Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)
Augustine Mound
No licensed photograph yetWe have no photograph we may publish for this site, so the interpretive 3D view leads instead.
Overview
About this site
Overview
The Augustine Mound is a burial mound at Metepenagiag, New Brunswick, Canada, designated a national historic site. It was built around 500 BCE and is associated with the Adena culture of the Ohio River valley.
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Article
Augustine Mound
A circle 30 m in diameter surrounds the mound, which stands at the centre of a ceremonial area.
DescriptionSources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
The mound lies on the left (north) bank of the Little Southwest Miramichi River, 700 m east of the Oxbow site and of Heritage Park, where a museum presents the culture and history of the Mi'kmaq of Metepenagiag. A circle 30 m in diameter surrounds the mound, which stands at the centre of a ceremonial area. It is low, with a gradual slope. Two perpendicular berms, oriented to the cardinal points, form a cross. Each measures one metre wide by ten to eleven metres long and is 0.5 metre high at the centre of the mound. The berms are made of different materials from the mound itself. Only part of the mound is intact today.
DatingSources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
The mound was built around 500 BCE and is associated with the Adena culture, which originated in the Ohio River valley. Some of the materials come from that region.
ExcavationsSources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
The first archaeological excavations took place in 1975 and 1976, but the centre of the mound had been damaged shortly before the excavation. Human remains and artefacts were found; they are related to the artefacts from the deepest layers of the Oxbow site.
ConservationSources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
The mound became a national historic site in 1975. It still has spiritual and ritual importance for the Indigenous population.
ContextSources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
Eastern North America has many earthen mounds, built over several thousand years by Native American peoples. They are not megaliths but earthworks of piled soil, and they served as graves, platforms and symbols. The Adena culture of the Early Woodland period, from 500 BCE to 100 CE and centred on Ohio, built burial mounds and shared a ceremonial system.
Tradition and region
About this kind of monument
Native American earthen mounds
Eastern North America has many earthen mounds, built over several thousand years by Native American peoples. They are not megaliths, but earthworks of piled soil, and they served as graves, platforms and symbols. The Adena culture of the Early Woodland period, from 500 BCE to 100 CE and centred on Ohio, built burial mounds and shared a ceremonial system. The Hopewell tradition, a network of cultures from 100 BCE to 500 CE, exchanged goods from Lake Ontario to Florida and raised burial mounds and geometric enclosures. The Mississippian period, from the end of the tenth century to the sixteenth, brought maize farming, large towns, and platform mounds on which temples and chiefs' houses stood.
The grandest is Monks Mound at Cahokia, Illinois, the largest pre-Columbian earthwork in the Americas. Its construction began between 900 and 955 CE; it is about 30 metres high and 291 metres long including the access ramp, with a base about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Effigy mounds are mounds shaped as animals or symbols; the effigy mound builders are mainly associated with 550 to 1200 CE, though radiocarbon dating puts the origin of some as far back as 320 BCE. The Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, 411 metres long and about 1.2 metres high, is the largest serpent effigy known, surveyed in 1848 by Squier and Davis.
Mounds are dated by radiocarbon dating of charcoal and by pottery; many were levelled by farming and by antiquarian digging. Nineteenth-century theories of a vanished race of Mound Builders have no support: the mounds were raised by Native American peoples.
When visiting, remember that many mounds are sacred places. Look for platform tops, the flat summits of mounds that held buildings, and for the ramps and plazas around them.
Paraphrased from Wikipedia: Adena culture, Wikipedia: Hopewell tradition, Wikipedia: Mississippian culture, Wikipedia: Serpent Mound, Wikipedia: Monks Mound, Wikipedia: Effigy mound, Wikipedia: Poverty Point, Wikipedia: Mound Builders · CC BY-SA 4.0
From the article
Dated moments in the story
See it in 3D
An interpretive reconstruction of the monument, standing on the real ground at its exact point, under the sun for that place and season. Drag to look around it.
The reconstruction is ours, not a survey: it shows what a monument of this type looks like, at the size the record gives for this one.
Where it stands
Canada
The pin marks the monument itself — its exact point.
- Coordinates
- 46°57′18″ N, 65°50′00″ WFor a GPS or map app: 46.95500, -65.83333
Access is as our sources describe it; we have not visited the site to check.
Nearby
The closest sites in the Atlas, by straight line.
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Tertre funéraire John-Frederick-Darwall
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)D'Anville's Encampment
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Cairn Pipounapi
Fort Sainte Marie de Grace
America's Stonehenge1500 BCE–1900 CE
Glengarry Cairn
Serpent Mounds
International Hotel Stone Cairn
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Sources
Every record behind this page, with the link it came from.
1 source behind this page
- 01Wikidata Q3542043wikidata.org
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Credit
Text, licence and sources
Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Tumulus Augustine" (French), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; authors are listed in the page history. Reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read on Wikipedia · Edit history and authors
- Wikipedia (French): Tumulus AugustineCC BY-SA 4.0
- Wikidata Q3542043CC0