A giant snake in Ohio built on a crater, holding nothing. Serpent Mound coils more than a quarter mile across a ridge in Adams County. Almost every mound in America is a tomb. This one isn’t. No bodies inside it. No grave goods. Nothing was ever put in it. And the ridge it sits on is the rim of an impact crater about five miles wide, struck roughly three hundred million years ago. The bedrock underneath is shattered and folded… the only ground like it in Ohio. The serpent’s head points at the summer solstice sunset. For a hundred years, Americans credited it to Atlanteans, Egyptians, and lost tribes. Anyone but the people who were still living here. There is a country buried underneath this one. And you’re standing on it right now.

