Hempstead and Waapan Hill Before reporting some of the magnificent details of the Portsmouth Works, its necessary to discuss the personality of Giles Samuel Booth Hempstead, known as GSB for short. Hempstead was one of those flamboyant characters in the early history of the state of Ohio who account for such interesting Buckeye storytelling that turns out to be 90% hokum, but which leaves that intriguing 10%. Hempstead was a physician who moved to Portsmouth from Marietta, sharing his profession with other mound explorers like Edwin Davis (of Squier and Davis fame) and Doc Bennett of Portsmouth who seems to have been Hempsteads protégé. It is too often said that the intelligence of physicians drew them to archaeology, but the reality is that physicians were among the few with disposable income enabling them to become serious artifact collectors and thereby the employers of teams of mound looters. This was not any kind of archaeology worthy of the name -- it was simple grave-robbing done on an industrial scale, a tradition best exemplified by Warren K. Moorehead and William C. Mills, so successful in their pillaging of Indian graves that they were given official positions at that trumped-up organization called the Ohio Sate Archaeological and Historical Society. Hempstead was a leading figure in this tradition, and its champion in the Portsmouth area. He appears to have been the originator of the two great hoaxes that have so distracted from serious study of the Portsmouth Works, namely the idea that Tremper Mound was built in the shape of a mastodon (Hempstead theorized that the mound-builders were contemporaries of the mastodons and saber-toothed tigers and that the earthworks served in part as traps for megafauna), and the idea that the mound-builders were refugees from Atlantis. The latter gibberish was taken up by the Kentucky psychic Edgar Cayce and turned into a full-fledged cult of cockamamie, which we see expressed today by the Old-Age New-Agers at Serpent Mound. It should go unsaid that Hempstead believed that the mound-builders were unrelated to historical Native Americans and instead saw the earthworks as products of an antediluvian age, conveniently giving white men right and reason to loot the graves. Hempstead also proposed that Waapan Hill (which he called Kinney Hill) was entirely a built structure, i.e. an artificial pyramid, in an amazing presaging of the Internet hucksterism surrounding natural hills in Bosnia, Antarctica, and other hard-to-get-to places. (Someone should tell Brien Foerster that Portsmouth has an artificial giant pyramid, just to spark tourism.) At this point one might be reluctant to take anything that Hempstead said seriously, and indeed his pseudoscience is one of the many reasons that Portsmouth has evaded the attention of real scholars. But in this fact also lies the reason why certain genuine observations made by Hempstead have been neglected, and one of those stands out as preeminent. I should say at this point that my attention was drawn to Waapan Hill before I read about Hempsteads craziness or took a serious look at his Portsmouth map (which went through two editions). I was drawn to the hill for the following reasons: 1. It appears to be the geometric center of the triangle formed by Tremper Mound, Old Fort, and the Hardin concentric-circle site. 2. It is the obvious high-point of central Portsmouth with commanding views of both the Ohio and Scioto valleys. 3. It is just northwest of Mound Park and is a prominent landscape feature observable from the horseshoe mound in the park (I checked). 4, It has a very strange appendage that extends to the southeast which is perfectly linear and looks to be artificial. Micklethwaite Road now travels atop that appendage which violates the citys grid pattern. The rampway on which Micklethwaite Road travels is so straight and so obviously non-natural, I didnt pay too much attention to it, because it seemed like it could be some old historic structure repurposed. But then I looked seriously at Hempsteads map and saw that he highlights that structure, before it had a modern road atop it, and uses it as evidence that the entire hill is artificial. This at least shows that the linear structure was there well before the 1870s, had no connection to a modern road, and was associated by some learned local men with the mound-builders. Now its absolutely clear that the entire hill is not artificial -- it is far too large and irregular, and we know that it predates the era of power equipment which would be necessary for such a task. However, the linear appendage does appear to be artificial and prehistoric. It is a massive work, and it is now possible to say what it was intended to be. For one, it points directly to the summit of the hill, and it gradually climbs the steepest slope of the hill on the east -- the hill that may have been called Waapan by the Shawnee, meaning sunrise. In the other direction it points toward the winter solstice sunrise and to the Hardin concentric circle site beyond. Therefore I think this was exactly what it appears to be -- a ramp for ascending the hill on the east, graduating the hills steep unwalkable grade there. Though ceremonial processions may have traveled this ramp, I dont see that as the necessary purpose. Rather, I see it as affording ready ascent to the summit -- from which all of the area earthworks were visible -- for groups of whatever size, for the purpose of what Mayan scholars call anticipatory resurrection, looking down on the area earthworks to anticipate the afterlife journey in bird form. It is a massive structure and this becomes the premiere evidence that the hilltop overlooks, not the geometric earthworks themselves, were the places for human “ceremony” with practical import – preparation for the afterlife journey. And it is evidence that Portsmouth – not Chillicothe or Newark – was the epicenter of this civilization. The more subtle hilltop overlooks of Chillicothe and Newark indeed may have been inspired by and modeled after Portsmouth. The GoogleEarth image below shows the hill and the straight rampway on its southeast. The large Southern Ohio Medical Center is just north of the rampway and Hill View Retirement Center is just north of SOMC. Mound Park is just off the map to the southeast. The small segment of road in the northwest corner is a part of Sunrise Avenue. (Background on Hempstead comes largely from an article by James Murphy -- Giles Booth Hempstead, a Bio-Bibliographic Note on a Pioneer Portsmouth Archaeologist. )
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 23:25:54 +0000