Image by Talon Silverhorn (Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma)
Earlier this year, John E. Hancock, professor emeritus of architecture at UC specializing in architectural history, released his book Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley (Smithsonian Books). The book is the result of his work as principal author and photographer of the nomination dossier of Ohio’s Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks to the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The earthworks are a set of eight massive, sacred sites across southern Ohio used as ceremonial sites for Indigenous people who participated in the Hopewell tradition between 1,600 to 2,000 years ago, constructed in precise circles, squares, and octagons that align with the cycles of the sun and moon. In 2023, UNESCO added the Hopewell Earthworks to its World Heritage list, where it joins the likes of historical architectural masterpieces such as Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China. It is the only site on the list in the state of Ohio, and the 25th across the U.S.
Following more than 35 years spent studying and doing public education projects on the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, Hancock’s newest release features more than 250 images in addition to maps, histories of the sites, summaries of archaeological research, and Indigenous perspectives. He has also published a Traveler’s Guide to Ancient Ohio (Ohio University Press) featuring the eight sites and about 50 others.
Cincinnati Magazine sat down with Hancock to discuss his years of studies of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks—Ft. Ancient, Octagon Earthworks, Great Circle Earthwork, Mound City, Hopewell Mound Group, Hopeton Earthworks, High Bank Works, and Seip Earthworks—what we know, and what we still hope to learn.
What exactly is an earthwork?
There’s an important distinction between mounds and earthworks. An earthwork is a configuration that’s made out of earthen lines, generally making some kind of an enclosure. Generally, a much more complex configuration than just a mound.
What’s the reason for the cluster of sites in southern Ohio?
Everything’s not completely clear about how these different indigenous cultures came and went over the thousands of years that they’ve been here, but there seems to have been a phenomenon in southern Ohio, specifically over in Ross County around Chillicothe, just about 2,000 years ago. Rather suddenly, there were some probably charismatic leaders and new ideas, and they started doing some things in much more elaborate and sophisticated ways than had been going on even a couple of generations before that. The most striking thing, from my point of view, and for the [UNESCO] World Heritage [nomination] process, is that they started building these huge geometric earthworks that were really not like anything from before. Huge circles and squares and octagons and long parallel lines—and I mean huge. Each geometric shape is more than 1,000 feet across, and there’s dozens of them all up and down the Scioto Valley, and they built lots more of them in our little Miami Valley where Newtown and Milford are now. Maybe their greatest masterpiece of all ended up in where Newark is now. That was the big breakthrough, and they started bringing in materials—copper and obsidian—from way out across the continent. The elaboration of ceremonial life and the creation of these way bigger, way more precise earth wall enclosures started right here in southern Ohio.
You mention that there are dozens of these sites in the region. Is that in addition to the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks?
It just depends on how you define them. There are major well-preserved sites as well as lots and lots of little ones, probably hundreds of little circles. The eight sites are the ones that were thought best to represent the whole [Hopewell] tradition, so I can’t give you a number of how many more there are beyond the eight.
How do you define the Hopewell tradition?
Calling it a tradition is better than calling it a culture because it was so widely influential across at least half, maybe even two-thirds, of North America. Those would have been groups with many differences in their language and in the way that they did many other kinds of things. The set of symbols and burial practices and other things like that had been traced in the archaeological record as having influenced all these people over these huge distances. It’s better to refer to that as a set of ideas more than a culture. It doesn’t have the unity of a culture. Some of my archaeologist friends liken it to a religion, especially a religion like Roman Catholic or Islam—a set of beliefs and symbolic practices that are shared by groups in many different places who have many different ways of life, speak different languages, and so forth. That’s what the word “Hopewell” refers to—certain sets of ceremonial symbols, probably the practices that went with them, and a certain way of building earthworks, at least here in the Ohio heartland. Therefore, a certain time period when people were doing that, which was about 1 to 400 AD. It’s also important to point out that the name “Hopewell” is not an American Indian word, and a lot of the tribes don’t much like it at all. It’s named after a land owner, a guy who owned a farm outside Chillicothe, where archaeologists found a huge amount of really beautiful things among the graves. That’s what they do, is they name the culture after the site, but that’s what we’re stuck with for the time being is to call it Hopewell.
What are the beliefs shared by people across this tradition?
The indigenous cosmology is different from most kinds that we are accustomed to, in that it is very much tied to a respect for and belonging to the natural world. So, things in the sky and things in nature are all sacred and all part of a system of living things that are dependent on each other and all connected. The sun and the moon, besides being astronomical objects, were like sacred beings. Every ancient culture watched and knew the patterns of the cycles of time associated with the sun and the moon, and those were of course connected to cycles that they needed for their everyday life, like planting crops. These people were farmers. Every aspect of life was tied up in this sacredness of everything in the world. Some contemporary American Indian beliefs and practices—about the moon, earth, and water, for example—suggest ways of interpreting what their ancient Ancestors were doing in their ceremonies and earthwork designs. Precise moon alignments may relate to their use of a lunar calendar, or to the moon’s association with deceased Ancestors. Ponds that reflect the earthwork walls, like at Fort Ancient, suggest creation stories still told today.
What are some of the ceremonial practices that happened at the earthworks?
A lot of what we have the evidence for is burials—how the dead were prepared for their journey to the afterlife, that they had to take their regalia with them. If they had ornaments they wore as leaders, that went with them, symbols of their role in life.
How were Indigenous people able to create earthworks that were so precisely designed and constructed?
There’s two kinds of precision, and they have to be talked about separately. One is geometric precision. How did they make perfect circles? They were more than 1,000 feet in diameter, and are perfect within just a couple of feet all the way around. Then, they could make the same size circle five or six more times across the region. How do they do that? Well, you make a circle with a stick and a string. You put a stick in the middle, and you take your string and you walk around in a circle. Then theoretically, you could take your string and go somewhere else with it, and put another stick in there and make another circle. What I did in one of the sections of my book is to try to extend that, because in my studies of other ancient cultures and even famous ancient buildings like the Greek Parthenon, the proportions are based on what you can do with sticks and strings. You can make a circle, but then you can also make a square with sticks and strings using certain techniques. The short answer is that it appears they did it with sticks and string, but to do it that big and with that much precision—near absolute precision—is a sign of real genius.
Why did it matter to be so precise?
When we move on to astronomical precision, then of course that matters, because if you want to time your festival to grandmother moon, you know when she’s going to be in exactly the right position, then you have to make that precise. For me, just thinking as an architect, once you get the idea of precision in your head, you have to pursue it. You have to keep refining and refining it until it’s perfect. Just ask my book editor about that.
How do they achieve astronomical precision?
Again, with sticks, with putting poles in the ground. You start by putting poles in the ground, or maybe making a circle of poles, and then you watch it. If it’s the sun, you watch your poles for a year, because the sun goes back and forth where it rises on the eastern horizon every year. So you can pick the pole that lines up in the midwinter, and you pick the pole that lines up in midsummer, and you pick the pole that lines up in March and in September on the equinox, and then you can build an earthwork. What they usually did with the sun, and the most common way to mark the sun, was to mark one of the solstice sunrises—that’s June or December—with the diagonal of a square. If they get that line determined through year-long observation, then they know that’s two corners of a square, and then they make the square around that diagonal line. There are five or six examples around the state where they did that. Much more difficult is the moon, because where the moon rises is much more complicated than where the sun rises. It also goes back and forth in the east along the horizon, but it goes back and forth from northeast to southeast and back again every month. And then that angle along the eastern horizon gets wider—it grows slowly, grows wider over 9.3 years—and then it shrinks again over another 9.3 years, so that the point on the eastern horizon that’s farthest to the left, the moon only returns to that spot about every 19 years. It’s really complicated, and it really takes a long time to observe that and let it repeat a couple of times so that they understand it. Then they build monuments to that. The Octagon Earthworks at Newark, which is the most beautiful and the best preserved of all these earthworks, the easiest to appreciate, probably—it has a perfect central axis across a circle and an octagon, and that line points directly to the northernmost moonrise every 18.6 years. This is precision, and it’s genius-level precision. As far as I’ve been able to determine from my research, these ancient American Indian ancestors were the only culture on Earth to build multiple monuments to that lunar cycle.
Why were they the only ones?
I surveyed the literature on archeoastronomy, and that’s people who studied it globally, what ancient cultures do about aligning to the sun or the moon. It’s almost always the sun, because that’s so much easier and it seems more important too for your planting and harvesting. But Indigenous Americans all the way up and down the continent seem to have always had more emphasis on the moon, not only as a part of the world where the deceased ancestors go, but also as a way of keeping time.
What’s the significance of being named a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
My short answer to that is always fame and glory, but that means a lot, actually. On a sort of superficial level, it generates visitation and tourism, which makes the world more aware of these amazing achievements. That’s value in itself, especially because they were so obscure before. Ultimately, the monuments of an ancient culture on the World Heritage list means that they are right there along with Stonehenge, the Parthenon, the Colosseum, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the whole list. Everybody has a general sense of the great monuments of great civilizations. The significance of joining that company is, superficially, it draws tourism. It’s doing that pretty well right now. But what really matters about that is that this culture now, or Indigenous North Americans, American Indians’ ancestors, were geniuses and created these amazing places. And some of our native collaborators rightly make a big deal about that. Their ancestors have been classified as primitive savages, unfortunately, for a long time—we know what all the stereotypes are—but they were geniuses and they had this sophisticated culture and this amazing knowledge and they’re able to take great pride in that, as well they should. That’s ultimately why it matters the most.
Are these sites accessible for people to visit and learn about?
Seven out of the eight UNESCO sites are visitable. One of them is a research preserve and is a little bit hard to appreciate anyway. Five are under the care of the National Park Service, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe, and three of the others are under the care of the Ohio History Connection. There are many more too. The rest of them across the state, many more beautiful earthwork sites to appreciate, aren’t on the UNESCO list. The thing about this kind of architecture is that it can be very elusive sometimes. That’s the word I like to use, because some of these earthworks are so big that you can’t quite see across the enclosure. Some of them are very complex, and when you’re on the ground and only looking at little pieces at a time, it’s hard to put the whole picture of it into your head. It’s subtle, and some of them are also covered in the forest. Ft. Ancient, for example, that’s very close to here. It’s amazing and really well preserved, but most of it is in the forest, and so if you go at the wrong time of year, it’s elusive. It’s hard to see. That’s why I wrote my guidebook, because there’s so many things that are necessary for people to appreciate these sites and not just walk away baffled. There’s a long introduction that explains the whole background of the region, the geologic structure, the historical periods, and then when you get to one of the sites, there’s a map that takes you from one point to the next in the trail and where the stops are and what to look for and what to think about while you’re at each location. That’s what enhances appreciation, because the book helps tell you what you’re looking at and why it’s important, even though it may be just a fragment of the overall picture.
What’s the most fascinating thing you’ve discovered about the Hopewell sites in your time studying them?
Probably the sort of wonderment at the skill and technique and genius of creating these designs that are perfect astronomical markers and also perfect geometries at the same time, and it’s the Newark Octagon earthworks that captures this the best. But there’s pieces of it in most of the others as well. Right behind that would be the unusual qualities of the spaces that are created in many of these sites. I used the world “elusive” before, but once you learn to feel it, it becomes very powerful in a way, and it’s the kind of space that is inherently sacred because of the way it focuses and extends your vision to the horizon and so forth. You can really feel that these were made by people that regarded the natural world in a very special way.
Has it altered your own connection that you feel to the natural world?
Yes, absolutely. I think we’ve lost a lot because our religious traditions in the West have generally distanced us from respecting the natural world, and evidence of that is everywhere. We’re pretty well wrecking things because of that. So, it gave me huge respect to learn more about this society and what they believed, as well as what they built.
Conversely, what questions do we still have about the Hopewell earthworks?
I don’t know whether my architectural angle on these sites will be taken up by others or not, now that I’m retired again. But from the point of view of the site managers and their interpretive work and their research in the field or archaeology, there are three major directions right now. One is shifting the emphasis off the earthworks and onto finding the settlements. Where did these people live, and how did they live? What did they eat? What was family life and community life? There’s still not much known in that area, and I think that’s where they want to go on that. In that work would be trend number two, to work as closely as possible with Indigenous scholars and leaders to help frame those questions and to answer those questions. That collaboration has really just come up in the last 10 to 20 years, and it’s starting to produce a lot of really fascinating themes. Potential, I think, for new ideas. I mentioned a couple of them in [Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley], which has quite a bit to the beginnings of some of those comparative themes between present native thinking and what the ancestors were doing. The third trend is to do more with remote sensing, which is how they can go out there with new machines and figure out a lot of what’s under the ground over wide areas without doing any more excavation. That’s a really exciting area too that’s been growing over the last 10 to 20 years.
What has remote sensing been able to discover so far?
They can go out onto a site that they know is there and they can cover the entire surface. That means they can uncover earthworks that they didn’t know were there. Anything that was burned will show up, so any place that they were doing cooking, and of course that helps to find where they lived. The other thing that can be done is in landscapes across Ohio, anywhere that there’s an open field, there’s not too bad a chance that remote sensing there would pick something up and so a lot of new earthworks have been discovered that nobody ever knew about.
