What if a single place could change the way you see the world?

What was happening here 2000 years ago that brought people back year after year?

Where time was measured differently.

Where belief was encoded into the land itself.

And how did they see themselves fitting into the universe?

It's hard to believe, as I'm walking along these tracks of steel and rust, that just around the corner are remnants of a monumental building project.

Earthworks that were sacred to my ancestors and that I'm about to see with my own eyes for the very first time.

Standing in a place like this It becomes clear that it was never just about construction.

It was about connection, balance, responsibility.

And I ponder the very same questions that they did 2000 years ago.

What is above, what is below, and all that lives in between?

What is visible and what lies beyond sight?

Good morning.

Good morning, Logan.

How are you?

Very good.

So, what do you think?

Amazing.

I mean, coming over here, over the rise, getting greeted by deer as you very first walk up with the mist in the background to talk about a nice view is kind of an understatement of this place.

This is pretty unique in the sites that I've visited so far in that I can see the whole site from here.

How would they have designed this place?

I mean, would they have actually came up here and, you know, been a cartographer and figured it out?

It's hard to know the details, but I think the power of place certainly played a role in some of their selection for these sites.

The geology, the terraced landscapes that we have here.

They are close enough to the Scioto River without being in that lower floodplain terrace.

When we look at all of the earthworks, they take over these second terrace landscapes.

Would they have seen this big open field?

Would this have been forested?

This part of Ohio, Ross County, would have certainly been forested.

To build an earthwork in one of these landscapes, you first have to clear off the forest.

And we know from archaeological research, American Indian people have been managing these landscapes for thousands of years.

From that visitor overlook at Hopeton, you can look out over the earthwork and you can get a sense for the complete shapes, the vastness of the geometrical conception.

The primary parts of it is a large sort of circular enclosure that's nested within a portion of the rectangular enclosure.

that's nested within a portion of the rectangular enclosure.

Connected to those is a set of parallel walls pointing towards the Scioto River It would have been a dramatic procession bringing your canoe or walking from the riverbank up this way into this sacred landscape.

It's been 2000 years.

What can you actually find without talking to people about it?

We see these repeated patterns of geometry.

We see these precise geometric alignments to the sun and the moon, which this site has.

We see interaction with societies far and wide.

We really think of it today as a religious movement that really crosscut.

It was shared by many different societies and different cultures, people with different languages all across eastern North America.

I think these places were pilgrimage centers drawing many, many communities, maybe hundreds of communities from the surrounding area.

And that's what creates Hopewell, this concentration of people all fervently believing in this message, whatever it was, which we don't know.

This is a focus of ceremony.

We know that actually, only a small percentage of them hold hosts to funerary ceremonies, and so the others must have held other ceremonies.

Whether these were around the annual cycles every year.

Times of Thanksgiving.

Song and dance.

My sense is is that these earthworks, you know, hold host to a variety of activities.

It also is a place where people can trade items.

It can be a place where political advocacy can take place, where support and emotional encouragement or courage and bravery can be evoked.

We don't live in Jerusalem, but we know how holy those people feel about Jerusalem.

We know that people make their annual pilgrimages to Mecca.

annual pilgrimages to Mecca.

We know that they just think they cannot live this life without having gone there at least once.

That's the way it was with the mounds.

And all of that activity, both social, religious would have been happening at a site like this.

Coming from a Native perspective, you know, the way that a lot of Native spirituality works, it involves a lot of community.

It involves branching out ideas and having a relationship with the people and the landscape around you.

We today will kind of colloquially say that those are part of a religious practice in talking to outsiders, but I tend to think of those things as more points of connection.

And so our kind of foundational belief, I would say is that we are not separate from the natural world and not separate from the cycles of, of our universe.

But it's our job to see ourselves and understand our role in the world and how it functions.

These ancestors who made these sites had a deep connection with the world around them, and I don't mean it in a phooey way, but they did it in a way that is very practical, very spiritual, very rational.

They engaged in a world where they honored themselves, nature, things that quite weren't known.

They were on the ground level composing these geometric landscapes.

Precision aligned to the sun and the moon without our modern tools, without our modern computers, without our modern ways of serving.

The fact that they're able to build these places, not just on this grand scale, but to those alignments.

They are looking to the stars.

They are looking to the moon and the sun and paying attention to them over time.

Right.

And then sharing that knowledge generation after generation.

You're making a bridge between the earth and the heavens.

You're linking the rhythms of the cosmos with what's happening on earth.

I suppose that we take things for granted now that we live in a society, where we no longer look up to the sky.

We have lights that blind us, but whenever you're in a society that the night sky lights up your evenings to look up and wonder and marvel.

The builders very well might have wanted to emphasize our place in the universe, in the cosmos.

Maybe the intention was to help us understand that as we stand in the vastness of these large earthworks and see that we are small in comparison.

We're approaching what we call a gateway, a space in the wall of the square enclosure, and it's where we can see and observe alignments.

Hopeton is associated with tracking the movements of the sun and the moon along the horizon.

The square figure is actually sort of an irregular square.

It's not, it's not a perfect geometric square, but it has a series of gateways or openings in its walls.

And those openings can be used as backsights and foresights pointing at astronomical alignments.

This isn't the only site where that takes place.

You see this being carried through at most of these earthwork sites in some fashion.

It's unmistakable that they're trying to say something and carrying it through 400 years.

That is so cool that we're able to to know that.

But how do we know that about these places?

How do we know that these alignments are here?

Alignments are things that have been studied and observed through the archaeoastronomy at these sites.

This site is also been studied for how the earthen walls were put together.

Right beside us is a great example of a remnant.

This is half of the size of the original wall.

Imagine this structure behind us being 12ft high.

The National Park Service excavated ten trenches The National Park Service excavated ten trenches at different locations across the earthwork walls.

So we have a pretty deep understanding there of the materials that people used to build those walls.

And we have some ideas about the pace of building, trying to understand were these built one basket load at a time over 100 years, or were they built many basket loads in a single year.

How would a place like this be different from other earthworks?

Or are they the same?

The more modern archaeological excavations show no mounds, no funerary sites here, so that makes it a little different than some of the other earthwork sites.

Directly across the river.

Mound city, though it has a contemporary date with Hopeton.

We're not sure if they were completely connected, but you definitely see a separation in activity.

There is an important connection just by, and on the basis of geography, whether they were precisely contemporaneous or not.

I mean, perhaps one is being built in response to another one.

They do seem complementary in that you have a concentration of burials on one side, concentration of geometry and ritual on this other side.

Hopeton kind of looks to me like a preparatory area, you know, somewhere where ceremonies are being held, people are being taken care of, and then transported across the water to Mound City to be interred.

At Hopeton there's evidence of really heavy burning going on there, but there's no remains.

All of the remains are at Mound City.

All of the remains are at Mound City.

Mound City is the very carefully curated and long use kind of internment area and long use kind of internment area for people, objects and buildings.

It's kind of a perfect representation of of our thoughts about crossing between worlds.

That act of crossing a river must have had powerful symbolism, powerful religious experience.

There's something fascinating about their proximity to the landscape and the fact that a river sets them apart.

I don't have an answer for like, are they related or not?

They absolutely could be related, right?

This sort of standard best practice archaeology, that one would do to assess a formal relationship of these places haven■t been done.

The chronologies of them have not been analyzed under the best practices of them.

And from what we know there is some sort of discontinuities.

But part of that is our really immature understanding of when Mound City was utilized.

And the best way for you and I to experience this is if we just head on over to Mound City and walk through it and experience that difference.

I understand why people call it a movement or religious movement, because Hopewell sites are found throughout the eastern part of the U.S., so it does seem as though there was a worldview and that those ideas caught on throughout the region.

For no other reason, I would agree that it might be called a religion, but I don't agree in the way we think of religion today.

As an archaeologist in the United States, I'm trained as an anthropologist and in anthropology there are those sort of categories of things people do, and one of those things is, is religion.

And I think that's what we see in Hopewell.

We see this recurrence of the same iconography, the regalia that people are wearing, to the architectural settings in which their ceremonies are happening, aligned to the same cosmic rhythms, wherever they are.

These are formal settings created to formal criteria.

They have to be the exact same measurements in diameter, and that level of formality and following canons of a religion really, to me, speak to a religion and not everyone doing their own thing.

Whether Hopewell should be called a religion or not is a little bit more of a question, perhaps, and probably only because in the modern world, the idea of religion is sort of dominated by the three big ones that came out of the Middle East.

And that I think that's why some of our Native friends and collaborators want to maybe shift to a different word, because the traditions of Native American religion are not the same as those world dominant religions today.

To me, there is a difference between religious movement and spirituality.

I don't know whether you call that religion, but there was definitely a spirituality of nature.

I don't object to to saying it's a reunion, a religious movement.

That's part of us.

And it's difficult to explain to others.

To me, spirituality is more of a connection.

A religion is more of a set, You have to do this.

You have to do that.

You have to not do this.

You have to not do that.

I think it was more just a way of coming together and being connected with each other, with nature, and with the creator as well.

In a place like the United States, we have a secular and a spiritual, and we have a separation of church and state.

And so Indigenous peoples don't have that.

We have a holism where everything is melded in together.

And so you can't have politics without some spirituality, and you can't have a change in spirituality without some politics.

And so for the people of the past, I see them having a deeply spiritual connection to the world around them and the things unseen.

If these places could be called religious, it would be more a way of life.

But the connotations of religion is very jarring to what I understand to be Native spirituality, which in itself the word spirituality isn't exactly accurate.

It's more about how one lives its life.

Be a good relative, not being centered on yourself or your family, but to give back to the community and to be responsible in your life for your actions.

We■re approaching the gateway here at Mound City, and this would have been a way for them to enter this sacred space.

Whatever ceremonies happening here, you definitely get that feeling that this is a really, really special place.

Yes.

It happens to be many times the first place a visitor gets introduced to the Hopewell culture.

As we've deepened relationships with tribal partners like yourself, Logan, we've asked guests to enter into the site with mindfulness and respect.

So I'll let you lead us into the site whenever you're ready to go.

It really amazes me every time I come to these places.

It's hard to put into words how it makes me feel each time because of the connection that my people have to them.

And this one in particular has the added layer of being really focused on funerals.

More than 120 people were buried among those 20 some mounds at the Mound City Group.

So it seems to have been very much focused and devoted to mortuary activity.

Mound City is probably one of the older sites, probably one of the first sites that Hopewell culture used.

It's not as big as some of the other sites, but the concentrations that of burial mounds here are more than we see at other locations.

Here is a beautiful composition of shapes, bounded by this beautiful enclave of forest.

It's a monument to the permanence of life and death and the community.

And that combination really doesn't exist anywhere else.

What you're walking past here today is a restored Mound City.

In the 1840s, Squier and Davis, two amateur archaeologists, were working on their document about the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.

And so they excavated shafts in probably all of the large mounds there at Mound City Group.

And they began to discover some of the first hallmarks of Hopewell ceremonialism.

They began to see the first evidence that these were associated with altars first evidence that these were associated with altars and offerings and religious observances.

A portion of the collection was retained by Davis, who attempted to sell it to museums later in his life, and that collection was purchased or incorporated into what is now the British Museum, where some of those objects from Mound City are still on display today.

They noted in that, at many of these sites that they were beginning to lose them due to agriculture and modern encroachments.

Mound City, though, was still a farmer's woodlot.

The farmer had not yet exposed it, degraded it.

So this is one of the best restorations of the Hopewell earthworks that we have.

So one question I've always had about these places that we have all these earthworks, we have the mounds, but these places would have been full of wooden structures.

Do we know a little bit about what they would have been doing inside these buildings?

Yeah.

I mean, we can't get into great detail, but based on what was left behind, that's how we can then sort of infer this was not a village.

This was not their day to day home.

We don't even find garbage pits inside of a place like Mound City.

What we do find are burials of humans and burials of objects.

This was a dedicated space, purposeful activities taking place here, and very well cared for.

There was a decision made that one mound, mound 15, wouldn't be reconstructed, that in fact they would utilize posts above ground, just a few inches to let people know that you're not just looking at this mounded landscape.

These marked places where buildings were originally erected and where important activities happened.

Clearly, these structures and the way that they're set up show a very ceremonial or ritualistic intent.

In some buildings there are altars or basins, clay lines that show signs of really heavy burning, human remains interred in these clay lined basins.

human remains interred in these clay lined basins.

And bits of broken objects in them as well.

Both the Squier and Davis and William Mill■s excavations uncovered a large number of fragments of platform pipes beneath mound 8, and Mills of fragments of platform pipes beneath mound 8, and Mills actually projected this idea that actually they maybe they were in a bag and had been smashed, interred as pieces within that mound.

And so it really makes clear the importance of these objects, And so it really makes clear the importance of these objects, the fact that they were intentionally broken before they interred.

This is where all of that ceremony would have begun.

Inside of this prepared structure.

The things that could have happened here probably aren't the same things that we celebrate today, but I bet you they're descended from those same things.

World renewal ceremonies, celebrating ancestors, but also those objects.

Yes.

We had different ideas of animate and inanimate objects, and you can find that in our languages today.

Anything that's created, they say, has some form of spirit.

So even objects, which is why those are so important to us, are, especially our ancestral objects.

These things are acts of creation and have at least a little bit of spirit with them as well.

I think that people don't realize that, you know, you find so many arrowheads on the ground or in a cache or in an excavation that you don't think about the specialness of it.

It becomes mundane to you.

Whereas for me, it shows me the sheer number of ancestors here, the sheer number of people who believed in this cosmology, that everything plays into itself and has a role and is magical.

And maybe we can't see everything.

So these objects very well could have been thought of as animate objects, whether they had spirits of their own or life of their own.

These people probably had different ideas than us.

But I bet you that those threads that connect us to them are still there.

And we know because of a scant few carbon 14 dates, that Mound City was in use the entire 400 years of the Hopewell in this region.

So imagine generation after generation returning to these spots to have those activities take place.

That's astounding.

And that's part of what makes it this World Heritage site, because it can carry on this cultural tradition for a lengthy amount of time.

In 1917, this site has already seen a lot of heavy agricultural use.

You've got farmland far and wide here, and the U.S.

has also entered World War One.

But we had no standing army, and so there was a need to to train soldiers.

And so there were 16 training camps built all across the United States.

And one of the locations selected for a training camp was Chillicothe, Ohio, which became a city for 60,000 soldiers virtually overnight.

But unfortunately, part of Camp Sherman was built directly over top of the Mound City Group even though the mounds and earthworks were still quite visible.

They've been plowed down, but they're still quite visible there.

These places were just not respected.

A local community tries to prevent the War Department from placing the barrack buildings on here, but they move forward.

They prevent the War Department from placing a barrack building on top of the tall central mound.

They actually turn one 90 degrees.

So we do have big impacts on Mound City, but the war ends in 1918.

That land was subsequently acquired after the war had ended, and portions of it were divvied up for the creation of a VA hospital, as well as a prison.

But in 1923, that portion of the Camp Sherman property was turned into a national monument.

It was operated by what is now known as the Ohio History Connection for several decades before the National Park Service took over direct management.

And that's really when we start taking a hold of the interpretation, the preservation and the understanding of the site that you see what's come of it today.

What other research has happened here?

We had recent research that focused on the exterior of Mound City, taking a closer look at what we call these ditches right outside.

It's a peculiar feature of the landscape here.

The ones that Mound City, which are a major feature of the site, eight of them which are a major feature of the site, eight of them around the rim were long thought to be borrow pits.

Definition of a borrow pit, that's where you get the soil build the mounds with.

They■re not borrow pits.

They were designed as vessels.

They were lined with clay, so they would hold water.

Now whether that was for a visual effect or whether it was something for people to drink at the ceremonies or even something else.

We don■t know.

I don't think we know.

It's very interesting to me because I've always viewed these as negative mounds.

They actually represent something else.

Maybe the opposite of the mounds themselves, or something else entirely.

The fact that they are actually built to hold water, I think, is a very important part of their meaning.

Whether they are mirrors, whether they represent the underworld, you would have actually been able to see the stars reflecting up as you walked in between or walked out of these places.

You would have had torch light or fires that would have been reflecting off of these things as well.

So they would have actually been very visually spectacular.

Most visitors that come here have a little bit of understanding of what occurred on these grounds, but they may not understand the magnitude and making sure that when they leave this site, those visitors understand the story that existed here.

Although these sites might be old, they're still living today.

Whether it be through the descendants of the ancestors who built them, or with the lunar alignments, or with the solar alignments, they're quite literally still living to this day.

When I go to Arlington National Cemetery, I leave there not thinking of it as the death place.

I think it's a place that inspires.

It's a place that I want to go to, and I want to return.

And every time I go and leave there, I want to be a better person.

I want to make life more meaningful.

And that's the experience I want people to have when they come in.

Visitors today can now have an opportunity to walk through a very important site for the Hopewell culture.

You may just be a casual tourist that just wants to have a nice, peaceful walk.

That's fine.

Understanding though, that you're in this reverent place to come in with that mindfulness of respect.

As contemporary Native peoples, these places are very important to us.

These are sacred spaces, but we want this place to be experienced.

We want people to come and use these places for education, to respect them.

Go and learn what you can about the Hopewell people, about the Hopewell ceremonial- ism, and about the tribes today.

It's not just this cool old thing.

These are spaces that are important to the descendants of the people who built them.

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

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