Famous Ancient Indians & Mothmen & Momma
Thousands of years before the first Europeans showed up on the scene in the seventeenth century, a mysterious race of giant ancient Indians wandered into what is now West Virginia out of the misty twilight of the Paleolithic Great Hunt following mammals long since extinct, such as the giant ground sloth, the great bison, woolly mammoths. These Adena Culture people, more commonly called the Moundbuilders, due to the tumuli in which they buried their ochre- painted dead, constructed such impressive burial mounds and earthworks that many West Virginia archaeologists have entertained theories that they were not built by ancestors of the “lowly Injuns” at all, but rather by a lost race of superior beings, such as the lost tribes of Israel or relic peoples from the sunken continent of Atlantis.
Hundreds of earthen mounds remain in West Virginia, the most mysterious legacy of the Moundbuilders, whose tribes once settled throughout the Mississippi drainage basin and southeastern states. The Adenas were unusually tall—enormous, in fact. Bones of women over six feet in height and men approaching seven feet have been found. They had large flat skulls, huge foreheads, heavy brow ridges, jutting chins, and massive bones. This band of really big Indians battled its way into the Ohio Valley before 10,000 B.C., and then kicked indigenous native butt all the way up the Kanawha River, where remnants of their culture lasted until about 200 A.d. Where these huge ancient Indians came from remains a mystery. Some archaeologists have suggested Mexico as the migrators’ distant matrix, and have presented long lists of parallels between the Adena peoples and those of early Mexico. Take for example the use of trophy skulls in burials, or the common custom of head- binding to flatten the skull.
Only in very ancient sites in the Valley of Mexico, Tlatilco, El Arbollo, and Ticoman, can you find comparable evidence of people who so deformed their heads as did the Adenas, beginning with circular bindings in infancy. The adult skulls found in mounds exhibit foreheads that are among the widest known in the history of the world. The distinctive, almost artfully misshapen skulls of the most select individuals buried in the Adena mounds suggest a fascination with deformity that approaches deification. Deformed holy subjects were not uncommon in Middle and South American art. The large ear-spools and the bent knees of an Adena Pipe figurine found in a burial mound in Ross County, Ohio, definitely suggest Olmec influences. Somebody noticed that this litde figurine was a dead ringer for a achondroplastic dwarf with a goiter and rachitic joints. The actual skeleton of one such achondroplastic dwarf has been found in an Adena mound near Waverly, Ohio, surrounded by wondrous grave riches.
What this boils down to is that the Adenas had a highly developed cult of the deformed and dead, and at their ceremonial sites built impressive mounds over the remains of their contorted kings, misshapen shamen, gnarled priests, and others of their honored gimps. They buried their royal monsters in barbaric splendor, sealing their grotesque giants and twisted dwarves in the dark with grave goods that must have been tribal treasures. There were pounds of freshwater pearls and crystals of quartz found, necklaces of exotic gems and shells and nuggets of meteoric iron, beautiful stone and terra-cotta rings, sheets of hammered silver and gold, ornaments made from the shells of sea-going turtles, ceremonial copper axes and breastplates, mica ornaments of such delicacy as to suggest transparency, bones carved like birds, human bones beautifully engraved with crested-bird swastikas, the effigies of animals long extinct carved upon the teeth of bears and panthers, headdresses of copper deer antlers with a hundred points, all sorts of copper effigy figures suggesting shamanic transformation, copper shamanic figures that could depict either men wearing masks made from the skin of the dead or the dead masked in the skin of the living, suggesting that dominant theme of evolving planter cultures: that life and death are one, that life comes out of death and death comes out of life, that out of the plant king’s death comes the life of the tribe.
The Adena constructed their mounds over many generations, layering their dead in new burials as they needed to for their select few. Apparently those select few were accompanied into eternity with various of their servants or slaves or assorted family members or really good friends. The Adenas lived near and used their ceremonial cemetery mounds over periods that may have lasted for centuries, but the burials in these mounds were relatively rare.
To be sealed ceremonially in consecrated earth was clearly an honor, perhaps one in which the selected ancient Indian holy cripples, with the ritual songs of the shamanic visionaries in their ears, would limp toward willingly, and undertake the perilous dream journey into the invisible world for the people.
When the Great Smith Mound, which was located in the town of Dunbar on the Kanawha River (a mound leveled in the 1940s in order to build a tennis court for the local high school), was first excavated in 1883, they found skeletons at different levels from different Adena eras, including one skeleton that measured seven and one-half feet in length. This gigantic skeleton was surrounded by ten other skeletons arranged so that their bony toes pointed toward it. The surrounding skeletons were in such contorted positions as to suggest unhappy live burials.
When archaeologists excavated the Grave Creek Mound at Moundsville, which is perhaps the most striking prehistoric earthwork in West Virginia at 69 feet in height and 295 feet in diameter at its base, they discovered the skeletons of a man and a woman. Their bones were entangled, as though they had been embracing when death approached to claim them, as though that ancient couple was making love in the moments before their ritual assassination. Clearly that couple was having sacrificial sex, dream-screwing for their tribe to demonstrate that death meant nothing. Their ritual fornication was clearly a ceremony in honor of the eternal loss and restoration of innocence. Clearly their Wedding Ordeal in their Honeymoon Tomb was a pilgrimage to and back from that sacred land of timelessness, where, untouched by the transformative force of becoming, there were no lasting pangs of loss and desire.
Earthworks on the crests of the mountains along the Kanawha River stymie archaeologists. Along the hilltops above Montgomery, that little river town where I was born, there are these remnants of a stone wall that once ran along the mountaintops for many miles. Most archaeologists say they have no idea what these hilltop earthworks were for. Old Timey Red Injun Devil Worship, a few West Virginia archaeologists have opined. When I was a boy I climbed up into those pyramidal mountains every day. I spent hours up there, sitting on that old stone wall alone.
Years later, when I was a student at West Virginia Institute of Technology in Montgomery, for maybe the second or third time, one lovely autumn afternoon I took a girl I loved but couldn’t get to first base with up to see that old wall. We made a picnic of it, taking along a bag of apples and some cheese and bread, and a bottle of red wine, plus several joints I had rolled the night before. As an experiment, I had soaked these joints with Pernod and let them dry overnight. I really wanted to get to first and second and third base with that girl. I longed to engage in ritual fornication with that girl. I longed for us to entangle our bones.
The girl I loved with all my heart wasn’t much of a hiker, though (she fancied herself a hip, arty type, a poetess who cultivated paleness). We had to stop often to rest as we wove our way up the steep mountainside among the trees and rock outcroppings. When we finally reached the top ridge, I showed her a section of the old wall where I had hung out a lot as a kid, which was just barely recognizable as a man-made construction now, and looked more like an oddly shaped mound. But it still excited me, and I babbled to the girl I loved about how I had spent hours simply pressing my hands against the earth-matted stones while trying to imagine the touch of the hands that ages before had positioned those stones. Why, I had wondered out loud to her, did those ancient Indians build a wall along the tops of the mountains? What were they building it against? And, more curious than that, which side of the mountain were they afraid of? Were they afraid, maybe, that some monster might awake from the river far below and stalk into the hills to eat them raw?
I told the girl I loved that a lot of Indian names, many of them of great beauty, had been preserved in the names of rivers in Appalachia. There was Ohio, which meant “river of whitecaps” or “the white foaming waters.” There was Shenandoah, “daughter of stars.” And Monongahela, “river of falling banks.” And then there was that river winding in the valley far below us, the ancient Kanawha, which meant “place of the white stone” or, in the language of the Shawnee, Keninsheka, “river of evil spirits,” which clearly might be a clue as to which side of the mountain the ancient Indians believed their concept of King Kong would come clomping up to get them.
I told the girl I loved that by the time the white man came into this rugged area, not many Indians were left, and the explorers found only a vast wilderness broken here and there by old “ghost fields” that Indians had once cultivated, and by the remnants of Indian “ghost villages” long abandoned. There was still plenty of game in the hills and the soil of the bottomlands was rich, but, for whatever reason, disease, intertribal warfare, the Indians had mosdy vanished. But it was curious, I told her, that many of the Indians’ origin legends and creation myths were set in the mountains of West Virginia. Maybe the old pyramidal mountains of West Virginia had simply become too mythological, too sacred, too full of the ghosts of ancient ancestors for the profanity of everyday Indian life. Finally they had visited that religious landscape, that cult arena, that they had come to call the Land of the Sky People, only for ceremonial rites of passage or to pray.
—How do you know all this neat Indian stuff? the hip, poetic, pale girl who I loved wanted to know. —Indian stuff has always just blown my mind, man, she added.
—Because of all the Indian blood that flows in my veins, I informed her. We had piled dry leaves at the base of a large rock to sit upon while we leisurely nibbled our apples and cheese and bread and sipped our jug red wine and passed the Pernod-soaked joints, which really hit the spot, by the way. As the afternoon slowly lengthened into evening, we watched down the slope through the limbs of the bare trees as the lights began to come on in the valley below, which from such a height as ours looked so frail, those valley lights, the bleached halo about each one seeming so small yet resilient in the falling darkness. I had whispered to that hip, poetic, pale girl I loved how there was Indian blood flowing in my veins from both sides of my family, blood I could trace back through my mother’s lineage to the great Shawnee warrior-chief Cornstalk, and on my father’s side to the great Delaware shaman, priest, and poet-prophet, Chief Bull, who Bulltown on the Little Kanawha River was named after. Which accounted for my own Indian middle-name, Alfonsohontas, which translated roughly as “he who can carry his tale.”
What I can remember to this day is how the dry leaves gently scratched my bare back and crackled sweetly, and how the clean smell of the fall air rose from the cool, smooth skin of the girl I loved. But then suddenly she screamed, that girl I loved, and jumped up off of me, and covered her perfect, pale breasts with her arms, then pointed toward the darkness under an old oak and screamed again.
—Whatwhatwhatwhatwhat? I was curious to know.
—I saw him, man! the hip, poetic girl screamed and pointed under the tree.
—Saw who saw who saw who? I inquired. I jumped up and looked about wildly.
—Something! Fucking somebody! A fucking Indian, man! the girl I loved wailed and began to frantically pull her clothes on, as she slid and slipped down the steep mountainside.
—What fucken Indian? I inquired, as I put up my dukes and spun around and around. —What fucken Indian? I don’t see any fucken Indian!
And I didn’t. But that girl I loved sure had seen something. And I could hear that hip, poetic girl whimper shitshitshit as she scrambled down the mountain, her lovely pale back soon lost to my sight in the encroachment of night.