Last October I took a long weekend and visited a few archeological sites around Southern Ohio. I went by myself, and I’m glad I did, because I don’t think anyone I know would have enjoyed the modest remnants of past peoples with the same level of wonder and imagination that is built in to my psyche. I didn’t get an anthropology degree for no reason. Even though I don’t use it in any official capacity, that learning still informs my day to day.
Southern Ohio was very much like a shuffled mirror world of South-eastern Indiana. There are Fayette Counties and Greenfields in both. There are tiny abandoned crossroad buildings with small rusty signs from the 1960s and 1970s. Every double-wide has a few weed-shrouded rusted out cars along the verge of the county road. It was very much like digging up and examining my childhood.
Serpent Mound, the other mounds in the area, and the petroglyphs I visited were touching; and I would also say, at least for me; holy. As someone who has, in one way or another, spent a lifetime seeking a fair and honorable way to connect with/align to the history of the land that has shaped me, seeing the way that the ancients shaped the land in such gentle and ephemeral ways gave me a moderated sense of peace with this journey.