Mounds State Park, Anderson, Indiana

James Tharpe Plainfield, Indiana

On October 7, 1930, the Madison County Historical Society donated to the Indiana State Department of Conservation (Department of Natural Resources) a 254 acre tract of land containing an elaborate burial mound complex which they had acquired earlier in 1930 from the Union Traction Company, thus Mounds State Park was created.

Mounds State Park located at 4306 Mounds State Park Road, Anderson, Indiana.

On May 5, 1931 the renowned archaeologist of the day, Warren K. Moorehead with Glenn A. Black visited the park and made a number of auger borings of various earthworks including the “Great Mound.”

The Great Mound was probably first recognized by non-Indians before 1803 when land reports were sent to General Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory.  Frederick Bronnenberg, who protected the mounds until his death in 1853, first purchased the land in 1821.  His house still stands within the present-day park.  The property remained in the Bronnenberg family until 1879.  Shortly thereafter it was owned by the Union Traction Company and eventually developed into an amusement park.  A carousel was operated atop the panduriform “Fiddleback” mound. Much alteration and destruction of mound surfaces occurred at this time due to amusement park activity, and in some areas, cultivation.

The first reported excavation of the mounds was a few years before 1874.  It may have even been while Frederick Bronnenberg was still living. The target of these operations was the Great Mound.  A survey and detailed map of the mound complex by G.M. Levette is reported in 1879. Indiana University, under permit and financial support of the Department of Natural Resources, extensively excavated the Great Mound during the summer of 1968 and 1969.  A small secondary mound situated on the central platform surface of a large primary mound was revealed.

Indiana University’s excavation revealed in the Great Mound burials, log tombs, crematory basins, garbage pits, numerous postholes, and some pottery. The pottery is decorated in zones, with thin incised lines, often forming nested (up to five) diamond designs. This design is similar to an excavation of Ball State University at New Castle twenty miles to the southeast. The New Castle Site is dated by radiocarbon at around the beginning of the Christian Era. Since Middle Woodland Hopewell pottery has also been recovered from New Castle it is reasonable to assume that the mound complex at Mounds State Park is also Hopewell.

Ball State University, under permit from the Department of Natural Resources, excavated the Mounds’ Bluff Site locality just to the north of the Great Mound site.  Human bone, a garbage pit and stone chippage were encountered. For locations of the Mounds’ Bluff Site refer to diagram of the park.

Information from the Indiana Historical Society on the Great Mound indicates that on the platform surrounding the earth mound were numbers of small post molds. This suggests that an irregular brush screen had guarded the activities occurring in the central region or that saplings had been bent over and tied to the heavy support posts located near the center to form a roofed shelter. Artifacts recovered, though few in number, included plain and distinctively incised pottery, mica, a plain platform pipe, and bear effigy canines  which were drilled and carved from bone. (Kellar 1969).     

The Indian earthworks at Anderson were long thought to be burial mounds.  A Ball State archaeologist’s work, however, indicates they may have been observatories to track the stars and the seasons.

Ancient Astronomers:

Decades before the birth of Christ, a race of Indians built an intricate complex of mounds near Anderson that Don Cochran, a Ball State University Archaeologist, believes was used as an observatory. Dips in the earthen walls surrounding the largest mound’s central platform helped observers track the movement of the sun and bright stars.

The west side of the Great Mound features alignments that follow the setting of the sun on the days of winter and summer solstice, the shortest and longest days of the year.  It also tracks sunset on the equinox, when the hours of daylight and darkness are virtually equal.

Cochran used a survey transit to help make his discovery at Mound State Park. The survey tool helped confirm the alignment of smaller companion mounds with the dips in the earthen wall surrounding the park’s Great Mound.

It was December 21, 1988, winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. If Cochran was right with his computations and if it worked out in real life, the implications, he believed, could be staggering.

It was just after 5 PM and the big moment was almost at hand. But something didn’t look quite right. The sun was sinking on a track that would take it too far to the left to line up with a flag marker (his coat). It looked like it was going to miss the slot in the Great Mound.

But, as the sun slipped closer to the horizon alignment began to drift slightly back to the right. Cochran watched as the sun swung into line with the embankment dip. At 5:23 PM, it sank into darkness directly behind the flag. The theory appeared on target.

These modest heaps of dirt were not merely burial mounds or amphitheaters, as archaeologists had thought for decades.  They were sophisticated observatories shaped from the earth by prehistoric humans nearly a century before the birth of Christ.

For more than 2,000 years the mounds had been silently keeping track of the heavens spinning above central Indiana while no one had suspected, until now.

The Observatory

The smaller earthworks align with dips in the Great Mound’s embankment and probably helped their creators sight the sun and stars. Fiddleback mound, for instance, is on a line with the summer solstice sunset, the circular mound is aligned with the winter solstice sunset, and the shallow earthwork tracks the rise of a bright star known as Fomalhaut.

Cochran believes there is even more to the arrangement than that.  One possibility is that these enclosures are a kind of map. “Obviously, you think of a sun circle. This (the Great Mound) could symbolically represent the sun and these other enclosures could represent other astronomical bodies.”  That is not all: The mound builders may have been working on an even wider scale.

On a map of central Indiana, Cochran has plotted the locations of four other ancient mound groups built around the same time. There is one near each of these populated areas New Castle; Richmond, Cambridge City and Winchester. Cochran has sketched in lines connecting the sites and the result is a pattern that eerily resembles the Big Dipper.  Although he stops short of suggesting the mounds were located in an attempt to recreate the constellation, he does marvel at the resemblance. “Now it’s our job to see if we can determine why they were located there.”

Their Culture is a Mystery

They are known as the Adena and later Hopewell, prehistoric Indians who lived in Indiana centuries before such better known historical tribes as the Miami and Delaware. 

Much of their sophisticated culture is shrouded in mystery, lost forever in the mists of time. There are no written records, and the clues they left behind are scant: shards of pottery, bits of jewelry, assorted stone tools. “Very little is really known about the Indians of that time,” said Karren Dalman, naturalist at Mounds State Park. Adding to the mystery is the absence of anything archaeologists can identify as the remains of a village near the Anderson Mounds.

Questions that still puzzle historians are, just where did the Adena leave off and the Hopewell begin, and what was their relationship to each other.  Most estimates date the Adena from 1,000 BC to about 100 BC, with Hopewell flourishing from 100 BC to 400 AD. Current theory is that the Anderson earth-works were built by the Adena from 1,000 BC to about 100 BC and they were later used by the Hopewell.

Don Cochran asks, “Do Hopewell represent an influx, a new migration of people bringing in new ideas that displace the Adena? Were the two overlapping in the region? What actually was going on here?”  Cochran suspects the earthworks primarily were used for religious rites. Most likely, the Indians lived in small groups scattered through the dense forest of the area.  They traveled to the mounds for ceremonies at certain times of the year. “The observations, tying them in with the heavens, are probably very much a part of that.”

The Discovery

Like many discoveries, the breakthrough at Mounds State Park was an accident. It began in June 1988 as an attempt by Cochran and a group of Ball State archaeology students to update the only existing map of the mounds, said Dalman. “The last map that was made was back in 1870, or thereabouts, and it had some things out of place.”

Cochran knew from earlier work that the embankment around the Great Mound was high enough to block any view of the interior. In fact, he’d always suspected the wall had been built to ensure the privacy of whatever went on inside the mound. So he was perplexed when he noticed that, from his vantage point on Fiddleback, he could clearly see the members of his survey team as they worked on the Great Mound central platform. There seemed to be a depression in the bank along his line of sight.

Cochran and his team went back three different times and did a contour survey. Then they stretched string across to be able to see where the dips were and how they lined up.  They discovered that the dips in the wall were no accident; they were precisely aligned with the surrounding earthworks. One of the depressions in the wall lined up with due north.

Cochran also thought back to some intriguing information uncovered in the late 1960s by an archaeological team from Indiana University. What was uncovered was evidence that dozens of wooden posts had been set up in a scattershot pattern on the central platform of the Great Mound.  A report on the researchers’ findings theorized that the posts might have formed a wooden fence, or supported a roof of some sort.

But Cochran was not convinced. Given the precision of the construction and alignment of the earthworks, he doubted the mound builders would have used such haphazard design for a fence, or supported a roof of some sort. So he started looking at the post-hole patterns.  Many matched up precisely with the star and sunset alignments already charted. “I’ve assumed that the center of the mound is the observation point.  But that may not be the case. It may be that one stands behind one of these large posts on one side and looks in the other direction.

“It’s more complicated than I’d ever imagined. You can predict when things are going to happen with it: where the sun is going to rise and where it is going to set, and the same for stars. It really is a very complex computer.” Now for the first time in 1,500 years, some one is watching it work.

REFERENCE

Vic Caleca, Star Staff Writer , The Indianapolis Star, October 8, 1989

© 1990 C.S.A.S.I. Last modified:
January 31 2004