# Ohio's Great Serpent Mound was built by the Native American ancestors of today's Indigenous nations, not by the giants, Lost Tribes, or ancient aliens of the debunked 19th-century Mound Builder myth

**Verdict: Contradicted.** The Great Serpent Mound is a real and magnificent monument: a roughly quarter-mile earthen serpent effigy in Adams County, Ohio, built by Native American communities. What this file rates as debunked is the so-called Mound Builder myth: the 19th-century claim that the mounds and effigies of the eastern United States were too sophisticated for Native people and must have been built by a vanished superior race (variously imagined as white Europeans, the Lost Tribes of Israel, Atlanteans, biblical giants, or, in modern versions, ancient astronauts). That claim is false, and it was never neutral. It grew up alongside westward expansion and Indian removal, and it worked to deny Indigenous achievement and to justify dispossession. Archaeology settled the question well over a century ago: Cyrus Thomas's 1894 Smithsonian survey found an unbroken chain connecting the mound builders to historical Native Americans. A genuine, entirely separate scholarly debate continues over which Indigenous culture built and rebuilt Serpent Mound, the Early Woodland Adena or the later Fort Ancient people, but both are Native American, and that debate does nothing to revive the lost-race myth.

Category: Lost History & Ancient Mysteries · Era: 19th century · First circulated: The lost-race idea spread through American popular and political culture from roughly the 1810s onward as settlers pushed into the Ohio Valley; it hardened into a national narrative by the mid-19th century and was demolished by the Bureau of Ethnology's mound survey in 1894, though it survives today in pseudoarchaeology and cable television · Believed by: The scientific and Indigenous consensus that Native Americans built the mounds is universal among archaeologists, historians, and the descendant nations. The lost-race version survives mainly in fringe pseudoarchaeology, ancient-aliens media, and older popular lore; the legitimate Adena-versus-Fort-Ancient dating question is a live, mainstream archaeological debate that is not part of the myth.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/great-serpent-mound

## Summary
The Great Serpent Mound near Peebles, Ohio, is the largest serpent effigy in the world: an earthwork about 1,348 feet long and a few feet high, winding along a bluff above Ohio Brush Creek, with a coiled tail at one end and open jaws at the other. It is Native American heritage, and both the archaeological record and the descendant nations affirm it as such. For much of the 1800s, however, a powerful myth held that the mounds were built by a lost, non-Native race whose descendants were wiped out by the ancestors of today's American Indians. That story was fake history, and it did real work: it denied Indigenous achievement and helped rationalize removal and land seizure. This file reports the myth as the debunked hoax it is, names its racist function, and keeps it strictly separate from the honest, ongoing scholarly question of exactly which Native culture built and later renewed the serpent.

## The claim
That the elaborate earthworks and effigies of the Ohio Valley, including the Great Serpent Mound, were too advanced for Native Americans to have created, and were instead the work of a vanished superior people, white Europeans, the Lost Tribes of Israel, Atlanteans, biblical giants, or ancient astronauts, whose civilization was later destroyed by the primitive ancestors of today's Indigenous nations.

## Origin and timeline
- c. 300 BCE – 1100 CE: Native American communities in the Ohio Valley build and maintain earthen mounds and effigies across many centuries. Serpent Mound sits near classic Adena (Early Woodland) burial mounds, and later radiocarbon work ties phases of the effigy to the Fort Ancient culture as well. Both are Indigenous societies.
- 1780s: Thomas Jefferson excavates a burial mound near Monticello using careful, layered methods and concludes it was built by the ancestors of living Native Americans. The early informed view in North America correctly credits Indigenous peoples.
- 1810s–1840s: As settlers push into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys during the era of Indian removal, a rival narrative takes hold: a lost race of Mound Builders, exterminated by the ancestors of contemporary Indians. Politicians and popular writers embrace it, and it becomes a fixture of American self-mythology.
- 1846: Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis survey and map Serpent Mound. Their volume Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848) becomes the Smithsonian Institution's very first publication, documenting the earthwork in detail while the lost-race question hangs over the era's interpretation.
- 1880s: Frederic Ward Putnam of Harvard's Peabody Museum studies and excavates Serpent Mound and, alarmed by plowing and erosion, leads a fundraising campaign to buy the site in 1887 and preserve it. It becomes one of the first privately funded archaeological preserves in the country; the land later passes to the state of Ohio.
- 1894: Cyrus Thomas, head of the Bureau of Ethnology's Division of Mound Exploration, publishes a book-length Smithsonian report after years of fieldwork. It dismantles the lost-race theory point by point and concludes there is an unbroken chain connecting the mound builders and the historical Indians. Scholars call it a founding moment of scientific American archaeology.
- 1966: Serpent Mound is designated a National Historic Landmark, formally recognizing it as a nationally significant example of ancient Native American monumental art.
- 1991: Radiocarbon dating of charcoal recovered from within the effigy returns a date of roughly 1070 CE, prompting many archaeologists to attribute the serpent to the Fort Ancient culture rather than the earlier Adena.
- 2014: A new radiocarbon study reinterprets the evidence to suggest an Adena-era origin around 300 BCE, with later Fort Ancient repair or rebuilding around 1100 CE. The debate over which Indigenous culture and date is genuine and unresolved; crucially, every candidate is Native American.
- 2010s–present: Cable television and internet pseudoarchaeology revive the old denial in new costume, crediting Serpent Mound to Nephilim giants, the Lost Tribes, or ancient astronauts. The Ohio History Connection and Native nations push back, calling the theories demeaning to Indigenous heritage.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The mounds are too sophisticated for Native Americans to have built, so a vanished superior race must have made them.
  Evidence: This is the false premise at the heart of the myth, and it is contradicted by the entire archaeological record. Indigenous societies across the Eastern Woodlands built earthworks continuously for thousands of years, from Adena and Hopewell burial and ceremonial mounds to the great Mississippian city of Cahokia. Serpent Mound belongs to that documented, homegrown tradition. The premise was never a finding; it was an assumption about Native incapacity, and it is simply wrong.
- Claim: No living Native people were connected to the mounds, which proves a different race built them and disappeared.
  Evidence: The apparent disconnect was largely manufactured by removal and by the myth itself. Forced relocations tore Indigenous communities from their homelands, and the lost-race story then treated the resulting absence as evidence. Cyrus Thomas's 1894 survey found continuity, not rupture: an unbroken chain linking the mound builders to historical Native nations, many of whom retained cultural ties to these sites.
- Claim: Serpent Mound's precise astronomical alignments show engineering beyond ancient Native capability, pointing to aliens or a lost civilization.
  Evidence: The alignments are real (the serpent's head is oriented toward the summer solstice sunset, and features have been read against solstice and equinox points) but they are well within the demonstrated skill of Indigenous North Americans. Native astronomers and builders laid out solar and lunar alignments at sites from Cahokia's woodhenge to the Newark Earthworks. Sophistication is evidence of Indigenous achievement, not evidence against it.
- Claim: Archaeologists cannot even agree on the date, so the question of who built it is still wide open.
  Evidence: The live scientific debate is narrow and entirely intramural: whether Serpent Mound was built around 300 BCE by the Adena, around 1070 CE by the Fort Ancient culture, or begun by one and renewed by the other. Every option on the table is a Native American society. Genuine uncertainty about which ancestors and which century does nothing to reopen the long-settled question of whether Native ancestors built it. They did.
- Claim: Stones carved with Hebrew inscriptions found near Ohio mounds prove the Lost Tribes of Israel were the true Mound Builders.
  Evidence: Those artifacts, such as the Newark Holy Stones, are 19th-century hoaxes. Their lettering mixes ancient and modern Hebrew forms in ways no genuine ancient inscription would, and scholars identified them as frauds. They were planted to prop up the Lost Tribes version of the myth, and they prove only how determined some promoters were to write Native people out of their own history.
- Claim: Giant skeletons were dug out of the mounds, and their existence was covered up.
  Evidence: The giant-skeleton stories trace to sensational 19th-century newspaper items, tall tales, and misidentified or exaggerated finds, not to verified remains. No authenticated giant skeletons exist, and the recurring claim that the Smithsonian hid or destroyed them is an internet legend with no documentary basis. The remains actually recovered from mound contexts are those of ordinary human beings, the Indigenous people who built and used the sites.
- Claim: Serpent Mound has always been regarded as the work of a mysterious lost people.
  Evidence: That framing is itself an artifact of the myth. Squier and Davis mapped the effigy in 1846, Putnam excavated and preserved it in the 1880s, and by 1894 Cyrus Thomas had established Native authorship on the evidence. The Ohio History Connection and archaeologists today present Serpent Mound plainly as Native American heritage. The mystery was never about the builders' identity; it was manufactured to obscure it.

## Why people believe it
- The myth served a political purpose. If a superior lost race had built the mounds and been wiped out by the ancestors of living Indians, then removing Native people and taking their land could be reframed as reclaiming the heritage of a vanished people rather than as conquest. The story flattered settlers and eased consciences during an era of dispossession.
- The scale is genuinely awe-inspiring, and awe paired with unfamiliarity invites exotic explanations. A quarter-mile serpent traced across a bluff prompts a natural who could have done this, which pseudoarchaeology exploits by supplying giants and aliens instead of the documented answer.
- Hoaxes and sensational media kept feeding it. Forged inscribed stones, tall tales of giant skeletons, romantic 19th-century literature, and later ancient-astronaut television all packaged the myth as thrilling hidden history, which travels far more easily than a technical archaeological report.
- Removal produced the very appearance the myth exploited. By severing Indigenous communities from ancestral sites, federal policy left mounds that looked abandoned and unclaimed, and the myth then pointed to that engineered silence as if it were proof.

## Open questions
- Which culture and which century: the honest, still-open scholarly question is whether Serpent Mound is an Adena work of around 300 BCE, a Fort Ancient work of around 1070 CE, or an earlier mound later rebuilt by Fort Ancient people. Because the effigy holds no burials or diagnostic artifacts, dating leans on scarce charcoal samples. This is real archaeology, and every answer is Indigenous.
- What the serpent meant: readings of the effigy's symbolism (a snake with jaws open around an oval that may represent an egg, the sun, or an eclipse, and features aligned to solstice events) remain interpretive and are best informed by the perspectives of descendant Native nations rather than by outside speculation.
- Why the myth persists after more than 130 years of debunking: the open problem is less archaeological than cultural, namely how heritage institutions and Native voices counter a lost-race story that cable pseudoarchaeology and the internet keep recycling to new audiences.
- How the site is best protected and honored: questions of stewardship, Indigenous consultation, and Serpent Mound's bid for wider international recognition are ongoing, and they proceed from the settled premise that this is Native American heritage.

## Sources
- Serpent Mound, World History Encyclopedia (2021): https://www.worldhistory.org/Serpent_Mound/
- Serpent Mound, Ohio History Connection: https://www.ohiohistory.org/visit/browse-historical-sites/serpent-mound/
- Ohio's Serpent Mound: An American Indian Story Written in the Earth, Ohio History Connection: https://www.ohiohistory.org/ohios-serpent-mound-an-american-indian-story-written-in-the-earth/
- Fort Ancient Culture: Great Serpent Mound, Smarthistory: https://smarthistory.org/fort-ancient-culture-great-serpent-mound/
- Redating Serpent Mound, Archaeology (Archaeological Institute of America) (1996): https://archive.archaeology.org/9611/newsbriefs/serpentmound.html
- Serpent Mound: Location, Origins & Preservation, History.com: https://www.history.com/articles/serpent-mound
- Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas / Smithsonian Institution (1894): https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/91661
- The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a Lost White Race, University of Oklahoma Press (Jason Colavito) (2020): https://www.oupress.com/9780806164618/the-mound-builder-myth/
- Crazy Theories Threaten Serpent Mound, Demean Native Heritage, ICT (Indian Country Today): https://ictnews.org/archive/crazy-theories-threaten-serpent-mound-demean-native-heritage/
- Serpent Mound, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_Mound

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