Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, Ohio

By Patrick Totty

Ask people to name some walled cities of the New World erected before the arrival of the Europeans and they’ll probably mention such fabled sites as Machu Picchu in Peru or Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The cultures that created these magnificent ramparts were located in arid, rocky areas where there were plenty of raw materials to build defensive walls and terraces.

But few people realize that in eastern North America, amid well-watered farming lands, Native Americans constructed a series of sacred cities, demarcated by huge earthen mounds, starting about 200 B.C. and lasting until about 500 A.D. – almost 1,000 years before the arrival of Columbus. 

Long after the mound builders ceased their constructions and the effects of weathering and forestation had softened their profiles, early white American settlers in the Ohio Valley were amazed and mystified by the mounds. The 12-foot-high mounds – often culminating in conical mounds as high as 30 feet – sometimes spanned 1,000 feet. Although the farmers could not know who built the mounds, it was apparent that they’d been formed by a considerably sophisticated native culture.

The mounds, often formed in such geometric shapes as trapezoids and octagons around ceremonial centers, were a surprisingly common building element among different Indian cultures of the East. Despite their often vast differences in languages and cultures, the mound builders are uniformly referred to today by archaeologists as the Hopewell Culture – the “Hopewell” referring to Mordecai Hopewell, an Ohio farmer whose fields in 1891 became the focal point of some of the most extensive excavations of the mounds ever undertaken.

Today, the greatest concentration of remnant mounds is in southern Ohio in the Scioto River Valley near Chillicothe. This area is preserved in the 1,170-acre Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, officially established in 1992 although it had first been preserved as Mound City Group National Monument in 1923. 

The most important feature of the park is a rectangular area, 99 acres in size, known as the Great Enclosure. This enclosure contains large mounds, including some that evidence shows had been built on the remains of earlier mounds. With the Hopewell Culture spanning 700 years, it’s no surprise that the religiously significant mound cities became major trading areas. Their inhabitants’ need to create sacred objects, such as statues, figurines, totems, jewelry and ceramics, inspired lively commerce over a vast geographic area. Copper from the Great Lakes mica from the Appalachians and seashells from the Gulf of Mexico have been found in the mounds – proof of commercial ties extending hundreds of miles from Ohio.

While the mounds do not rival the workmanship or heroic size of Aztec, Toltec or Incan constructions, they do show that the future United States was home to some very sophisticated cultures that were able to conceive and carry out large construction schemes. Even more interesting, the Hopewell Culture apparently was able to muster the labor for mound building

Some useful URLs:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hope/hd_hope.htm
http://www.nps.gov/hocu/adhi/adhi1.htm
http://www.nps.gov/hocu/