Hopewell Culture National Historical Park

Listen first. Wind moves through the tall grass, and somewhere beyond the trees the Scioto River runs low and brown. Under your feet the ground is soft and level. Then it rises... gently, deliberately, into rounded green forms. These are not hills. People shaped every one of them by hand, basket by basket, about two thousand years ago. You are standing inside one of the most important ceremonial landscapes in North America, here in the river country of southern Ohio.

This is Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, just north of the city of Chillicothe in Ross County. The park is not a single place. It is a group of separate earthwork sites spread along the Scioto valley and nearby creeks. The best known is Mound City Group, where the visitor centre stands. Here, a low earthen wall forms a large rectangle with rounded corners. Inside that wall sit about two dozen mounds, scattered across the grass like a quiet congregation.

So who built them? The honest answer is that we do not know what these people called themselves. The word Hopewell is a modern label. It comes from a farmer named Mordecai Hopewell, who owned land a few miles from here in the nineteenth century. Archaeologists dug into the large earthworks on his farm, and his surname stuck to an entire ancient culture. It is a little like naming the builders of a cathedral after the man who later owned the field next door.

What the name describes is not one tribe or one kingdom. It describes a shared way of life and a shared set of rituals. These traditions flourished across much of eastern North America from roughly two hundred years before the common era to about five hundred of the common era. The Scioto valley was one of its great centres. Communities here lived in small, scattered settlements. Yet they came together, again and again, to build earthworks on a scale that still surprises people today.

Now look at the mounds in front of you. Most of them were not tombs in the way we usually imagine tombs. Archaeologists found that many mounds covered the remains of wooden buildings. Inside those buildings, people held ceremonies for the dead. Many bodies were cremated on clay platforms. When the rituals were complete, the community burned or dismantled the building. Then they covered the whole place with layers of earth, sometimes with different coloured soils, and raised a mound over it.

Here is the first surprise. The objects buried in these mounds came from astonishing distances. There was copper from the Great Lakes region, far to the north. There was mica, a glittering mineral that splits into thin sheets, from the southern Appalachian Mountains. There were shells and shark teeth from the Gulf Coast. And there was obsidian, a black volcanic glass, traced to the area of the Rocky Mountains near present-day Yellowstone. None of these materials exist naturally here in Ohio.

How did they arrive? Nobody knows for certain. People may have passed objects from hand to hand along long trade routes. Or individuals may have travelled huge distances themselves, perhaps on pilgrimage. Either way, skilled artists here turned these materials into remarkable things. They cut mica into the shapes of hands and birds. They hammered copper into ornaments and headdresses. And they carved small stone pipes in the shapes of animals... frogs, birds, otters, even a beaver, each one sitting on a curved platform.

One mound here became famous for those pipes. In the 1840s, two surveyors named Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis dug into the mounds at this site. They found a large cache of carved effigy pipes in one of them, which became known as the Mound of the Pipes. Squier and Davis mapped earthworks all over the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Their book, published in 1848, was the very first publication of the Smithsonian Institution. Many of their pipes later went overseas, and a large part of that collection is now held in the British Museum in London.

Now the second surprise. The mounds you see may not be exactly what the Hopewell people left behind. In 1917, during the First World War, the United States Army built a huge training base here called Camp Sherman. Rows of barracks covered this ground. Many mounds were levelled or damaged to make room. Only after the war did archaeologists study the site again and rebuild the mounds in their original positions. So what you see is partly ancient and partly a careful twentieth-century restoration.

That restoration led to protection. Mound City became a national monument in the 1920s. Much later, the park grew to include other earthworks in the valley and took its current name. Then, in 2023, these sites gained global recognition. They became part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That designation places this quiet Ohio field alongside the great ancient monuments of the world. It also links Mound City with related earthworks elsewhere in Ohio.

If you have time, the other units of the park show a very different side of the culture. Several of them feature enormous geometric enclosures. These are earthen walls shaped into near-perfect circles and squares, some covering many acres. The builders achieved this precision without metal tools, written plans, or draft animals. Researchers have studied whether some of these shapes line up with the movements of the sun and the moon. At some sites, the evidence for such alignments is strong. Seen from the air, the geometry looks almost mathematical.

Back here at Mound City, take a slow walk along the path that circles the mounds. Notice how the enclosure wall keeps the outside world at a distance. Notice, too, how close the river runs. The builders chose this terrace above the Scioto with care. Floods could reach the lowlands, but this ground stayed dry. Inside the visitor centre, you can see replicas and original objects from these mounds. The small details on the carved pipes are worth a close look, especially the eyes of the animals.

Before you leave, stop for a moment in the middle of the enclosure. Turn slowly in a full circle. You will see the grass, the low earthen wall, the line of trees along the river, and the rounded shapes of the mounds. Two thousand years ago, people stood on this same ground and said goodbye to the ones they loved. They carried soil here by hand to honour them. As you walk back toward the path, the mounds stay quiet behind you... as they have for a very long time.