Newark Earthworks column - December 2020

Newark Earthworks column 2020

Jeff Gill

Seeing the moon again for the first time

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Learning about the Newark Earthworks, and sharing their story with new audiences over the last thirty years, I've become aware of a few things.

One is, of course, how many people know little or nothing about what Native Americans accomplished on this continent two thousand years ago. People who are aware of all sorts of details about kings and queens and pharaohs, pyramids and Stonehenge and cathedrals, even though they've never been outside of this country, are at best dimly aware of "mounds." 

And I've been in conversations where people speak excitedly of a European trip where for a week they rented a room on a square "right across from a church that's a thousand years old!" If I add "did you know every time you drive down 30th Street in Newark you're in the middle of an earthwork complex that's twice that age" it's likely to be met with initial unbelief.

I enjoy teaching people, both local residents and international visitors, old and young, about this gem of prehistory and culture we have in our midst — but I also value what I've learned myself. One big part of that learning has been about the moon.

Sure, I knew there was a moon in the sky, and I'm old enough to have followed the Apollo program mission by mission with great excitement; I could still tell you where on the visible surface on a full moon night you could spot the Sea of Tranquility.

The Old Farmer's Almanac had helped me dimly be aware of the phases, waxing gibbous and waning crescent and so on, cycling from sliver to bright round rise at the full, opposite the sunset. What I wasn't really conscious of, though, until I came to become acquainted with the Newark Earthworks, was how the moon's arc can swing from high in the sky to low on the southern horizon: not within the course of a year, as the sun's path runs, but within weeks.

Even as I know the sun's time in the sky at our latitude gets shorter each day to the winter solstice, then from Dec. 25 longer each day as the path overhead gets consistently higher until the summer solstice in June, I had not noticed how the moon's rise and set cycles on a different pattern altogether, too complex to describe briefly here, but in the sky during the day at times, rising nearly an hour later each night, more or less, shifting north and south in its westward path overhead.

But now, after delving deep into what's known and what we still struggle to understand, about the geometry and astronomy of the Octagon portion of the Newark Earthworks, I find that somewhere in the back of my head I'm more aware of the moon than I once was. I step outside and look up anticipating the moon's presence and place in the sky, and there it is. The moon used to surprise me, but now it's more of a constant companion, anticipated and welcomed in its natural place in the sky.

Something like the hour and minute and second hand of an analog clock, the sun is the easy to notice second hand of the cosmos we live in, the seasons the minute hand, and the moon, perhaps, the hour. Once you understand a bit more deeply how the whole system works, the parts and their movements make more sense, and even start to find echoes inside your own awareness.