A New Way of Thinking and Teaching about

Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon, GA is one of our country’s most significant archaeological sites. It is one of the very few remnants of a once great Southeastern Mississippian Culture and a contemporary of the well-studied and preserved Cahokia on the Mississippi River. Under the protection of the Department of the Interior, at least a portion of the once vast complex has been saved from farming and urban development, though even today it is under assault by highway planners.

Richard Thornton is a native Georgian, a registered architect and city planner who takes great pride in his Creek/Yuchi heritage. Since childhood, Richard has been on the path of learning all he can about his heritage. Richard decided to use the tools and techniques of his profession to do an independent study of Ocmulgee. And thus began one man's journey into ‘Virtual Reality Archaeology.’ We present to you his findings.

Drawing of overall layout of Ocmulgee on the fall line of the Ocmulgee River.

Large Temple Mound and the Main Plaza in Foreground

Center of Government and Religious activities.

Each separate village defined by natural terrain

Had it’s own mounds, public buildings and surrounding cultivated areas.

Richard located accurate aerial photographs and topography maps of all the major archaeological sites in the vicinity of Ocmulgee that were compatible with his CADD program. When the maps and photos and grids all came together, what his computer screen revealed astonished him. All the structures at Ocmulgee were aligned on either a 0-90 degree or 65-25 degree axis. There were several significant directional relationships – perhaps pointing to where the sun rose or set on the Solstices and Equinoxes; or perhaps constellations on certain days of the year. Ocmulgee’s site plan was an enormous observatory!

CADD enables one to measure distances, angles and areas with extreme accuracy. How, he wondered, could a people with Neolithic technology produce such precision? The sort of precision he discovered, over uneven terrain, was not accomplished in our times until the mid-to-late 1800s when the need for precision railroad construction fostered the advancement of surveying and civil engineering. Merely using line of sight and a long string could not have achieved this accuracy. Only some type of optical transit combined with a knowledge of geometry, degrees and math would have made it possible.

Richard’s best guess is that the accomplishment of this feat probably involved mirrors, since many large mirrors have been found in Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. Whatever technology was utilized, there is a clear implication that the people of Ocmulgee also knew the basics of astronomy, had a standard unit of measurement and some graphical means of passing down complex technical knowledge from one generation to the next.

Ocmulgee’s Geometric and Spatial Relationships

Radiating out from Mound A were structures placed in straight lines which ran true North-South - Mound B and the McDougal Mound to the North and mile Track and Stubb’s Mound ten miles to the south.

There was a line of structures which ran true East-West - Earth Lodges D-1 & D-4.

Other lines of structures were on diagonal lines which aligned with the point were the sun would rise or set on the Winter Solstice, Summer Solstice, Spring Equinox or Fall Equinox.

The McDougal Mound and the Dunlop Mound were both exactly 3,424 feet from Mound A and exactly one-half that distance (1712ft.) apart from each other.

Another line of structures (Mound A, Mound D, Dunlap Mound and Fort Hawkins Hill) seem to have pointed at the setting point of the North Star. A line from Mound A through Earth Lodge D-4 seems to point at the apogee of the North Star.

Mound E and Earth Lodge D-4 are equidistant from mound A.. Earth Lodge D-1 is exactly halfway between Mound E and Earth Lodge D-4 – possibly pointing to some constellation.

Perhaps the most astonishing discovery in the illustration below, is that the center of Mound A, the center of the circular mound at Ochesee, (the Lamar Village site) and a mound on Brown’s Mount – a total distance of six miles – were all aligned to define the point where the sun rose at the Winter Solstice.

Mound A

Ichesi

Brown's Mount

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