High above an ancient river valley sit massive earthen walls.

Built by a civilization history tried to erase.

For generations, people thought this was a fortress built for war.

They were wrong.

This isn't a monument to a lost past.

It's a landscape of profound intention, built on ancestral knowledge that is still very much alive.

As I come up from the little Miami River, the water below cradling the reflection of the sky.

I approach these steep embankments, climbing toward earthen walls that wind across the ridges.

I notice something beneath the underbrush.

Limestone fragments that signal a pathway placed with intention, leading into the sacred space built by my Indigenous ancestors.

This site feels different from the other Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.

How does it fit into the bigger picture?

And what knowledge lies just on the other side of this hill?

Hey, Bill.

Hey, Logan.

How are you doing?

I'm doing great.

How are you?

Oh, pretty good, pretty good.

I always love coming out here to Fort Ancient.

It's such a beautiful place.

But why did you have me meet you here?

So when you were coming in, you probably noticed there was a limestone path coming up the side of the hill, and it comes right up into this.

This is the original gateway to the site.

This is?

Right here.

So somewhere around 2000 or more years ago, people would have been making that trip up the hill and into this gateway into Fort Ancient, just as you did.

Over time, 5 or 600 years, the site was enlarged and expanded.

Other gateways were added, but this is the first.

What makes this place so unique?

Fort Ancient is unique because it is so well preserved, compared to some of the other sites.

We can see that the earthworks here, they've not been eroded from modern agriculture.

Its location on the landscape means it■s a lot harder to farm on it, so it hasn't endured that same wear.

So this this is largely preserved.

It hasn't been plowed.

It hasn't been dug up largely.

So this is, you know, pretty close to what it would have looked like.

Exactly.

Can you tell me a little bit about the people who would have built this place?

Sure.

The American Indians that built Fort Ancient largely lived in this area, but probably not really inside the earthwork.

They were using this as a place for the local community to gather and do all sorts of things that a community does together.

But they were building this also as a place of pilgrimage.

It's a site that people would have come to from very far away The Fort Ancient earthworks are extraordinary.

They're very different from the geometric earthworks.

They're what are called hilltop enclosures.

So their shape is determined by the topography on which it was built.

And that topography was chosen very specifically for these sites.

It is a earthwork that was used as part of a religious tradition, and in many ways is not unlike the big geometric earthworks.

They're built by the same people for the same purposes at the same point in time.

But the nature of this type of construction is a bit different.

We've got a natural plateau that's been leveled out and then enclosed with an earthen wall all the way around.

And it has some features that are uncommon or unique.

One of them is that it has water features all around the interior.

A few of those still hold water today.

Fort Ancient, I think, kind of epitomize these gathering spaces, at least in the later Hopewell.

They really took a lot of time to prepare and construct this place in a very specific way.

It's a unique blend of reshaping the environment to suit your own kind of human needs, but also working with the world around you.

The scale of it, it's just really hard to wrap my mind around.

How big is this place?

Well, if we think about it in terms of like how much area it covers, inside the earthwork?

Over 100 acres.

Okay.

But if we think about the artwork wall itself, if we were to stretch that into a line, it■d be three and a half miles long.

Anywhere from 4 to 23ft in height.

But maybe the most interesting way to think about it is think about how much effort it took the people to build the earthwork.

And if you take that amount of soil, just what's in the exterior wall, that's the equivalent of 125 million basket loads of soil, at about 30 pounds a basket.

And they would have been carrying this at a single basket at a time.

One basket at a time.

Very simple technology.

It's all done by hand.

Wow.

What a view.

Was something like this why they would have chosen this spot?

The Indigenous builders were looking for very specific type of landform.

They're looking for a kind of elevated plateau and something enclosed by water.

We've got the little Miami right here, but there are also two streams that come in on the other directions around.

But we know that it was so important that it be enclosed by water because they actually artificially extended those two streams.

They dug those channels deeper to more symbolically, completely enclose it in water.

I noticed that this valley is very, very deep.

I imagine that that really helped pick the spot as well.

This is today the valley of the Little Miami.

But there's some deep valleys here that were carved by ancient rivers over millions of years before the Ice Age.

So this valley was actually carved by a different river that flowed in the opposite direction.

The rivers that we have today are filling in some of the same valleys, but they're much smaller than what was here prior to the Ice Age.

You can't build a place where thousands of people are coming if you don't have water, but you can find water in many, many more places.

So it's an ecologically really great place to be because you have different kinds of resources in the two areas, and you can take advantage of all of them.

And so that's part of the explanation.

These are rich areas.

And Ohio has a rich and abundant environment.

Ancient cultures were much more attuned to the world around them than we are.

Their mastery of the environment was at a level that we can hardly conceive of today.

So that's why it was clear to them where to put their earthwork.

They knew where they would work.

And that applies not only to the landscape, but to the sky, the moon, the sun, the rest of it.

Do we know exactly when this site stopped being used for its original purpose?

Always difficult to say, because when we look at something like radiocarbon dates, for example, if we're dating something from the earthwork that shows us when that portion of the earthwork might have been constructed, but it may have been used for a long time after it was constructed.

So what we can say with more confidence is that the construction ceased by around 4 or 500 A.D., so roughly about 1500 years ago, but people probably still continue to use it sometime around 11 or 1200 A.D.

We have people who are living adjacent to and inside the earthwork almost a millennium later, and that they are probably using it differently than the original Indigenous builders did.

So these are still Indigenous peoples, but they are living a different lifestyle.

These later peoples are growing maize and beans and squash.

They have a different economy.

They have large villages.

We didn't see things like that in the time when the earthwork was being built.

So their use changed over time.

Definitely.

Yeah.

So I've noticed a couple of these water features throughout the earthwork.

Do you guys have any idea what they are?

Yeah, these are actually part of the earthworks construction.

They are all around the interior except in one place where they occur on the exterior.

And these are vernal ponds.

So these were intentionally dug down by the Indigenous builders.

They lined the bottoms with gravel and they naturally fill up with water.

Since they■re vernal pools, they don't really drain anything.

They're just collecting water from what's immediately around them.

Fort Ancient was definitely designed with earth and stone, but also water.

The 84 earthwork segments are aligned almost continuously with a necklace of clay lined ponds.

These are all constructed, and the water on the interior combines with the wall in order to form the boundary of the site.

For us, I would see something like this next to earthworks and assume that it has something to do, representing or evoking an underworld as opposed to an overworld or where we live here.

Water, earth, sky, all these elements are here.

And so the use of water and the crossing of water to represent that lower world, the observance of the sky and contemplation of our sky world, and then our middle world, life and death, hunger and satisfaction and personal connection and loneliness.

These things all represent our middle world.

And so these absolute concepts that sit on our periphery, that are always just out of reach for us as human beings, they intersect at places like Fort Ancient.

When we see the way in which they are very intentionally constructed, they■re such an ever present part of the earthwork.

The problem is many of them don't hold water today.

And that's not because they can't hold water.

It's because they were intentionally drained in the 1930s.

Only some of them still hold water, so they■re a less obvious feature of the earthwork today.

If you think about it, these are 2000 year old man made vernal ponds that have been continuing to function without maintenance for millennia.

One of the things that vernal pools give us the opportunity to do is to understand what the plant composition has been like in the past.

So what's been able to be done is take a soil core out of there.

Well, that's a pollen record of the last 2000 years.

And what it tells us is that in the centuries that the earthwork was being used and built, that it was devoid of trees.

It wasn't forested the way it is today.

And what we see instead is the pollen of their domesticated crops.

So they were probably growing those crops inside the earthwork What kind of plants would people have been growing here?

The Indigenous builders of the earthwork would have been gardening for a large proportion of their diet.

They were building on the agricultural base of the Adena culture, the Eastern Agricultural Complex, which included things like sunflower, squash, goosefoot, native plants that they domesticated, not imports like corn.

Many people think all Indians ate corn, but corn was domesticated in Mexico.

It doesn't come into Ohio until A.D.

900, so that's not available for the Hopewell culture.

But this allows the Hopewell culture to have the diverse, healthy diet.

Having a diverse food source allowed them to adapt to maybe an off mass year of hickory nuts, and to live in a sort of flexible way with the environment, especially through the incorporation of these grown plant foods.

They're very well suited to growing in these soils and in this climate zone.

So they're very reliable.

And that stands in contrast to things like this.

And actually, we have an interpretive garden here at Fort Ancient where we are growing some of these plants.

Their primary purpose is education.

But one of the things that the staff here does with some of the plants and other things that are made here on the grounds of Fort Ancient, is that we give those as gifts to some of our tribal partners, especially when they're coming to visit in Ohio to take home some of these plants.

Some of these are also heirloom seeds.

These are a link to the past.

They are from modern tribal citizens to link to their ancestors.

Fort Ancient does not have a lot of geometry in the way that Newark has, but it has some.

And it is geometry in the form of four stone covered mounds.

In the North Fort, there are four stone mounds that form a perfect square, so it incorporates Hopewell geometry in a very different way from what we see at the geometric earthworks.

But it's there.

There was some erosion at one of the corners of the North Fort that we wanted to have fixed, and they had to drive heavy equipment across the North Fort.

So we did a geophysical survey, and this big circle shows up in the geophysical survey that nobody had ever known about.

And we said, well, we don't want big trucks driving over that, you know, so we just need to figure out what it was.

Back in 2005, I was chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Wright State University, and I got a call from Martha Otto from the Ohio Historical Society and she asked me if I would be interested in the potential of excavating at this circular structure.

You know, I looked at this thing and I took about two days and said, yes, I'm very interested.

Moorehead Circle was a circle of erect wooden posts, probably 6 to 8 to 10 feet high, and a circle about 200ft in diameter.

There are some other circles that are known that are much larger, one at the Hopewell site, but this one is the most studied because we spent 11 field seasons here.

I'm used to archaeological excavations being you go to a place, you start excavating and you start answering your questions.

But it seemed like every season Dr.

Riordan spent excavating at that site, the picture became more complicated.

It wasn't like coming into focus.

It was like, what the heck?

What's going on now?

So while you were studying here, what did you find?

Well, around this circle, there were hundreds of wooden posts that had been set in holes that were dug and with rocks that helped support them.

Right here, this was the formal entranceway into the Moorehead Circle, and we discovered just underground, two limestone pavements, one superimposed on top of the other.

This is where you should go in.

At the center is an absolutely unique set up of features that it's remarkable.

There was a low mound of red earth adjacent to a floor that was about 60 by 40ft, which had been a crematory surface.

I think where ancestral bone bundles were brought in here and burned, at least at the time of the summer solstice sunrise.

So the four stone capped mounds line up with notches in the earthwork.

And those are alignments to like summer solstice sunrise, winter solstice sunrise, some of the lunar alignments.

One of the things that is interesting about those alignments, that square formed by the stone mounds, is that the summer solstice line formed by one of those mounds, and one of the gaps in the earthwork wall, also goes directly through the center of Moorehead Circle, in the exact middle.

I think it is fair to say that Moorehead Circle was a very important area where a lot of different activities took place over time, but as with a lot of places in archaeology, it's hard to summarize them as a single thing because they were used for a long period of time.

I think this place was constructed from early on to be the ceremonial heart of everything they did here at Fort Ancient.

So I've heard you call it Moorehead Circle.

How did it get that name?

I thought it needed its own unique identifier to separate it from the larger Fort Ancient site.

And so the first archaeologist who worked here at Fort Ancient in the 1888 to 1890 was Warren K. Moorehead of Xenia, and the book that he wrote about his work caused the state legislature to buy most of the site as a state park.

I'd really like to talk about names and how things get names.

It really doesn't feel like it connects to the cultures that would have built this place.

How did Fort Ancient get its name?

Well, Fort Ancient has been called that for a very long time.

The Fort Ancient earthworks were not built by what archaeologists called the Fort Ancient culture.

That was a misconception formed very early on in the 1800s, when archaeologists excavating in the South Fort found the remains of a village and cemetery that was a different sort of culture than the Hopewell.

So they assumed that that village belonged to the earthworks and said, okay, we will name this newly discovered culture after the site where it was discovered.

This will be the Fort Ancient culture.

But this is a Hopewell site, and the Fort Ancient culture is a contemporary and later transitional culture from Hopewell, but not necessarily the same practice.

And so the name Ford Ancient was an assumption that this was some sort of military structure.

That's problematic.

The Fort Ancient site is actually a Hopewell site.

So now we have this, this, this naming convention is interfering with our understanding of how, of the depth of time of that site.

So it's confusing whenever we talk when using these terms.

To the early Europeans moving into the Ohio country, the obvious position here on a hilltop with embankments, it looked like a fort, and for lack of a better idea, that was how they regarded it.

And so Fort Ancient is another one of these misinterpretations where this is viewed as a hilltop fort or fortification.

But these are not military sites.

As a matter of fact, there's almost little to no evidence of military conflict or violent death in the Hopewell sphere.

And so I think it does a great disservice to these sites and the legacy of what was left here.

But the more problematic part of this is that many people and some people still today did not really necessarily believe that American Indians had built these places.

This is what we call the myth of the mound builders.

And that is the premise that there was once an advanced civilization in North America, that they built places like Fort Ancient and all these other earthworks, and that those people were killed off and replaced by American Indians.

There was a separation of American Indian people from the earthworks, and people like Squier and Davis and Atwater talked about the “Mound Builders”, as you know, who built the mounds?

The “Mound Builders”, and the mound builders were not connected in people's minds to American Indians.

Well, it's a culture of people who don't have relationships with the people who built them.

And so it's a mystery.

You know, I don't know a lot about East Asian archaeology or South Asian religion.

And so those are mysteries to me.

But they wouldn't be if I go and hang out with them, learn about them, spend time with them.

We have this myth in this country that this was a big empty continent, a big empty land.

And that the Europeans came in and they brought civilization.

I think it really is important to undermine that narrative by pointing out that there were lots of people here before.

There are other layers of history here in Ohio, which are fascinating and wonderful and brilliant, adds richness to all of our lives.

It's important that we just state the truth plainly.

Native Americans built these places.

These are important sites to Indigenous peoples of the United States, and they should be celebrated and marveled upon.

The unfortunate reality of that, in denying the Indigenous authorship of these earthworks that was also used explicitly to justify the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

And I suspect that that's the reason that there are no tribes, tribal governments within the state of Ohio.

Correct.

The Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830.

In 1831, some of the Shawnee were the first to leave Ohio.

1843, the Wyandot were the last to be forced to leave Ohio.

The US military was used to push out the native people to make way for westward expansion of the United States, and it's really a black eye on the history of the United States.

The fact that they use force to remove all these folks to a smaller piece of the land they always lived on.

The settlers could have decided to live in harmony with them and have diplomatic relations.

That is not what they did.

They found that the village sites and town sites that existed were really great.

They had resources, and they really liked those places.

So their answer was to remove the Indians through force, and to take up residence in the places that the Indians had created and had lived for, for hundreds of years.

Our ancestors walked September, October, November, and December, and arrived in what was then Indian Territory in 1832.

And many of the people died along the way, and we got down to only 69 people.

When they arrived in Indian Territory, they had no food, they had no money.

So in December, tell me what plants, what crops you plant in December?

What foods you can go and pick and harvest in December.

It's a different world.

And so it was a hard transition, I think, for our people to resettle in Oklahoma away from 15,000 years worth of history, practice, of understanding.

This isn't just the United States removing us from these places.

It's also removing all of the opportunity for people to build relationships.

Imagine if Shawnee people had been living here the whole time, imagine what our understanding of these places would be.

You wouldn't have to guess.

You wouldn't have to make up stories.

You wouldn't have to invent legends about our communities.

You would have Shawnee neighbors.

You would have cashiers who were Wyandot and Miami.

You would hear our languages being spoken fluently, and we would have access to our historical sites and have a much better understanding, because that connection was never severed.

The land where the, where the park sits now, in the 19th century, this was all family farms.

The highway that goes by the museum came in at 1804.

And so at least that early we see people writing and talking about this place and the need to preserve it.

The state legislature passed legislation in 1890 to purchase the three family farms that made up most of the earthwork.

It actually made Fort Ancient Ohio's first state park.

And when was this museum built?

This was not the first museum.

There was originally a museum built in the 1920s that was privately run.

This facility first began to be built in the 1960s.

It was dramatically expanded in the late 1990s, including this gallery.

This was envisioned as being a gateway to Indigenous history for the entire state and for the entire time, not just the time period that Fort Ancient dates to.

And when did consultation with tribes really start?

I noticed there are some dated signs and mannequins.

You're absolutely right.

This gallery predates consultation with tribes.

Consultation really begins in the late 2000s and up to present What have you learned through tribal consultation?

So much.

It's about a lot more than just updating verbiage.

It's about looking at the objects, what things are appropriate to display or not.

These things are outdated.

They were done without consultation or collaboration, and they've sort of been the status quo that people have grown up with, and now have built their own memories and traditions around.

I was born in 1956, so I've seen a lot.

I remember a third grade field trip where we went to the local museum and my ancestor■s skulls were in the case.

I probably went with two other Potawatomi kids in my school.

I had to go outside.

I was physically sick, and the other kids would talk about how cool that was.

But that's changed.

They have become more sensitive.

There's still areas of museums or institutions that they still have our ancestors, no matter how big or small or how many amount, they're still on those shelves.

But now they need to be returned back to where their original place was.

I don't think most people would want their grandmother that has been buried to be dug up and to be shown, or anything that would have been buried with their grandmother.

They wouldn't want to have her paraded around.

And it's the same thing with our ancestors.

In certain instances, these objects have come from places that were not grave goods, but in places where they are grave goods it's important to understand that these things were interred with the idea of permanence.

The ancestors need to be reburied.

There's no doubt about that.

Their spirit journey is interrupted, and there's no reason for them to be sitting in cardboard boxes.

The artifacts, the burial goods is another matter for me.

I worry about if those are all repatriated and then all buried.

I do not want to see that because I think that will be an erasure of Native artistry, craftsmanship, sophistication.

I think it shows just how incredibly gifted these people were.

Now, I know that there's people in my own community that would disagree with me, but I don't want to lose that.

There has to be some kind of balance made.

Personally, I don't think a burial item should be showcased.

But there are times when artifacts may be shown to the greater public.

But in order to do that, institutions need to work with tribes today to figure out what's appropriate, and what conditions that can be okay.

I know that■s tough for people to hear, but I, in my experience, have found tribes are open to sharing their history and culture because it enriches the stories of places.

But most importantly, it's about perspective.

It's about bringing the Indigenous voice into what we present to the public.

This part of the gallery, for example, the post contact era, doesn't really talk about people in the way the pre-contact did.

So we're talking about military campaigns and battles and forts, but we're not talking about who are the Shawnee, who are the Miami.

We need to connect the story to being a story about people.

Most of the interpretation of Native history is a progression of military events leading into American history.

All of the ancient history of North America is treated as a stepping stone to get to the real story, which is colonization.

15,000 years of story, of language, of culture, of science and trial and error shouldn't be a stepping stone to 200 years of conflict with the United States, Native nations, and our story, our technology, our development, and our voice should hold the sort of foundational weight.

Without bringing tribes in to share what's viewed as their histories and what's accurately part of their histories, other people come in and get creative with the storytelling.

Sometimes it's accurate, and then more times than not, it's telling a story that's just not true.

I was at Johnston Farm and they had just done a new exhibit, and I come upon a wall there and it it says, and the Shawnees gave up their lands.

And I read that, and then you could see the facial expression on me, and then you could hear it in my voice when I read it.

I said, the Shawnees gave up their lands?

Who wrote that?

And there's this meek voice from behind that says, I did.

And of all things, Bill Mann is standing right behind me, who does so many of the exhibits in some of the museums in the various locations.

I said, you do know we didn't give up our lands.

Our lands were taken.

That is not what we wanted.

And he said, I will try to rewrite that, you know.

And he is just one of the greatest friends I have here in Ohio today because we worked on many projects.

So we make mistakes in partnerships.

We have to accept each other, we have to forgive each other.

We have to learn and all of us being better because of those partnerships.

When we're translating someone's culture, they should be part of making that translation for people.

For example, if we're putting up a new exhibit that's about tribal history, well, we don■t just write the text and send it to the printer anymore.

We write a draft of text.

We start a consultation.

So consultation is sort of like them giving feedback on something that we want to say.

But collaboration is like really co-creating something.

I've been involved in interview process of different projects around the Hopewell Earthworks.

Allowing us to have a voice is very significant because it's our own people.

We should be telling a story.

Bringing tribal voices to the table is really important because it not only gives us a place to tell our story from our perspective, but it also lets the broader public have access to the knowledge that we have.

It took a long time to get to where we're at, but the first step was really to build relationships.

We've been at that for a long time, but those relationships can't be things that are just limited to an exhibit or a project.

They have to be ones that are lasting.

We're at the stage now where we're working together to reinterpret these places.

Long term, though, the point where we think we've been really successful is when we find a good model of co-management.

There's a saying in Indian country called “Nothing About Us Without Us.” If we're going to make decisions as a city, county, organization, that relates to Indigenous places, we should be talking to the Indigenous people about it.

Now, in Ohio, there's regular consultations going on with more than 40 tribes, and they are being consulted on policies around visitation and management of the sites here.

So how can we have an agreement that's about actually managing a space on a daily basis?

Maybe a tribe is providing some of the interpretive services, maybe literally tribal citizens living in Ohio, working with us to provide tours on site on a regular basis.

Like we're not there yet, but what's really important is that tribal voices are heard in these places.

Continuing to work those management sharing concepts and ideas, continuing to preserve and protect these places, continuing to bring that tribal voice into everything that we do here, are keys that's going to make this place prosper in the future.

This is not my heritage, so I need to facilitate connections between this place and descendant Indigenous people and the public.

That they can understand that we are not this mythical lost race.

We're not this ancient thing that's happening.

We are real life people.

We still practice our culture.

We still practice our language.

We do all of these things today.

We've really only just begun this process.

The process of building relationships between museums and tribes and archaeologists.

And we've learned a lot already, but we really have a lot more to learn.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Hopewell Earthworks, Stories Written on the Land is funded in part by the America 250 Ohio Commission.

Production support for Hopewell Earthworks, Stories Written on the Land is powered by the Storytellers Trust.