The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks still rise across the vast horizon.

But what was life like around them 2000 years ago?

Archaeologists and Native descendants are working together to uncover the human stories behind these monumental designs.

What did they find, and what does it tell us about the people who shaped this land?

On mornings like this when the fog hangs low over Seip Earthworks, it■s easy to imagine this place alive with movement.

People arriving from far lands.

Speaking different languages.

Coming together for reasons we're trying to understand.

The earthworks still endure.

And while we don't know everything about how they lived, each discovery brings us closer to understanding the people whose descendants are still here.

Part of an unbroken story.

Hey, Tim.

Hey, Logan.

Good to see you.

Good to see you.

I always love it out here.

It's so beautiful.

Especially this morning with the mist here.

You know, you can really feel what it would have been like to be here 2000 years ago.

Absolutely.

The Seip Earthworks is a tremendous place, and we find ourselves now right at a gateway.

Probably the point of entry.

So this right here is where they would have entered 2000 years ago.

Yeah.

You can see in the vegetation around us this higher vegetation represents the earthwork walls which have been slightly diminished by plowing.

The earthwork walls bend inward.

Right.

And you sort of get a guided, sort of an avenue sense of it that gives it a sense of perhaps importance 2000 years ago compared to the other ones, which are just openings or gaps in the wall.

And so is there any other piece of the architecture of this place that■s unique for Hopewell Earthworks?

Yes and no.

And that's somewhat of the beauty of Hopewell is this combination of unique and commonality.

And so this is one of five earthworks that we call a tri-partite earthwork, meaning that it was made of three separate parts.

A large circle connected to a smaller circle, connected to a square in a particular formation that shows a lot of interesting geometry and the way these people were thinking about geometry.

And there's five of these built within about 30 miles of one another that all have those three geometric elements in different combinations.

They're each unique.

Each circle and the square are the same size Each circle and the square are the same size at all five of these sites.

And then has the beautiful mounds set apart And then has the beautiful mounds set apart against that landscape of the Paint Creek valley.

It is a wonderful example of precision and geometry.

The earthwork itself, when I say large, I'm talking about two and a half miles of earthen wall, encompassing something like 120 acres.

So what can you tell me about the people who would have come here, what they would have celebrated?

People from around this continent would come and celebrate different things.

The burial of dead, of important ancestors that needed to be laid to rest.

But there seems to be other ceremonies here.

This is one of the areas I think our understanding has the most room to develop going forward.

The people who built the earthworks lived in the Eastern Woodlands 2000 years ago, before urbanization, industrialization and settlement.

It was an amazing, lush, verdant, beautiful place, and it was filled with color and sound and texture.

So the Woodland period lasts from about a thousand BCE to a thousand CE, and the Woodland period is characterized by the first use of pottery, the beginnings of agriculture, and village life.

And the Hopewell episode happens in the middle of the Woodland period.

You know, it's relatively short period of time between A.D.

1 and 400, but it's kind of amazing to me that all of this could be sustained for as many as three centuries or four centuries.

It■s remarkable.

What kind of tools would they have used to build these earthworks?

That's a great question.

And, you know, they're using mostly organic materials that don't preserve as well as other things, so there's some of this that we're inferring.

But in the second large mound here at Seip, archaeologists removed the femurs of deer and elk that they hypothesized might have been instruments for digging.

Ohio's earthworks were being constructed with the simplest kind of technology that you can imagine pointed sticks, clam shell hoes and baskets.

And this is in marked contrast to the sophistication of the knowledge that's incorporated into these earthworks.

They carried the soil one basket load at a time, often from pretty great distances.

They would have different colored soils to layer up the earthwork walls, sometimes in pretty complex, precise configurations.

The different colors of clay, the reds and the yellows, the sands, the gravel, all of that coming from the creeks and the riverbanks and tying all of mother Earth in to encapsulate and shell in their important places.

Archaeologists in the 1920s recovered an imprint of a specific basket load of soil, with the design of the baskets itself giving a sense of the size.

So you could actually see what their baskets would have looked like.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And so this is where these sort of estimates of how many, you know, basket loads of soil were in here and how many hours it would have taken to make a place like this.

So one archaeologist calculated it was almost, a half million hours of individual labor that went into building just the embankment wall here at the Seip Earthworks.

Life was good for the Hopewell culture.

They were living in a kind of a golden age.

Because the earlier people were hunters and gatherers.

They relied on what food they could find and collect in the natural environment.

So it's a healthy diet.

But at this latitude, during the winter, a lot of that disappears.

They go through episodes of starvation in the winter and many people die.

So it's a it's like a boom and bust.

But the Hopewell have the hunting and gathering and fishing diet.

But then they also have the security of the Eastern Agricultural Complex that allows them to store food for the winter, so there aren■t periods of starvation.

The Eastern Agricultural Complex is only one of 12 agricultural complexes in the world, and it is very rich with resources, and it is very rich with resources, and they learn to use almost all of them.

But they did it in a way that they did not exhaust the resources around them.

Prior to Europeans here, people actually had a high quality of life, and we see that through diet, but we also see it through leisure activities.

If you have a good lifestyle, you have a lot of leisure time.

If you're struggling to live, you don't have time to be painting shells.

You don't have time to be making a 1050 foot round ditch.

It took hundreds of people who shared in an idea to dig all of this out.

They didn't do it under duress.

This is not a people on the edge of survival.

These are people who have stability.

They have a strong sense of community.

They're accomplishing great works.

This is the Seip-Pricer mound, one of the largest, Hopewell mounds in the area.

240 feet long by 160 feet wide, and up to 30 feet tall in places This particular earthwork, is there anything special about it?

Anything that sets it apart?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's an important thing for us to talk about that this is a burial mound.

This was a place where ancestors were interred.

And it covers the remains of a huge wooden building, something like 6 or 7000ft■ of roofed space.

So a gigantic structure.

One of the largest buildings ever built in eastern North America.

Ultimately, important ancestors were laid to rest in this space, and each of the rooms of this large building were mounded over into what we would call primary mounds.

And so there■s three mounds, and then those were layered over again with specific soil for at least two additional episodes.

You know, raising it to this really massive mound we see behind us.

Some mounds, like the earlier Adena mounds, were simple burial mounds.

They would bury someone, build a mound over it, and then sometimes come back and bury somebody and build more of the mound.

With Hopewell, it's things look the same, but it's a different concept.

People were buried in log tombs on the floors or under the floors inside those buildings.

And one of these shrine buildings may have stood for 10 or 20 years.

When they took them apart or decommissioned them, they would build a mound that seems to be like a remembering, a memory of the building and whatever had happened there.

People have described them, I think, inappropriately as piles of dirt.

But when you see the complexity and when you see, I mean the architecture that's created with that earth, they're not piles of dirt.

They're piles of dirt in the same way that the Parthenon is a pile of rocks.

How do we know that there were wooden buildings there that were then mounded over.

This mound in particular was actually excavated by what was then the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, between 1925 and 1928.

Henry Clyde Shetrone conducted probably the last large scale Hopewell Mound excavation at Seip Earthworks.

It was a monumental undertaking.

When this exhibition was happening.

It was it was actually really famous.

It followed shortly after the King Tut excavations.

Multiple stories were running in large newspapers such as the New York Times.

were running in large newspapers such as the New York Times.

The local community here actually coined the term the Valley of the Kings to describe this Paint Creek Valley.

And so they were sort of translating that history and heritage into modern nomenclature.

So they actually called this valley, the Valley of the Kings.

Yes.

Now, of course, we don't think there are kings, you know, 2000 years ago living here.

People are codifying it in the language of the time and sort of marketing it, if you will.

These Hopewell sites did not disappear at the end of the Hopewell period.

The late Woodland culture that comes after Hopewell often continued putting burials into Hopewell mounds, and archaeologists have referred to this as the so-called intrusive mound culture, as if these later barbarians were violating the beautiful Hopewell earthworks by adding their burials, but these were descendants of the Hopewell culture.

It may have been a kind of a religious revival of people burying their dead in these great mounds of their ancestors, as a way to feel like they were continuing that tradition or something.

Which speaks to the sort of continuity of importance of these places that, you know, tribal communities continue to use them almost up until actual removal.

These places are still special to us.

We still consider them sacred.

My 32nd great grandparents would have helped build these places.

And there's that direct line.

There were some rupture to that connection during the Indian removal period, but it didn't sever it.

You know, these places we know are still really important.

This place was used for ritual and specifically burial, but what else was this landscape used for?

This is a really large space.

Yeah.

I mean, the scale of this place really begs, you know, what was it used for?

So you can imagine people coming to these large places and there probably was, you know, dancing and music and community games, and sort of like all the things that people do when we come together.

One of the early studies located, just to our left here, an area where the topsoil had been stripped, and then they prepared a large surface.

It looks like a place where, yeah, you would have held a a stomp dance or other sort of traditional dances.

So these are active community centers that are being used by the people.

And you said stomp dance.

So you are collaborating with tribes about modern, traditional dances and ceremony.

Yeah.

One of the actually really great examples of collaborations is a study that was done between Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee tribe and Brad Lepper of the Ohio History Connection, where they studied these steatite spheres.

There was an exhibit of the Shawnee drum, and the director of that museum was taking me through the museum and telling me about the drum.

And at that time, Chief Ben Barnes stopped and started talking about the drum as well, and how they attached the drum head to the body of the drum.

And he told me how they went to a special place and got these perfectly spherical black stones.

We use those black stones in a ceremony or a religious observance, still to this day.

They were simply objects that■s used to secure a piece of leather to a drum, so that the cordage can cinch down and pull the drum taut, so that the drum can make noise.

But all we have are the drum stones.

But all we have are the drum stones.

Since it was found in a burnt offering, everything else that would have comprised the drum would have burned up.

that would have comprised the drum would have burned up.

That serendipitous meeting resulted in a conversation over a year or so, where we wrote a technical archaeology paper together that talked about these black stones, which the excavator, Henry Shetrone said were marbles And even though he admitted that marbles was a game that wasn't known among American Indians until Europeans got here.

So how it could be marbles, I don't know.

You know, had he visited with the descendant communities, he might have understood what those five round black steatite stones were.

And so coming together with communities to help understand what these objects mean, and how they might be used.

So this fascinating, productive collaboration could never have happened unless sort of an archaeologist knowledgeable about the Hopewell culture was in conversation with Indigenous people that had knowledge of their contemporary ceremonial practices, and both were willing to share.

Just a conversation between people that hardly knew each other at the time, and didn't realize this conversation would become so important and profound.

One of the really interesting things we■ve learned with the use of this space came from archaeological excavations in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, where they uncovered, at least seven different structures in this area, including the structure, in front of us here.

This is an example of the sort of classic designs that we see inside of earthworks.

We get very little evidence archaeologically for certain types of of information about architecture.

We can see stains in the ground.

We can see stains in the ground.

These are the remnants of wooden architecture.

Floor plans have been recreated by the archaeologists because they find all the holes where the posts were.

And so, you can see that these were built very clearly, their precise outlines.

Some double lines of posts where you think, well, this may have been some kind of structural device to help the wall to be sturdy.

Interior posts in precise grids.

So that means that they were supporting a roof.

We can look at and see you know, what is the diameter of these posts?

How many of them are there?

How far are they spaced apart?

How deep into the ground are they set?

What angle are they set at?

You know, that can help determine whether or not this is, a rigid pole or flex pole construction.

Where would the windows in a place like this be?

Otherwise, it would be a very, very dark structure.

Absolutely.

And it's a it's a really brilliant question because you're right, it would have been a dark structure without a window.

Everything sort of above surface we have to infer through various lines of evidence.

From what we know that what's in the ground, we can sort of make a variety of guesses as to what's above the ground.

So we're seeing patterns in the archaeological record, and we're not able to know the cause of those patterns.

So we make inferences.

We look for additional evidence that might confirm or refute our guesses.

Sometimes we can do that and get closer and closer to the truth.

But we never, ever, in science in general, get to truth with a capital T. Imagine you're on an excavation site and somebody uncovers something that's sort of a dark stain in the ground, right?

Well, you can measure it.

And we even have soil color charts, so we can say it's exactly this color.

That's what we know.

Right?

But immediately, like archaeologists, we want to start saying, okay, well I think it's a hearth.

So that's the the inference step, is like, what is it?

What was it used for?

But then you might collect soil samples from it.

So you might find that there were burnt seeds in there.

And it's a much smaller inference than to say, well, we think this was a hearth, because there's burned food there, essentially.

What do we know about the roofs of these places?

Do we know they had roofs, or is that just inference?

Yeah.

You know, that's one of these like really important questions about this.

For a structure like this, the interior support suggests that yeah, it was probably roofed.

Were they like covered with bark?

Were they covered with hides?

You know, did they have a dome ceiling?

Did they have a peaked ceiling?

Those are things that I don't think we can know for sure.

That is where people often focus in.

They want to know what was it covered with.

We don't have that information most of the time.

It is not something that is likely to be preserved in most preservation environments.

If you come and visit the Seip earthworks, you■ll see that we■ve sort of reconstructed one of these structures by putting post holes in the patterns that archaeologists record in the 1970s.

But there■s actually six additional structures that archaeologists record out here that you can still see the sort of faint outlines of.

The original interpretation of these structures were as craft production sites.

Places where they would have made the objects that archaeologists recovered from mounds.

But they are really important places, places of rituals.

The Hopewell people had actually cleaned them up before mantling them with different layers of sand and gravel, sort of capping this space.

That■s one of the things that fascinates me about Hopewell is that they weren't afraid to end things.

They purposely capped these places in a way that signifies that whatever they were being used for is done now.

Yeah, they knew how to end things and they knew how to end things right.

We know how the earthworks would have been used for ceremony.

But how exactly would outside of the earthworks have been used in these more mundane places?

Yeah.

So we're pretty confident that these people didn't live inside the earthworks.

And so they built their settlements and their houses sort of beyond earthworks.

And this is where they would have carried out their sort of day to day life.

One of the surprising factors is that they did not live in anything that we would call like a village.

Instead, they lived in small, dispersed settlements of maybe one or 2 or 3 houses.

They were small structures, places for a couple of families.

There have been in the Scioto Valley, some very large timber structures that might have been multi-family dwellings, or they might have been a place where a clan would gather, rather than a whole bunch of families.

They're hard to find.

And even today we only have three Hopewell houses at a single site have been well excavated.

And the one that was really well excavated, along the edges, inside the structure were benches on three sides where it appeared people would have slept, and underneath of them were these basins that held hot rocks?

It could have, you know, kept you warm, sleeping, in a cold winter.

There were areas set aside for cooking and other areas for, you know, throwing away the trash.

And so, they were really formalized settlements, but not the sort of large villages that, you know, historically, people expected for communities that were making such sort of large public works, They were clustered around the outsides of these earthworks along the riverbanks and the creek areas, and then coming to these locations, being at these sites, that's where we can possibly see a more structured environment.

And so I think they were vibrant places when, when people were here and then, you know, there were lots of times when there weren't many people at these sites and there were probably folks who were live nearby and kind of took care of them.

We think there was probably a cycle when lots of people came, and then they dispersed back to their local communities.

All of our understanding of Hopewell daily life and everyday living arrangements is really in its infancy.

So we're here.

And so, we were working or up here?

Up on that outwash terrace.

Let's go up.

Cool.

The Hopewell Lifeways Project, and this is a project that is exciting arena of research that's ongoing here at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, done in collaboration with tribal partners.

So the Hopewell Lifeways Project is a small group of tribal nations that have the opportunity to receive updates, but also it provides that opportunity to give feedback to the Hopewell staff of archaeologists who are helping protect and learn and study, but also educate these sites.

Present day.

The goal is to kind of humanize the story of Hopewell people a little bit more.

To understand daily life, including living situations, early agriculture, family relationships.

What were they eating?

How were they processing it?

How were they cooking it?

What were their buildings like?

Were they there more than a season?

What have we found so far in this?

Yeah.

Thus far we've located several areas that seem to have potential for being habitation sites.

We're using magnetometery to locate areas where we can see evidence of, of lots of intensive use, but nothing conclusive in terms of locating a habitation site.

I like to see when archaeologists, anthropologists, who are studying these places bring in contemporary tribal perspectives.

The ability to work with Indigenous people on interpreting these sites offers another layer of authenticity to our interpretations.

It's not just scientific archaeologists, you know, coming up with ideas.

It's working with Indigenous people to see what ideas they have, because their ideas are very likely going to be closer to what, you know, their ancestors were doing than anything I could make up as an archaeologist.

There's only a limited number of descendant communities that are descended from the Hopewell, and those tribal nations exist today.

But it's important that all those tribal nations that are descendant Hopewell communities have voice in these sites.

And so when you look at things like archaeology, you know, they show us a lot from what they find.

But things don't survive in the record.

You know, things like cordage, leathers, feathers.

Those things don't survive in the record, and so what we left with stone and bone and monument sites.

And so I go back to culture again, and I look at the things that we incorporate from nature or how we use all elements of life.

There's gaps everywhere.

And so, you know, I'm just trying to fill in those gaps.

Many times, in talking with Native people, they ask a question that we never even thought to ask, and that is where that consultation can be very fruitful for for both parties.

I remember one of the first conversations we had as we were setting up this project.

You asked me about, you know, the use of goose foot and these other domesticated plants that were growing, whether I thought the dishes would be sort of savory or sweet.

And frankly, I had never thought of this.

And, you know, these are questions we can answer with, really specific isotopic studies.

We can detect whether it was probably a savory or a sweet flavor profile.

But, you know, I simply had never thought to ask those sort of questions.

Everything that happened after contact was like a glacier.

It removed so much cultural knowledge.

But some of that is being recovered, and I am hopeful that someday we will have someone come to us and say, you know, I think this story or this tradition that we follow has something to do with these earthworks, and we can talk about it.

There's people, there's families, there's kids memories and lives that were happening in the context of these things.

I want those stories and what they left behind to be the forefront, not necessarily just they're vanishing.

Right.

We are a surviving culture and we are a proud culture, but we have a responsibility to come back and work and teach, but teach in a teachable, learnable way.

When I worked at the Ohio History Connection, I was really impressed by the archaeologists that were there.

They would bring the knowledge that they had from doing archaeology themselves.

But when a Native person came in and said, well, that's not how I view it.

They open their minds and they ask questions because they legitimately wanted to learn.

And I think it needs to be celebrated because when folks challenge themselves to see things from a different culture■s perspective, it enriches the tapestry that is the United States.

It's not just one story, it's many stories layered on top of each other and braided together.

And I think that's what, that's what makes these places so rich.

In my experience, collaborative archaeology has just been way more meaningful.

It keeps the sort of humanity of Indigenous people here always in the forefront.

And, you know, through this project, I've had the opportunity to go out to northeast Oklahoma, to dance among the Miami, to hear the songs of the Wyandotte are in the process of revitalizing.

As anthropologists, we're used to studying culture from afar, right?

And so, the opportunity to work actively with tribes, to do research closely with these partnerships gives me a sense of gratitude for the trust that goes into those relationships, but also some hopes that, you know, as a discipline, we are growing.

I think that we're really starting to see movement towards this becoming truly collaborative, truly working together for our benefit and the broader public's benefit.

We can use it as scaffolding to help better build our future.

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.