A new multistage construction chronology for the Great Serpent Mound, USA

A new multistage construction chronology for the Great Serpent Mound, USA, by Edward W. Herrmann and colleagues, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2014, is a peer reviewed archaeological dating study using radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence methods to establish that the earthwork was built and rebuilt in multiple episodes, including a significant Fort Ancient period construction phase around 1070 CE, complicating the earlier assumption of a single Adena period origin. Its strength is that direct scientific dating of the mound's own soil layers, replacing earlier assumption with measured evidence. Its limit is that dating construction episodes establishes when the earthwork was built and rebuilt, not why, so a claim about the serpent effigy's religious or astronomical meaning to the people who built it needs an interpretive archaeological or ethnohistorical source addressing that separate question, which this dating study does not attempt to answer.