Ohio Rock Art and Serpent Mound: Shared Iconography, Shared Stories

Abstract

James Swauger's study of Ohio's rock art, Petroglyphs of Ohio, has been the definitive guide to the subject since its publication in 1984. Swauger concluded that the Indigenous American Indian petroglyphs were created during the late precontact period and proposed that the makers of the designs were “proto-Shawnee,” but he deliberately eschewed any attempt to attribute meanings to the designs. Building on Swauger's work, we consider Ohio rock art through the lens of our previous research on Serpent Mound and the rock art of midcontinental North America, particularly the unique suite of pictographs at Picture Cave, as interpreted through the lens of Dhegiha Siouan oral traditions. We argue that several Ohio petroglyph sites include configurations of motifs that represent episodes from an ancient and widespread Indigenous creation story featuring the Great Serpent, Lord of the Beneath World, and First Woman, the mother of all living things.