Carol Diaz-Granados’s research while affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis and other places

James Swauger's study of Ohio's rock art, Petroglyphs of Ohio, has been the definitive guide to the subject since its publication in 1984. Swauger concluded that the Indigenous American Indian petroglyphs were created during the late precontact period and proposed that the makers of the designs were “proto-Shawnee,” but he deliberately eschewed any attempt to attribute meanings to the designs. Building on Swauger's work, we consider Ohio rock art through the lens of our previous research on Serpent Mound and the rock art of midcontinental North America, particularly the unique suite of pictographs at Picture Cave, as interpreted through the lens of Dhegiha Siouan oral traditions. We argue that several Ohio petroglyph sites include configurations of motifs that represent episodes from an ancient and widespread Indigenous creation story featuring the Great Serpent, Lord of the Beneath World, and First Woman, the mother of all living things.

The effigy mounds of the Upper Midwest and the Ohio Valley long have been regarded as distinct and independent cultural developments. A review of effigy mound iconography in both regions reveals similarities suggesting that they are elements of a shared cultural tradition. Comparisons with rock art imagery from the Upper Midwest and Missouri, the inferred centers of this artistic and ceremonial florescence, reveal co-occurrences of specific motifs and provide additional evidence of cultural connections among the Late Woodland to early Late Precontact societies inhabiting the lower Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio river valleys. Oral traditions of Native American groups with documented connections to these regions allow this rich corpus of imagery to be understood as key episodes in their genesis stories.

Serpent Mound, in northern Adams County, Ohio, USA, is one of the most iconic symbols of ancient America and yet there is no widely agreed upon date for the age of its original construction. Some archaeologists consider it to have been built by the Adena culture around 300 bc , while others contend it was built by the Fort Ancient culture around ad 1100. There have been three attempts to obtain radiometric ages for the effigy, but they have yielded inconclusive results. The iconography of the earthwork offers an alternative means of placing the mound in its cultural context. Serpent imagery is abundant in the Fort Ancient culture as well as in the more encompassing Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere. Pictographs from Picture Cave in Missouri include a serpent, a humanoid female and a vulvoid in close association. We interpret these elements, in the light of Siouan oral traditions, as First Woman and her consort the Great Serpent. The Picture Cave imagery dates to between ad 950 and 1025. We argue that these same three elements are represented in the original configuration of Serpent Mound and therefore situate its design and original construction in the Early Fort Ancient period.

W ithin the dark zone of Picture Cave, three pictographs were dated in 1997 through plasma-chemical extraction and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). The resulting four dates were reported in American Antiquity (Diaz-Granados et al. 2001:66, 481–493) and produced a weighted average of cal AD 1025. Charcoal pigment removed a few years later from a fourth pictograph panel, a drawing of a warrior, yielded a comparable AMS radiocar-bon date. The agreement of the newer date with the four previous AMS radiocarbon measurements on the other dated images in the cave gives additional strength to the original four dates. There is no statistical difference in any of the ages. From these results, we conclude that there may have been a flurry of activity at this time in Picture Cave. The Black Warrior figure portrays clothing elements , including a belt and a ceremonial " military " headdress (figure 9.1). The headdress bears a striking resemblance to one on display at the Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. The pictograph date, the Black Warrior figure, and the early historic headdress and other clothing accouterments are discussed in this chapter. On a vertical rock wall, in the dark zone of Picture Cave, is a clear depiction of a warrior, executed in black pigment (figure 9.1). The 31-centimeter-tall figure, holding a bow and a crowned-style mace or war club, was drawn in profile in a dancing or running posture. The figure is portrayed as moving to the viewer's left. To the right is a bloated beaver-tailed water spirit depicted with three arrows in its back (see chapter 10 here). A lighter, " ghostlike " outline of a face is drawn to the left in front of the darker outline of the Black Warrior's face. This second face either represents his opposite, or twin " brother, " a change in position of the figure, or a spirit emerging from the Black Warrior's mouth. The entire figure is depicted in profile with one leg raised in a dance position and one arm brandishing the mace. The Black Warrior figure has a great many unique elements, one being that it is rendered completely in black. Although several patches of brilliant red C h a p t e r 9 Diaz_Granados_5294_PP1.indd 125 7/17/14 11:18 AM I n t e r p r e t a t i o n s 126 (MIIS) (Reilly and Garber [eds.] 2007) art on shell, copper, and pottery, they are not only depicted in the hand here, but can also appear alone, possibly as a signifier for identity. The Castalian Springs gor-get and the Rogan plate both have maces, but they also have the bi-lobed arrow adornment and the bellows shaped scalp at the waist (Brain and P.. In the petroglyphs of East-Central Mis-souri, maces are found depicted, symbolically, alone or in conjunction with other motifs, such as a foot, a bird, or a bird track. Around the waist of the warrior is an elaborate belt or sash of three tiers. The belt or sash bears no decoration or knot and tassel. Undecorated belts are a feature of Classic Braden (Phillips and Brown 1978:97). The woven sash or belt is a powerful pigment accentuate adjoining drawings, the Black Warrior is rendered monochromatically. The face has areas of no pigment, probably the artist's convention to allow important details such as the falconid eye to be revealed. The abdomen has a horizontal hourglass (butterfly) shape that is devoid of pigment. There is a horizontally striped sash at the waist. These areas, the handle of the war club, and the trailing elements of the headdress are also in outline. The black pigment used for the Black Warrior is probably a recipe using a charred botanical composition. A 10X magnifier reveals a thin coating of silicon dioxide (SiO2) deposited by water passing through the porous sandstone, dissolving the SiO2 and evaporating, leaving the Si02 as a coating. This silica coating provided a modicum of protection for this pictograph panel. The headdress is a wraparound turban, or band-box, made of opossum skin, with a seven-part trailer at the back. This is not a commonly depicted head-dress in Mississippian art. In reviewing the figures depicted in the shell and copper from Spiro, only the Stovall shell cup figure has a similar animal fur hat. This unique hat (also see plate 6 in P. Phillips and Brown 1978) has a counterpart in the form of a military hat in the Osage Tribal Museum Library and Archives (figure 9.2). While the museum example has only one trailer, it is made up of a linear arrangement of panels, feathers, ribbon, appliqué, beaded elements , and bone tattoo needles and ends in a prominent horsehair tassel. The museum headdress is well provenanced as an early nineteenth-century hat worn by a member of the Men of Mystery clan who had attained all thirteen war honors. The headdress is embellished with white glass seed beads, opossum hide with fur side out, and ivory-billed woodpecker scalps with the beaks attached. The beaks are lined with thin copper sheets. According to museum records , the trailer recounts O-don, the Osage word for " war honors " (La Flesche 1975:120). The Black Warrior brandishes a large crowned war club or mace. While maces are a favorite subject in the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere