Re: earthworks column

Newark Earthworks column for the Newark Advocate – Summer 2023

Jeff Gill

 

Pieces adding up to a whole

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There's a piece, or pieces of an ancient mechanism that's back in the news recently, thanks to that fictional archaeologist Dr. Henry Jones, Jr..

 

His so-called "Dial of Destiny" is loosely in some ways and very closely in others based on an actual find of the last century in the Aegean Sea, opposite the island of Kythera, or Antikythera as they called it.

 

Something over two thousand years ago, a mysterious Greek workshop created an amazing bronze mechanism, about the size of a hat box, with gears and a crank. You could set the device to your current date, or any future (or former) date, and see on the analog display where the planets were, when the next Olympic or Pythian games would be held, and even calculate when eclipses would occur, along with the more everyday (or every year) events of solstices and equinoxes, and the phases of the moon.

 

The Antikythera Mechanism is the name of this object, discovered in dives on a Greek shipwreck that was carrying treasure and attractions to Rome for a parade to honor Julius Caesar. The statuary was the main attraction, and the corroded pieces of bronze gears were considered an anomaly until their possible practical uses were considered in just the last few decades. Once looked at closely, these linked gears constitute a device of which a lead scientist said "This device is extraordinary . . . The astronomy is exactly right . . . in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa."

 

It did not point one to fissures in the space-time continuum; its reality as a means to understand what was known long ago is to me even more interesting, and a time machine in its own right.

 

Built about the same time as the Antikythera Mechanism, and only truly appreciated about the same time as scholars realized what that gadget was really good for, was the geometric complex of earthen enclosures we call the Newark Earthworks. And in many ways, they are two means to the same end.

 

Not small and compact and metallic, but encompassing over four square miles and made of basket loads of earth, the earthen geometry was doing for observers in ancient Ohio much the same sort of calculation and prediction and recorded observation they were doing at that time in Greece. With better metallurgy and some inscriptions, the Antikythera Mechanism could be carried in a knapsack, or on a boat. The Newark Earthworks aren't portable: you had to come to them, make a pilgrimage of sorts, in order to work the "mechanism" and monitor the places now and upcoming of the sun, the moon, and perhaps other astronomical phenomena as well.

 

One other interesting parallel: the Antikythera Mechanism is today in about seven fused chunks, two of them big. We don't have all of it, and those gaps are a challenge to fully understanding what it was for, and how it was used. Likewise, the Newark Earthworks is no longer intact, and while we know mostly the two big pieces (Great Circle & Octagon), there are small bits and chunks which help us understand the whole all the better.

 

My landscape tours, one of which will happen again in October, are a chance to take people around to see how there are "gears" and fragments of the whole complex still hiding in plain sight along the streets and alleys of Newark. No fissures in time, other than the imagination that takes us back to when they were built here two thousand years ago.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he leads tours as a volunteer with the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State Newark and for the Ohio History Connection, and is a World Heritage Ambassador.

 

Faith Works 7-21-23

Faith Works 7-21-23
Jeff Gill

Klans, concerns, and lasting questions
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Back in February & March I wrote a series of columns marking the hundred years since Ku Klux Klan activities in Licking County and Ohio made the front pages of papers like the Advocate.

I tried to set the stage by noting two things: clearly the size of some of the public events and mass rallies meant the Klan had been quietly working for some time, so January 1923 is kind of an arbitrary date, and the Klan of the 1920s was different in some very confusing ways from the post-Civil War Klan in the South during Reconstruction, and the Klan some of us remember in resurgence responding to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s & 1960s.

Historians refer to the "second era" of the Klan, which I think is accurate, in the sense that it was a very distinct sort of movement from the Klans which arose, or lurked, before and after the period of Klan activity in the 1920s. Nathan Bedford Forrest led a Klan in the 1860s & 70s which was a resistance movement, rooted in terror and assault and murder, against giving civil rights to people formerly enslaved, and Confederate officers led the group in a secretive, underground organization. The anti-Civil Rights Klan of the 1950s & 60s was a more decentralized movement, also highly secretive, also deeply invested in both psychological and physical terror, along with murder on many occasions.

The 1920s Klan was, well, more public. Yes, they wore hoods, which their literature called "helmets" and on some occasions they would hear the order "visors up" and the face of the hood might be pulled aside for parades. Their surprise appearances in church services were almost always fully masked, but there were times the Klan would strategically unmask to show off their support. Either way, they loved public events and staged their cross burnings with theatrical care.

And they ran for office. Which is where this ongoing centennial is going, and why I continue to think there are relevant issues for us in 2023 about what we said to ourselves and others about this community in that perhaps not so long ago era.

Rallies and parades and programs and statewide gatherings called, inevitably, Klonklaves, were aimed at building up membership and support towards political control of communities. Ohio and Indiana were arguably the core of this second Klan; the headquarters nationally were in Atlanta, but the Midwest Klan had the biggest numbers and the state organizations reported in the early 1920s to Indianapolis, and the Grand Dragon there, D.C. Stephenson.

After my earlier series ran, in April a book was published by noted journalist and author, Timothy Egan, titled "A Fever in the Heartland." For the Midwestern context of the second Klan, there's no better single read to get your head around the reality that, as Stephenson said before his fall in 1925, "I am the law." The Klan, Egan notes, owned the state, and Stephenson owned the Klan. He's talking about Indiana, but Ohio was in his hip pocket.

In the fall of 1923, the Indiana governorship was contested between Republican and Democratic candidates, but both were Klan endorsed: Stephenson couldn't lose. In a number of other states, Klan endorsed candidates won; in Ohio, the Klan choice for governor failed, but in dozens of cities and counties their slate won, including Newark and Licking County.

Having a rally for the state Klan, a Klonklave, at Buckeye Lake, with as many as 75,000 Klan members in attendance that July of 1923, certainly helped ensure the outcome three months later at the ballot box.

To what end? That's what I will come back to next week.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been hearing stories about the Midwest 1920s Klan his whole life, and is still trying to make sense of them. Tell him what you've heard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.