Snake Den Mounds

Upcoming events at this historic earthwork site coming soon!

The Snake Den Mound Group is located in the uplands of Walnut Township, Pickaway County, Ohio, just west of East Ringold. The site’s peculiar name comes from the fact that in earlier times snakes in great numbers were known to hibernate there annually. When first explored by Warren Moorehead in the late 1890s, the site was described as a series of seven mounds containing extended and disarticulated skeletal remains, cremations and stone box burials. Some mounds were constructed from yellow clay and others from stone that included an odd assortment of boulders, spalls, fossils, concretions and burned rock. There was even what Moorehead described as a small concretion box recovered that contained a number of small native silver nuggets, still a unique find in Ohio archaeology.

In recent years a local support group has taken a renewed interest in the site with an ongoing research and preservation initiative. The focus of archaeology at Snake Den is no longer toward the large scale excavations of the past but rather comprehensive program of remote sensing surveys utilizing a variety of specialized instruments. This has resulted in discoveries including a perimeter wall and ditch surrounding the mound group, rows of pits, post circles and other subsurface features not visible at the surface, demonstrating that the site is much more complex than ever imagined.