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.