Ronald Hicks
Ball State University

The title for this paper comes from a comment made some years ago by a British colleague, Aubrey Burl, when I escorted him on a tour of Early and Middle Woodland mounds and enclosures in east central Indiana. He was right. Coming as I had from doing research on sacred earthworks in Ireland and Britain to working in Indiana, I was very much aware of the similarities and curious about them. Why would such parallels occur?

Of course, there are burial mounds in Wessex, in the south of England, although there they are called "barrows." But such mounds have appeared in many parts of the world at various times, from Mounds City in Ohio to China, where I have seen some that are not very old at all. What was more curious than the presence of burial mounds was the nature of earthen enclosures in the Midwestern U.S., which resembled those found across Ireland and Britain. The earthworks to which I am referring are known as "henges" in Britain, because the first stage at Stonehenge, constructed well before the first of the stones were erected, was a circular bank and ditch with a single unexcavated segment along the line of the ditch left to serve as an entrance causeway, aligned with an opening through the bank. Typically, they have the ditch inside the bank, as we find in circular Adena enclosures, making it clear that these are not defensive structures. Of course, when they enclose a stone circle, as at Stonehenge, this reinforces the conviction that these should in some way be considered sacred sites, but most do not enclose stone circles

During the 1920s and early 1930s, several such enclosing bank and ditch monuments were identified, and in the years since, nearly 200 have been identified in Ireland and Britain. They vary widely in size, from Avebury, a few miles north of Stonehenge, which is nearly a mile in circumference and within which a village was built in medieval times, to some only a few meters across. Most are in between, like the henge at Knowlton, which now surrounds a Norman church built of flint cobbles. It is not at all uncommon, particularly in Ireland, to find an early church associated with these enclosures, once again reinforcing the conclusion that they are in some way sacred.

As at Stonehenge, these enclosures also often have burial mounds nearby, further adding to the impression that they are associated with religion and ritual. Another shared characteristic is their tendency to have astronomical orientations, most often to the solstices, as is the case at Stonehenge, though in Ireland the cross-quarter days--i.e., midway between the solstices and the equinoxes--are often indicated. Some sites even have medieval tales or modern folklore linking them with the cross-quarter days in May or in August that were associated in historical times with driving the herds and flocks to summer pastures and with the beginning of the harvest, respectively. These events were occasionally associated even in fairly recent times with local survivals of rituals that clearly date from the pre-Christian past.

Another characteristic of the henges is the association with them of sets of parallel earthen banks that may have served as ceremonial ways. Less directly associated, appearing in folklore, medieval mythology, and in carvings on stones in the mound-like passage graves that, in Ireland, are sometimes associated with henge enclosures, we find raptorial birds, usually owls or ravens.

Except for the churches, all of these elements, as well as some others not yet mentioned, are found also with the Adena and Hopewell enclosures of Ohio and neighboring states. What can it mean?

The dates of the monuments on the two sides of the Atlantic, at least at first glance, appear to have nothing in common. Those of Great Britain are traditionally considered to be confined to the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, from roughly 2800 to 1500 B.C. By comparison, the Adena and Hopewell circles for which we have dates were constructed after 500 B.C. This difference in dating would appear to rule out one possibility, direct contact, which seems inherently unlikely in any case, given that the sites are separated by the Atlantic Ocean and, on this side, four or five hundred miles of land.

So let us look at the similarities in the circumstances of these two peoples. In both cases, the monuments appear among people in early stages of agricultural development. In both these people are living in midlatitude mixed-forest environmental zones. In both, available evidence indicates they were living in dispersed settlements rather than in nucleated villages. And in both we find indications of relatively long distance trade, or at least some mechanism--whether it be trade, pilgrimage, or quest--by which materials from far away sometimes end up in ritual contexts. One other clue is also available. In both, the site complexes tend to be on high ground near rivers and separated by distances that could easily be traversed on foot in half a day--probably in no more than four hours if one walked steadily.

What sort of picture might we draw from this?

What I would suggest is that these earthwork complexes arose in both cases because we have farming peoples living in environments where the seasons are of considerable concern and where small groups are semi-isolated from their neighbors--people who come to see the circle as symbolically important, being in the shape of the all-important sun, and who feel the need both for ritual to ensure the sun's cooperation and for periodic gatherings to reinforce social ties. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that people sharing these needs are likely to have developed similar solutions.

What about the raptorial birds? Well, off-hand I don't have an answer for that, at least not yet.

Let us go a bit further. I am inclined to believe that we should always look for and consider alternative explanations for the patterns we observe in our data. I believe we should also periodically reexamine old data and challenge conventional interpretations where it seems appropriate. Perhaps that is possible here. In other words, let's embark on a wild ride of unbridled speculation by looking at the hypothesis I initially rejected out of hand--some sort of direct contact. Is it entirely unlikely?

Some thirty years ago, Alice Kehoe (1971) published a paper in a volume entitled Man across the Sea. That paper, "Small Boats upon the North Atlantic," showed that not only were occasional North Atlantic contacts before the Vikings possible, they had been possible for many centuries. Sea-going boats would have been necessary for the first farmers to transport their cattle to Britain and Ireland before 4000 B.C. These were most likely boats with wooden frames covered with sewn and waterproofed hides such as the curragh common in the west of Ireland, which were historically used for such purposes. An experimental transatlantic voyage using just such a boat, modeled after the legendary sixth-century voyage of St. Brendan the Navigator, was carried out by Tim Severin in 1976-77. Kehoe went on to quote medieval accounts saying Irish clerics were in Iceland by A.D. 795, some centuries before the Vikings, and had been there for an unknown period of time. She then listed several clusters of traits suggesting transatlantic contact much earlier--beginning in the Laurentian aspect of the Late Archaic, sometime prior to the second millennium B.C. She also presented a case for northwest European influence in early pottery in the northeastern U.S. around 1000 B.C., showing that such pottery was more consistent with a European than a southeastern U.S. inspiration. And she even suggested there might have been some European influence on Hopewell, though not mentioning the enclosures. I won't go into the details of her arguments, but they do suggest that the direct-contact hypothesis is worth considering. We are, however, left with the dating gap I described earlier. But is it real?

Even a half century ago, Richard Atkinson, in an article summarizing our knowledge of henges at the time, referred to "the remarkable Iron-Age 'henge' at Frilford" (Atkinson 1951:91). More recent work has found that, although the examples in the south of Britain do tend to have been constructed during the period before 1500 B.C., those further north are sometimes later, belonging to the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age (e.g., Brogar, in Orkney), and in Ireland there appears to have been a resurgence in the building of henge-like earthworks in the Early Iron Age, after 600 B.C. These Irish enclosures in several cases accompany or enclose mounds or other features of Neolithic date.

This span of time and the apparent lack of late examples in parts of Britain does raise the issue of continuity. To what extent can we assume continuity of belief or ritual from the Late Neolithic to the end of the Iron Age and arrival of Christianity, a period of some 3000+ years? In Britain, thanks to a succession of invasions--Romans and Anglo-Saxons in particular--that disrupted many links to the past, evidence for such continuity is fragmentary. There are hints in the folklore, but archaeologists have tended to assume continuity was essentially nonexistent. However, let us return to Richard Atkinson, to whom I just referred. He excavated at Stonehenge for several seasons. A conversation I had with him some years ago provides an example of the way in which this assumption does not fit well with the archaeological evidence. In response to my asking if there was any sign that Stonehenge had continued in use after the Early Bronze Age, he responded that indeed he supposed his excavations had recovered about twice as much Late Bronze Age as Early Bronze Age material and perhaps ten times as much from the Iron Age. It was only with the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to the area, he told me, that use of the monument seemed to have stopped. Yet virtually all the literature on Stonehenge denies any connection between these Iron Age people--particularly their priests, the druids--and that monument. A recently published restudy of the Stonehenge data (Cleal et al. 1995:49) seems to confirm Atkinson's comments, stating that although construction and remodeling of monument ended by the middle of the Bronze Age, use appears to have continued. After all, if one has finished building a cathedral, one doesn't immediately abandon it or set about replacing it.

For Ireland, the evidence for continuity is much greater. Not only are sacred monuments from the Neolithic and Iron Age found in close association, medieval documents make it clear that some Neolithic structures were considered the homes of major Iron Age deities. Offerings of Roman gold coins were left at the entrance of one, the site now called Newgrange.

So, if for the moment we accept the possibility of transatlantic contact at an appropriate time and that the henge tradition continued from the Late Neolithic through the Early Iron Age, how would that tradition have reached the Ohio area without leaving traces along the East Coast? If that question can be answered, it leaves us with another: What might have been the nature of the contact? What form would it have taken?

Both questions have straightforward answers, though the first is the simpler. The distribution of circular earthworks known or presumed to be Adena extends from east-central Indiana and northern Kentucky on the west into West Virginia and northward across Ohio into western Pennsylvania. There are a few circular enclosures reported further north into western New York state, though these could be Late Woodland defensive works. In any case, this puts us within striking distance of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, a logical entry route from the North Atlantic into the Midwest.

The possible nature of the contact is more interesting. For this, we need to turn back to what is known about distribution of henges and of ancient Irish society, particularly those elements of that society closely connected with religion. I mentioned earlier that there appears to have been a renewal of interest in constructing henge-like earthworks in Ireland around 600 B.C., not long after the beginning of the Iron Age there. There is also evidence for a major trading post on the coast a few miles north of Dublin, where a bit later we find Roman material. This post is not far from an ancient copper mine and from the symbolic center of power in Ireland, Tara, seat of the high king and high druid, a site lying in an area with a very high concentration of religious sites central to the mythology. About a decade ago, Anne Ross (Ross & Robins 1989:111ff) proposed that it may in fact have been not the traditional merchant princes who controlled the trade in precious metals from Ireland across Britain but the priesthood--the druids. It is certainly interesting that henges are sometimes found immediately adjacent to old trade routes such as the worn roadway leading across the hills of north Wales from Anglesey. There is even one henge-like earthwork I know of on the continent near Koblenz, on a trade route from the west. More widely, we may see a possible henge influence in Romano-Celtic temples, which in western France are set within small, circular henge-like enclosures while further to the east these enclosures are square (Piggott 1968:70). It is also worth noting in this regard that Caesar, in his Gallic Wars, says that the druids were not originally the priesthood of the continental Celts but had come from Britain.

Speaking of the Romans, with the druids they made an exception to their usual rule of religious tolerance. They tried to wipe them out. After their conquest of Britain, they even sent an expedition to exterminate the druidical community and center of learning on Anglesey, the island stepping-stone to Ireland off the west coast of Wales. This was certainly to some extent because the druids were leading the opposition to Roman rule, but Ross suggests it was also part of an effort to wrest from the druids control of the trade in metals.

For a moment, let's look more closely at the nature of the druids. They were the highest of the three learned classes in Ireland. It took seven years of training to become a bard, twelve to become a fáith or seer, and twenty to qualify as a druid. They were, in a word, the Irish equivalent of PhDs, the scholars of their time. Caesar says they spent as much time discussing astronomy as theology--an interesting point, given the role of astronomy in the henges. And they were not just priests but also judges, advisors to kings, and so on, much like Merlin (who, by the way, would have been a contemporary of St. Patrick). What else do we know about the druids? They were free to travel anywhere. They also liked to set up their communities on islands like Anglesey and the Isle of Wight, a characteristic also of early Irish monasticism.

This brings us back to something I said earlier. I mentioned St. Brendan's voyage and the recorded presence in what seems to have been Iceland of a community of Irish clerics prior to A.D. 800. There are grounds for suspecting that Christianity found favor among the druids because of a similarity in doctrines; there certainly is no record of martyrdom in early Irish Christianity. It came in quite peacefully, and the monks were responsible for recording much of the old myth, though they tried their best to Christianize it, just as they made saints out of many of the old deities like Brigid, Oengus, Gobenet, and others. St. Columcille, an Irish monk who founded the monastic community on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, even returned to Druim Cett in northern Ireland around A.D. 575 to defend the pagan bards, who some wanted to exile.

So who were these migrant clerics? Could they have been more traditional druids trying to avoid the inevitable? We know only that they were in Iceland before A.D. 800. How long might they have known of a route to the west? One of the classes of Early Irish literature is made up of tales called immrama, 'voyages,' and an article in Science some years ago (Sawatzky & Lehn 1976) pointed out that under the right atmospheric conditions objects beyond the sea horizon may appear to lie above it, allowing Iceland to be seen from the Faeroes, Greenland from Iceland, and so on, an effect traditionally known in Iceland as the hillingar phenomenon. To travel across the North Atlantic, one would not necessarily have been journeying into a seemingly endless ocean. Sawatzky and Lehn also refer to an attempt to trace the etymology of the name Thule that concluded it most likely derived from the Old Irish tulach, which refers to a protuberance, elevation, or hill.

As I also pointed out earlier, boats capable of the westward journey would have been available in Ireland well before Adena times. Adena circular earthworks appear not long after the time of the renewed interest in such earthworks in Ireland. And the druids definitely saw some of their goddesses as taking the form of raptorial birds. So, one could indeed make a case that the enclosures are the result of direct contact between groups who already had much in common.

Do I believe all this? At the moment, not really, though I am willing to be persuaded. However, finding concrete proof is likely to be difficult, because the druids were not craftsmen. They depended on the hospitality of the people among whom they moved. Thus they are unlikely to have left artefacts we can identify. What they carried and transmitted were ideas.

Ideas are really what I have been concerned with in this paper. Whether it was done by the druids or some indigenous group of scholars, it is clear that the thinking behind the Adena and Hopewell earthworks was very sophisticated. We have given little thought to the question of who was responsible and what their origins and roles in society might have been. These are questions to which we must try to find answers if we are fully to understand the phenomena known as Adena and Hopewell and to gain a better understanding of the reasons for the similarities between the cultures of the Early Woodland Midwest and those of Neolithic and later Ireland and Britain.

Atkinson, Richard J. C.
1951 The Henge Monuments of Great Britain. In Excavations at Dorchester, Oxon,
R. J. C. Atkinson, C. M. Piggott, & N. K. Sandars. Oxford: Department of Antiquities,
Ashmolean Museum.

Caesar, Gaius Julius
58-53 B.C. The Gallic Wars (De Bello Gallico). Various editions. [The translation used
here is that of John Warrington. New York: Heritage Press, 1955.]

Cleal, Rosamund M. J., R. Montague, & K. E. Walker
1995 Stonehenge in Its Landscape. Archaeological Report 10. London: English Heritage.

Kehoe, Alice
1971 Small Boats upon the North Atlantic. In Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-
Columbian Contacts, Carroll L. Riley, J. Charles Kelley, Campbell W. Pennington,
& Robert L. Rands, eds., pp. 275-292. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Piggott, Stuart
1968 The Druids. London: Thames & Hudson.

Ross, Anne, & Don Robins
1989 The Life and Death of a Druid Prince. New York: Touchstone.

Sawatzky, H. L., & W. H. Lehn
1976 The Arctic Mirage and the Early North Atlantic. Science 192:1300-1305.