Serpent Mound Lost Knowledge and Anomalies

About Serpent Mound Lost Knowledge and Anomalies

Two radiocarbon dates published twenty-three years apart bracket the Great Serpent Mound: a Fort Ancient charcoal reading near 1070 CE uncalibrated, calibrating to roughly 1120 CE (Fletcher and Cameron 1996) and an Adena-era organic-sediment reading centered around 321 BCE (Herrmann, Romain et al. 2014). The two dates sit roughly thirteen centuries apart, and no single mound on the continent has ever sustained that gap without the dating method itself becoming the question. Serpent Mound's anomaly is not the serpent. It is that the earth holds the form, drops no bones, drops no pots, and refuses to settle on a century.

## The dating war: Adena, Fort Ancient, or both

The dating fight at Serpent Mound is the cleanest case in Eastern Woodlands archaeology of two competent teams reading the same dirt and arriving at construction dates over a thousand years apart.

The Fort Ancient case came first. In 1991, Robert Fletcher (a Pittsburgh archaeology student remapping the site) and Terry Cameron reopened a trench themselves and contacted Lepper (Ohio Historical Society) and Wymer (Bloomsburg), who joined the dating work. The trench cut through ground Frederic Ward Putnam had originally exposed a century earlier. Inside what they read as undisturbed mound fill, Fletcher and Cameron recovered three small pieces of charcoal. Two yielded calibrated radiocarbon ages clustering near 1070 CE uncalibrated, calibrating to roughly 1120 CE. A third returned a Late Archaic age around 2920 BP that they treated as a stray fragment of older surface debris incorporated during construction. The two consistent charcoal dates, paired with the fact that effigy mounds and serpent iconography are well documented in the Fort Ancient material record and largely absent from Adena, became the basis for assigning the mound to Fort Ancient hands somewhere around the eleventh to twelfth century CE. Fletcher, Cameron, Lepper, Wymer, and Pickard published the result in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology in 1996 and it became the textbook date for two decades.

In 2014, Edward Herrmann, William Romain, and colleagues published "A New Multistage Construction Chronology for the Great Serpent Mound, USA" in the Journal of Archaeological Science. They pulled soil cores through the mound body, dated organic sediment from what they read as the original Adena construction layer, and reported a mean age of roughly 321 BCE, with a calibrated range of approximately 381 BCE to 44 BCE. They applied a Bayesian statistical framework to integrate multiple radiocarbon dates from different stratigraphic positions across the cores, allowing the older Adena-era dates and the younger Fort Ancient charcoal to coexist within a single internally consistent model rather than forcing one to invalidate the other. They did not throw out the 1070 CE reading. Their reading kept it as a later episode and proposed a multistage chronology: an Adena-era origin around 300 BCE, with a Fort Ancient repair, refurbishment, or rebuild around 1100 CE that left the eleventh-century charcoal in the upper fill. The mound, in their reading, is not one mound. It is two construction events separated by thirteen hundred years on the same effigy footprint.

Bradley Lepper, with Robert Frolking and William Pickard, replied in 2018 (*Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology* 43:1) and again in 2019 (*MCJA* 44:1, "Debating the Age of Serpent Mound"). Romain answered with a rejoinder in *MCJA* 43:1 (2018) and a second rejoinder in *MCJA* 44:1 (2019). Lepper wrote the replies; Romain wrote the rejoinders. The critique focused on sample quality, not on the radiocarbon machine. The Herrmann and Romain dates came from organic sediment retrieved through soil cores rather than from in situ charcoal exposed in a stratigraphic profile. Organic sediment dates are well known to skew old: dissolved organic carbon migrates downward through the soil column, root intrusion contributes modern carbon offsetting older soil, and reworked carbon from pre-Adena floodplain sediments can push a reading centuries to millennia past the date of the construction event. Lepper cited published cases in which similar core-derived sediment dates had returned ages up to three thousand years older than the actual mound. The Fletcher and Cameron charcoal, by contrast, was recovered from a trench wall in physical contact with the original mound fill. The 2018 reply also pressed the cultural argument: Adena did not build effigy mounds anywhere else. Fort Ancient did. The nearby Alligator Effigy Mound is Fort Ancient. Fort Ancient pottery and rock art are full of horned serpents. Adena art is not.

Romain and Herrmann answered in the same volume, defending the core methodology and the multistage reading. They pointed out that the cores sampled distinct stratigraphic layers, that organic sediment in undisturbed mound fill behaves differently from organic sediment in pond or floodplain contexts, and that the geographic spread of their core dates was internally consistent with a single Adena construction event. They also noted that the Fletcher and Cameron 1070 CE charcoal could plausibly date a refurbishment rather than the original build, since charcoal in upper fill says when that fill arrived, not when the underlying mound was first raised. The journal printed Lepper's rebuttal next to it. The exchange ended without the field reaching consensus. Standard reference sources currently treat the question as open. Some accept the two-stage chronology. Others hold to a Fort Ancient single-build sometime around 1070 CE uncalibrated, calibrating to roughly 1120 CE. No new open trenching has been authorized at the mound since the 1991 work.

A third position is worth naming: the dating problem at Serpent Mound is structurally hard, not just empirically unresolved. Mound fill is not a sealed depositional environment. Worms, roots, frost heave, animal burrows, and centuries of foot traffic mix the upper layers. Any single radiocarbon date from any single sample is dating that sample, not necessarily the construction event. Fletcher and Cameron's charcoal could be later debris pushed down by burrowing. Herrmann and Romain's sediment could be older soil incorporated during the build. Both teams know this. The fight is over which kind of error is more likely to be operating at this site, on these samples, at the depths the dates were taken. The 2018 and 2019 exchanges in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology are unusually direct about that methodological underlayer for an academic dispute.

The honest summary: the mound was either built around 300 BCE and rebuilt around 1100 CE, or built once around 1070 CE uncalibrated (roughly 1120 CE calibrated). Both readings have peer-reviewed defenders. Both readings have problems. Until the National Park Service permits another stratigraphic dig, the dirt holds the answer. The thirteen-hundred-year uncertainty is not noise; it is the data. A site that resists single-date attribution this hard is telling us something about how it was used over time, not just when it was made.

## The impact crater under the mound

The Serpent Mound effigy sits on the eroded rim of a much older catastrophe. The Serpent Mound impact structure (also called the Serpent Mound Disturbance or Cryptoexplosion Structure) is a deeply eroded complex crater approximately 8 km in diameter (some readings extend disturbed bedrock to 14 km), with a central uplift, a ring graben, and disturbed bedrock extending outward beyond the original rim. Age estimates for the impact span the late Mississippian through early Permian. Paleomagnetic dating returns 256 +15/-12 Ma, while the stratigraphic upper bound (the youngest disturbed unit, post-Cuyahoga formation) places the event after roughly 330 Ma. Most workers therefore place the impact in the early Permian, with the paleomagnetic date as the preferred narrow constraint and the stratigraphic bound holding the wider window.

The impact origin is settled science. Robert Dietz reported shatter cones at Serpent Mound in 1960 in *Science*, identifying them in the Lilley dolomite (Middle Silurian) of the central uplift; the same paper established shatter cones as a diagnostic indicator of meteorite impact and added Serpent Mound, Sierra Madera, and Flynn Creek to the published list of confirmed impact sites. Coesite, a high-pressure silica polymorph that forms only under shock, was identified in the same Lilley dolomite shatter cones at Serpent Mound by Cohen and colleagues in 1961. Shocked quartz with planar deformation features was confirmed by Carlton, Koeberl and colleagues in 1998 in *Earth and Planetary Science Letters*. Three independent shock indicators, on three independent mineral systems, in three independent decades. The disturbance is a meteorite scar, not a cryptovolcanic feature, despite the older "cryptovolcanic" label that lingers in some references.

The mound builders did not need to know the geology to detect that the ground here was strange. The crater's central uplift produces ridges of older bedrock pushed up through younger limestone. Baranoski 2003 documents elevated trace metals (iron, magnesium) in central uplift bedrock, and that subsurface chemistry expresses at the surface as shallower, stonier soils on the uplifted rim and central core, contrasted with deeper karst-derived soils on the undisturbed limestone country off the structure. Plant communities follow the soils: drier, thinner-soiled rim ground supports a different mix of trees, herbs, and ground cover than the cooler, wetter karst ground beyond the disturbance. Local water chemistry differs across the structure as well, because the same fractured bedrock that holds the trace-metal anomaly also routes groundwater along different paths than the surrounding karst. Mound builders walking the land for a season would have noticed the plant-community shifts, the change in soil under their feet, the rock outcrops, and the way water moves over the ground, even without any soil-chemistry instrument.

The 411-meter effigy sits on a plateau on the eroded northwestern rim of the structure, not at the center; the plateau drops sharply to Brush Creek on the west and Ohio Brush Creek on the east, an unusual landform for the region that traces the eroded rim. The symbolic implication of the placement is the part the geological record cannot settle. Mound builders across Eastern Woodlands cultures consistently chose elevated, hydrologically distinct sites for ceremonial earthworks: bluffs over rivers, plateau edges, the heads of valleys. The Serpent Mound plateau fits that template, so the placement does not require a special geological-knowledge hypothesis. It requires only the ordinary site-selection logic for a ceremonial earthwork. Whether the builders read this as sacred or simply chose the highest, driest, most defensible plateau is not recoverable from the dirt. What is recoverable is that the longest serpent effigy in the world sits directly on the rim of the largest impact structure in Ohio. Coincidence or chosen, the geometry is real. The placement is one of the few facts about the site that does not depend on which radiocarbon date is correct, because both Adena and Fort Ancient builders would have read the same plateau the same way.

## Geomagnetic anomalies and what they may mean

USGS and Ohio Geological Survey aeromagnetic data, plus academic ground-survey work, have documented geomagnetic anomalies inside the Serpent Mound crater rim. The anomalies are real geological features produced by faulted bedrock, brecciated zones, and altered iron-bearing minerals from the impact. They show up cleanly in aeromagnetic surveys flown over Adams County and in ground-based magnetometer work along the central uplift. The Ohio Geological Survey Report of Investigations 146, by Baranoski and colleagues in 2003, is the standard subsurface treatment and includes the published anomaly maps.

The interesting question is whether the mound builders detected them. The popular claim, advanced by Ross Hamilton and others in the alternative-archaeology literature and gestured at by the Hardmans in passing, is that the builders sensed the magnetic disturbance and chose the site for that reason. The strict claim runs into a wall: there is no documented Native American compass tradition. Lodestone is present in trace amounts in some Eastern Woodlands deposits, but no archaeological assemblage from Adena, Hopewell, or Fort Ancient contains a directional magnetic instrument. The builders had no recorded technology that would resolve a geomagnetic anomaly in the way a modern magnetometer does.

What the builders did have was the surface evidence of the impact: ridges, soil change, water behavior, and a plateau visibly different from the surrounding karst. A site that reads as unusual to walking feet, dowsing rods, or seasonal observation would qualify as sacred ground in many Eastern Woodlands traditions without any geomagnetic instrument involved. The honest framing is that the magnetic anomalies are real, the placement of the mound over the crater is real, and the causal chain in between is unproven. Mainstream archaeology treats the magnetic-detection claim as speculative. The geological anomalies themselves are not in dispute, and neither is the placement.

## An effigy without bodies: pure landscape symbolism

Frederic Ward Putnam dug Serpent Mound for four seasons starting in 1886. He trenched the head, the body, the coils, and the oval. He found nothing. No burials in the serpent. No pots, no pipes, no copper, no shell, no flint cache, no bone, no inscription. The two small conical mounds adjacent to the serpent did contain Adena-style burials — Putnam reported flexed inhumations along with charcoal lenses and ash deposits typical of Adena log-tomb construction — which is part of why a generation of archaeologists assumed Adena built the effigy as well. The serpent itself held only earth.

This is unusual. Adena and Hopewell mound traditions are burial traditions. Named Adena burial mounds make the contrast concrete: Grave Creek Mound in West Virginia (built around 250 BCE, 19 meters tall, with multiple stratified interments), the Adena Mound itself (the type site, with multiple log-tomb burials), and Miamisburg Mound (Ohio's largest conical, with an Adena interment) all hold bodies and grave goods. The Hopewell ceremonial centers extend the pattern: Mound City Group (twenty-three mounds, all with cremation burials and grave goods), the Newark Earthworks (geometric earthworks with associated burial features), and the Hopewell Mound Group itself contain interments, cremations, copper, mica, and ritual deposits stratigraphically embedded in the fill. Fort Ancient mound and village sites contain refuse pits, hearths, postholes, and burials. The two adjacent conical mounds at the Serpent Mound site fit that broader Adena pattern. The serpent itself does not.

Even within the broader Effigy Mound Tradition further west, where Wisconsin and Iowa builders raised earthen bears, birds, panthers, and water spirits between roughly 700 and 1100 CE, the effigy mounds typically contain burials, occasional cremation deposits, or charred-bone scatter inside the shape. The shape is the marker; the burial is the dedication. Serpent Mound is anomalous even by that comparative standard: the shape is there, the dedication is not. It was built to be a form on the land and nothing else. Whatever the construction event was, it was not a funeral. It was not a foundation deposit ceremony of the kind known from Mississippian mound building further west. It was geometry placed on the landscape with no internal contents to mark its consecration.

That absence narrows the interpretive space sharply. A burial mound testifies to who was honored and what they were buried with. An effigy mound with no burials testifies only to the shape itself. Read with what tools survive, the mound says: a community spent the labor to move tens of thousands of cubic feet of earth into the form of a serpent oriented to the summer solstice sunset on the rim of a buried impact crater, and they put nothing inside it. The form was the message. The form is also all that survives. The lost knowledge at Serpent Mound is not the burial inventory, because there is no burial inventory. It is the cosmology that made building this shape, here, worth four months of community labor.

## The Halley's Comet 1066 hypothesis

The Halley's Comet hypothesis attaches to the 1070 CE date. Halley's Comet returned in 1066 CE and was recorded across Eurasia, including a famously bright apparition documented by Chinese astronomers and woven into the Bayeux Tapestry. The Crab Nebula supernova had reached Earth as a daylight-visible point of light in 1054 CE and stayed bright for weeks. If the mound was built within a decade or two of 1066, both events were inside living memory.

Nineteenth-century commentators floated the comet reading informally. Fletcher and Cameron, when they published the 1991 charcoal date in the mid-1990s, noted the temporal coincidence and observed that the curving body of the serpent could be read as a stylized comet trajectory with the head as the nucleus and the coils as the tail. Some popular treatments have escalated this to a hard claim that the mound is a comet portrait.

What the geometry actually shows is a serpent with seven undulating curves, an oval at the head end (variously read as a frog, an egg, or a sun), and a coiled tail. The curves are roughly periodic, not the parabolic decay an actual comet trail would trace. Eastern Woodlands iconography includes serpents extensively in pottery, gorgets, and rock art well before and after 1066. Horned-serpent and underwater-panther figures appear across centuries of Mississippian and Fort Ancient material culture, with no obvious cometary trigger. The comet reading is one possible motivation among several: a calendrical marker, a horned serpent cosmogram, a celestial-event commemoration, or a long-standing serpent shrine that happened to be rebuilt the decade after Halley's flyby. None of these can be confirmed from the surviving evidence. The honest treatment is to keep the comet hypothesis on the table as one plausible read, not the read.

## What the mound testifies to

A serpent-effigy four hundred and eleven meters long, made entirely of earth, oriented to the summer solstice sunset, sitting on the rim of a Permian impact crater, containing no burials and no artifacts, with two competing radiocarbon-anchored construction dates thirteen centuries apart. The mound survives. The dates are contested. The cosmology that produced it is no longer recoverable from the surviving evidence. The lost knowledge here is not what was buried, because nothing was buried. The lost knowledge is why this shape, why this place, why this orientation, and why a community moved a hill of earth to leave only a form.

Significance

Serpent Mound is the cleanest test case in North American archaeology for what a site can and cannot tell us when its builders left only its shape. Most ancient sites are read through their contents. Pyramids contain sarcophagi and texts. Tombs contain grave goods that anchor dates and identify the dead. Cities leave middens, hearths, postholes, and trash that build a stratigraphic record century by century. Serpent Mound has none of that. Putnam's four seasons of excavation in the late 1880s recovered no burials inside the effigy, no interior artifacts, no inscriptions, no datable cultural deposits in the mound fill that survived later disturbance. The mound is pure earthwork geometry, and almost everything we want to know about it has to be read off the geometry itself, the surrounding two conical mounds, and the chemistry of the fill.

That austerity is what makes it a doctrinal site. It forces the question: what can a surviving form actually testify to, when the cosmology that produced it is gone? It can testify to the labor — the volume of earth moved, the tools needed, the community size required to organize the build. It can testify to the orientation — the head's alignment to the summer solstice sunset, established by the Hardmans in 1987, locks the build to a celestial calendar. It can testify to the placement — the choice of a plateau on the rim of a recognizable impact crater is not random, even if the builders read the crater as sacred ground rather than as a meteorite scar. It can testify to the absence of burials — a deliberate choice, given that the same culture (whichever it was) built burial mounds elsewhere.

What it cannot testify to is the why. The two competing radiocarbon dates put the build either in late Adena around 300 BCE or in Fort Ancient around 1070 CE, or both. The cultural framework that made building a giant serpent here worth months of community labor is not recoverable from the dirt. We have the form. We do not have the meaning the form was made to carry. The mound is the limit case of what archaeology can read off of pure landscape art, and it is the test case for whether the question "what did this mean" has any answer when no text, no body, and no artifact survives the gap.

Connections

Serpent Mound's parent and immediate sibling pages establish its baseline before this lost-knowledge reading layers on top.

Serpent Mound — the parent page covering the basic site description, the 411-meter length, the seven-coiled serpent body with oval at the head, the two adjacent Adena-style conical burial mounds, the absence of artifacts inside the effigy itself, and the cryptoexplosion structure rim placement. Read the parent first for orientation; this page assumes that ground.

Serpent Mound astronomical alignments — the B1 sibling covering the Hardman 1987 summer-solstice-sunset head alignment in detail and the more contested body-curve lunisolar claims. The dating war on this page interacts with the alignment question: the Hardman alignment works for either the Adena or the Fort Ancient date because solstice positions are stable on the millennial scale, so the alignment is not a tiebreaker between the two construction-date readings.

Cahokia — Mississippian-era peer site near St. Louis, occupied roughly 1050 to 1350 CE, overlapping the Fort Ancient construction date for Serpent Mound. Cahokia's Monks Mound, plaza, and woodhenge document a culture capable of organized monumental earthwork on a continental scale during the same window the 1070 CE Serpent reading places the build. If the Fort Ancient date is correct, Serpent Mound and Cahokia are roughly contemporaneous expressions of late Woodland and Mississippian monumental impulse.

Mesa Verde — the Ancestral Puebloan cliff-dwelling complex in southwestern Colorado, peak occupation 1190 to 1300 CE, contemporaneous with the late Fort Ancient horizon. Mesa Verde shows what the same broad continent was building in stone at the same window when, on the Fort Ancient reading, Serpent Mound was being rebuilt in earth. The contrast is instructive: stone preserves architectural intent and household contents; earth preserves only shape.

Chaco Canyon — the Ancestral Puebloan ceremonial center in northwestern New Mexico, peak 850 to 1150 CE, with the Pueblo Bonito great house and documented lunar standstill alignments at sites such as Chimney Rock. Chaco's astronomical alignments are precise, dated, and culturally connected to recoverable mythology and oral tradition. Serpent Mound has the alignment without the cultural connective tissue. The pairing shows both ends of what survives when monumental astronomy is built into the landscape: at Chaco, alignment plus cosmology; at Serpent Mound, alignment alone.

Further Reading

• The Serpent Mound dating war is documented across a tight cluster of peer-reviewed papers between 1996 and 2019. Cryptoexplosion structure work spans 1960 to 2003. Foundational survey runs back to 1848. Real sources only.
• Putnam, F. W. (1890). "The Serpent Mound of Ohio." The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Vol. 39, pp. 871-888. Putnam's site visits in 1883 and his four-season excavation campaign starting 1886 are the foundational record. He documented the absence of burials inside the effigy and the Adena-style burials in the two adjacent conical mounds. The Century article is the public-facing summary; technical notes appeared in Peabody Museum reports of the same period.
• Squier, E. G., and Davis, E. H. (1848). Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Vol. 1, Smithsonian Institution. The first systematic survey of Eastern Woodlands earthworks, including the earliest published map of Serpent Mound. Now in the public domain; full text on archive.org.
• Dietz, R. S. (1960). "Meteorite Impact Suggested by Shatter Cones in Rock." Science, Vol. 131, No. 3416, pp. 1781-1784. The paper that established shatter cones as a diagnostic impact indicator and added Serpent Mound to the confirmed impact-site list. doi:10.1126/science.131.3416.1781.
• Cohen, A. J., Bunch, T. E., and Reid, A. M. (1961). "Coesite Discoveries Establish Cryptovolcanics as Fossil Meteorite Craters." Science, Vol. 134, No. 3490, pp. 1624-1625. The coesite confirmation at Serpent Mound and other cryptovolcanic structures.
• Carlton, R. W., Koeberl, C., Baranoski, M. T., and Schumacher, G. A. (1998). "Discovery of microscopic evidence for shock metamorphism at the Serpent Mound structure, south-central Ohio: confirmation of an origin by impact." Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Vol. 162, Nos. 1-4, pp. 177-185. Shocked quartz confirmation, sealing the impact origin against any residual cryptovolcanic interpretation.
• Baranoski, M. T., Watts, D. R., Carlton, R. W., Hansen, M. C., and Schumacher, G. A. (2003). "Subsurface Geology of the Serpent Mound Disturbance, Adams, Highland, and Pike Counties, Ohio." Ohio Geological Survey Report of Investigations No. 146. The standard subsurface treatment of the impact structure, including geomagnetic anomaly maps. PDF available from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
• Hardman, C., and Hardman, M. H. (1987). "The Great Serpent and the Sun." Ohio Archaeologist, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 34-40. The published establishment of the summer-solstice-sunset alignment of the serpent's head, plus discussion of possible lunar correlations along the body curves. The detailed alignment analysis is the doctrinal home for the astronomy claim and lives on the B1 sibling page; this page leans on it without re-deriving.
• Fletcher, R. V., Cameron, T. L., Lepper, B. T., Wymer, D. A., and Pickard, W. (1996). "Serpent Mound: A Fort Ancient Icon?" Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 105-143. The 1991 trench reopening and the charcoal radiocarbon date near 1070 CE uncalibrated (calibrating to roughly 1120 CE) that anchored the Fort Ancient reading for two decades.
• Romain, W. F. (2000). Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern Woodlands. University of Akron Press. Romain's broader synthesis of Hopewell-era earthwork astronomy, the framework into which his later Serpent Mound work fits.
• Herrmann, E. W., Monaghan, G. W., Romain, W. F., Schilling, T. M., Burks, J., Leone, K. L., Purtill, M. P., and Tonetti, A. C. (2014). "A new multistage construction chronology for the Great Serpent Mound, USA." Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 50, pp. 117-125. The Adena-origin 300 BCE reading with Fort Ancient rebuild around 1100 CE, drawn from soil-core organic-sediment dating.
• Lepper, B. T., Frolking, T. A., and Pickard, W. (2018). "On the Age of Serpent Mound: A Reply to Romain and Colleagues." Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 62-75. DOI 10.1080/01461109.2017.1419917. The methodological critique of organic-sediment core dating and the case for a single Fort Ancient build.
• Romain, W. F., Herrmann, E. W., Monaghan, G. W., and Tonetti, A. C. (2018). "Rejoinder to Lepper Concerning Serpent Mound." Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 76-88. DOI 10.1080/01461109.2017.1403738. The first rejoinder defending the multistage Adena-plus-Fort-Ancient chronology against the Lepper critique.
• Lepper, B. T., et al. (2019). "Debating the Age of Serpent Mound." Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 44, No. 1. DOI 10.1080/01461109.2018.1507806. The second Lepper reply, restating the Fort Ancient single-build position after Romain's 2018 rejoinder.
• Romain, W. F., Herrmann, E. W., Monaghan, G. W., and Tonetti, A. C. (2019). "Serpent Mound in its Woodland Period Context: Second Rejoinder to Lepper." Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 44, No. 1. DOI 10.1080/01461109.2018.1511155. The second rejoinder, holding the multistage chronology and answering the renewed methodological critique.