In the early afternoon on April 8, 2024, across a wide swath across Indiana, southern Illinois, southeast Missouri and beyond, the otherwise-invisible New Moon will block the light of the Sun completely for a few minutes. The result will be a magical—even religious—celestial experience: a Total Solar Eclipse. At totality, the Sun is completely blocked by the shadow of the Moon. Frogs and crickets will begin to croak and chirp, mourning doves will coo, and the awesome corona of the solar disk will be visible with the naked eye around a black hole in the darkened sky.
Besides eclipses, all people throughout history and around the world watched the Moon because of its luminous, locomotive, temporal qualities. It was, and is, a primary means whereby peoples in the past kept track of time in months (“moonths”). A series of archaeological sites such as Stonehenge in the British Isles attest to this, as do the arrangements of some early Mesopotamian cities, such as Ur in modern-day Iraq. [1]
Back in North America, farmers in the past and present used the cosmic sign of a halo around a Full or nearly Full Moon to predict that rain would be coming. Certainly, this is why Indigenous North American peoples, from Illinois south and west into Mexico, thought of the Moon as a “rain-bringer.” [2] Some Native people in Illinois even built their own towns and cities in alignment with certain Moonrises and Moonsets. Others were and are yet named after the Moon. [3] It was that important and powerful.
The earliest known lunar-aligned monuments in North America are in Ohio, and date to a period of history sometimes called the Middle Woodland era (100 BCE – 400 CE). [4] In Newark, Ohio, you can even visit one of the best-known monumental earthworks aligned to several important rising and setting positions of the Full Moon on its long 18.6-year cycle. Standing there, the effect on the human psyche is profound—not unlike an eclipse. Native Woodland-era people knew where the Moon would rise or set, and it did, just as their skywatchers had foretold.
This cycle is little understood by most Americans today. But astronomers know that the Moon appears and disappears on the horizon far to the north and, later, far to the south only during one out of every 18.6 years. [5] This happens on or near the summer and winter solstices (June 20 or 21, and December 21). This year, 2024, is a lunar maximum or “standstill” year. Beginning around the Winter Solstice of 2023, and until about December 21 this year, the rising Full Moon on the horizon is sliding a little bit farther south each month until it will appear more than 140-degrees of azimuth south at dusk on June 20, 2024. Then, after the summer solstice, the Full Moon will begin sliding back north along the horizon until December 21, 2024, when it will be only a little more than 50-degrees of azimuth south of True North (0°).
The precolonial astronomer-priests who laid out the Indigenous “Mississippian-period” city of Cahokia, around the year 1050 CE, knew this too. The city grid seems to have been established based on an elaborate understanding of the movements and cycles of the Moon, Sun, and Milky Way. In special veneration of the Moon, they built a series of mounds and shrine houses in rows that align with the Northern Maximum Moonrise (53° at that latitude) on a hilltop in the Illinois prairie 15 miles east of their city. Today we call this place, privately owned, the Emerald Acropolis. Here, Cahokians cut and filled a natural 30-foot-high hill, originally formed during the Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago, and added mounds and pole-and-thatch structures to the summit. The long axis of the natural ridge, the Cahokians must have noticed, just happened to point to the all-important, once-in-a-generation, lunar event. The Cahokian architects oversaw the construction of twelve mounds in rows on the hill’s summit, one of which was a large central platform mound. Then, the people who attended the ceremonies at this unusual place also built temples and temporary houses on this same summit whenever they celebrated the extraordinary celestial phenomenon. [6]
What might we all learn from sites where human history was thoroughly entangled with the movements of the Moon, like Cahokia, Newark, Ur, or Stonehenge? Perhaps celestial happenings, cosmic movements, and cycles of time could help us all appreciate our place in a dynamic universe. Perhaps these cycles would, in turn, give us some greater sense of ourselves. If so, then maybe we should all go experience the Total Solar Eclipse next month or the Maximum Southern and Northern Full Moon rises and sets this June and December.
References Cited
- Romain, W.F., Lunar Alignments at Ur: Entanglements with the Moon God Nanna. Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, 2020. 5(2): p. 151-176.
- Miller, J., Changing Moons: A History of Caddo Religion. Plains Anthropologist, 1996. 41(157): p. 243-259.
- Cummings, M.M., An Umonhon Perspective, in Medieval Mississippians: The Cahokian World, T.R. Pauketat and S.M. Alt, Editors. 2015, School for Advanced Research Press: Santa Fe, New Mexico. p. 43-46.
- Hively, R. and R. Horn, Hopewell Cosmography at Newark and Chillecothe, Ohio, in Hopewell Settlement Patterns, Subsistence, and Symbolic Landscapes, A.M. Byers and D. Wymer, Editors. 2010, University Press of Florida: Gainesville. p. 128-164.
- Pauketat, T.R., An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America. 2013, London: Routledge.
- Pauketat, T.R., S.M. Alt, and J.D. Kruchten, The Emerald Acropolis: Elevating the Moon and Water in the Rise of Cahokia. Antiquity, 2017. 91: p. 207-222.
