds of grass a day. This mammoth skeleton is thirteen feet high.
World History
