|
||
|
|
|
|
A composite scientific engraving presenting one of the earliest European visual syntheses of North American rock art and prehistoric earthworks, issued in Paris by the Société de Géographie to accompany David Bailie Warden’s important essay Recherches sur les antiquités des États-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale.
The upper half of the sheet features a detailed rendering of the famous Dighton Rock inscription, a densely marked petroglyph panel originally located in the Taunton River at Berkley, Massachusetts. Measuring over eleven feet wide, the boulder had puzzled observers since the seventeenth century. Its incised figures, geometric shapes, and apparent numerals were variously attributed to Indigenous Algonquians, Norse explorers, Phoenicians, or other imagined early visitors. The depiction here captures the stone’s full face before it was relocated and remains one of the clearest early renderings of the site. Though its markings are now understood as Native American in origin, the stone became a touchstone in nineteenth-century debates about American antiquity.
Beneath the main panel are four inset plans documenting monumental Indigenous earthworks in southern Ohio. These include a fortified enclosure on the north bank of Paint Creek near Chillicothe (2), concentric circular embankments at Piqua on the Great Miami River (3), a pair of parallel linear mounds near the Ohio River once interpreted as ceremonial raceways (4), and complex rectilinear and circular formations near Piketon on the Scioto (5). These sites were central to early American archaeological discourse and were among those surveyed and published by Caleb Atwater and others in the first decades of the century.
