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Water Serpent
Effigy
Two years ago one wet spring weekend, I invited a friend and
colleague, Dr. John Pohl, to join me at a meeting with the Green Mountain
National Forest archaeologist, Dave Lacy, and others to discuss the prospect of
future study of the Smith site and other cairn sites in the vicinity. At site
R7-2, after we had walked the length of the wall-over-the-stream, John Pohl was
asked what he thought of it, and he forthrightly said that it reminded him of a
water serpent. John is an expert in pre-Columbian art and archaeology, and is
also a consultant to the Moundville Mississippian site in Alabama. His comment
illustrates the gulf between those who have a thorough grounding in American
Indian cosmology and religion, and are not afraid to entertain original thoughts
about perplexing issues, and those who are trapped in the paradigm that says the
Indians had no stone building technology before the arrival of Europeans with
their superior knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most
archaeologists in the Northeast view structures of this sort as the crazy design
of some misguided colonial farmer, and cannot get beyond this viewpoint. For
instance, since an area north of the Smith site was said to be gold country in
the 19th century, one suggested that the culvert was a sluice to separate gold
from the dross, similar in construction to the flue of the Ely Copper Mine in
Orange County, Vermont (Neudorfer 1980: 52).
If we can get beyond the
mental barrier that says the Indians had no stone building technology, then the
connection that Pohl proposed makes eloquent sense. Snakes or serpents are
common to the mythology of many Indian tribes from South and Central America,
where it is the feathered serpent. In North America it is the water serpent.
As the Vastokases have written, “the dwelling places of these great snakes are
the insides of hills near lakes, where underground passageways provide access to
the water” and the meaning of snakes to the Algonkians was multi-layered. “They
may represent the powers of evil and darkness in their manifestations as
fish-tailed or horned monsters, but they can also signify the energy of life and
the powers of regeneration; in myths they sometimes function as vehicles of
transition for the soul’s journey to the netherworld” (Vastokas & Vastokas
1973:95). To Barnouw (1977:18) “great horned serpents appear as entrance-way
guardians. The bridge crossing over a river into the land of the souls is a
serpent disguised as a log.” Images of these creatures appear in the
Peterborough petroglyphs (Fig. 16) and in a petroglyph at Emden, Maine (Fig.
17), among other places. Interestingly, the Kennebec River in Maine, in the
Algonkian language, means serpent (Brinton 1868: 108).
Fig 16
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Fig 17
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Serpent-like
walls have been found in a number of Mid-Atlantic States. Brisbin (1976) and
Sanders (1991) describe a 191m (626 foot) long serpent effigy above the Big
Sandy River in Catlettsburg, Kentucky. Brisbin (1976:28) described a “large
boulder that exhibits evidence for quarrying. Slabs were removed by drilling a
number of holes, broken off, apparently sized by hurling down the hill,
laboriously carried back up the mountain, and placed in the serpent design.”
Sanders also describes a half dozen other snake effigies from Georgia to Ohio
(1991:278-277). The ones in Ohio are called the Kern Effigies (Krupp 2000:87).
There are two of them, and the larger one measures 47m long and points toward
the northwest. White (1983), who first discovered these low effigies and wrote
about them, concluded that they were aligned with the summer solstice. Similar
stone serpent effigies are found at the Oley Hills site and in Woodstock, New
York (Kreisberg 2007). At the former, a curved wall ends in a wide platform in
front of a large boulder (www.neara.org/Muller/stonerows.htm, Fig. 1). And at
the latter, a curved stone wall terminates at a large, square block of
metamorphic rock (Fig. 18). The similarity of the wall and the boulder to a
snake is unmistakable. This area of Overlook Mountain is known for timber
rattlesnakes, and so the location of this effigy on a flat terrace makes for a
perfect concordance. Within the borders of Woodstock, another snake effigy has
recently been found.
Fig 18
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Additional Features
Between the two
walls-over-the-streams are a number of stone constructions, many of them
impressive and similar morphologically to what we have seen at other sites in
Rochester. Only a handful will be discussed in this report. Nearest the larger
wall-over-the-stream are two stone cairns labeled B and C on the map. Cairn B
is a round cairn that is similar to others found at the Smith site and at other
locations in Vermont; it is quite well preserved. And at point C (Fig. 23) is
an impressive cairn on a slanted boulder that has a squared-off niche in the top
right corner. Into the niche the builder placed a white piece of quartz,
undoubtedly to emphasize this unusual but natural anomaly of the boulder. The
white color of the quartz stands in marked contrast to the gray cobbles of
gneiss in the cluster. We might compare its placement with other examples of
how quartz has been used (see
http://www.rock-piles.com/Smith_Farm/index.htm).
Fig 23
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Fig.19
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At the northern
border of the site is a wall trace (see Fig. 1), meaning that there is little
remaining of the wall except for an occasional rock deeply embedded in the soil,
and one can sight along several of them to see an alignment. Eventually by
following the boulders to the east, one intersects with a huge glacial erratic,
feature D (Fig. 19). A map of this area (Fig. 20) shows that the large erratic,
which is 8m long (26.2 ft.) and 4.3m wide (14.1 ft). At the left or north
corner of the boulder is what Ernie Clifford has called a “grotto” (see Fig.
20), which is a small space created by the placement of some large boulders at
an angle in this location. This is obviously a manmade space, but its purpose
is unknown.
