Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)
Glengarry Cairn
Photo Yoho2001 · CC BY-SA 3.0Source file on Wikimedia Commons
Overview
About this site
Overview
Glengarry Cairn is a megalithic mound in South Glengarry, Canada. It lies at 45.1217° N, 74.4898° W.
Catalogue recordSources and licences
Article
Glengarry Cairn
ContextSources for this section
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC 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. 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 regional background, “Native American earthen mounds”, is given below.
Dating
No date has been published for this site.
Setting
No other recorded monument lies within 10 km. In South Glengarry, Canada, 1 of the 1 recorded monuments are of this type.
ProtectionSources for this section
Sources for this section
Heritage status: national historic site of Canada.
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
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.
Photographs
2 photographs, each with its author and licence
More photographs
Where it stands
Canada
The pin marks the monument itself — its exact point.
- Coordinates
- 45°07′18″ N, 74°29′23″ WFor a GPS or map app: 45.12172, -74.48981
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.
Serpent Mounds
America's Stonehenge1500 BCE–1900 CE- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Cairn Pipounapi
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Tertre funéraire John-Frederick-Darwall
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Augustine Mound
International Hotel Stone Cairn
Fort Sainte Marie de Grace- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)D'Anville's Encampment
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Sources
Every record behind this page, with the link it came from.
1 source behind this page
- 01Wikidata Q23504878wikidata.org
Image files
- Glengarry Cairn NHS.jpgYoho2001CC BY-SA 3.0
- Glengarry Cairn circa 1843.jpgArtist: Battye, Edward W., Engraver: Dickinson, W. RobertPublic domain
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Credit
Text, licence and sources
Compiled from open records (Wikidata, CC0; OpenStreetMap, ODbL) and a regional background article based on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Wikidata Q23504878CC0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0