For 2000 years, these monuments have stretched across the land.

Who built them and why did they do it?

While most people have never heard of them.

The Hopewell ceremonial earthworks are among the most extraordinary achievements on this continent.

They are not ruins.

They are blueprints of a world view, living maps of a civilization framing the horizon, and patterns of ceremony and connection.

Written directly on the land.

The Earth.

Holds memory here.

Shapes stretch across the horizon.

Silent yet alive.

Carrying the heart of those who lived and gathered here.

Long before me I am aware of the hands that shaped the care with which each earthwork was made.

And the stories written onto the land itself.

You don't need names or signs to feel it.

Every ridge, every curve, every horizon carries the presence of ancestors.

And in walking here, I become part of that story, carrying forward a connection that never ended.

As a citizen of the Miami tribe, I've been on my own personal journey for years to relearn my heritage.

I'm here today to find out who built these monumental earthworks and why.

I, Brad, I begin.

Wonderful to see you.

It's wonderful to see you guys.

I always love coming out here.

How big this places is always awe inspiring to me.

It's off the scale.

It is, it is.

Can you tell me a little bit more about why this site is important and the people who would have built it?

Yeah, well, this is the Hopewell Mound Group.

This is the type site for the Hopewell culture.

It's the biggest of all the monumental earthworks here in the Saddle Creek area.

There's something like two and a half miles of earthen wall that.

We're about six feet tall.

And there was an exterior ditch about six feet deep.

So, you know, approaching it from the outside, it was really a formidable structure.

There's more than 38 mounds scattered in and around the enclosure, including the biggest Hopewell mound that was ever built 2000 years ago.

The mounds that we see today are commemorating the locations where these great timber shrine buildings once stood.

And also on this eastern end of the enclosure is a geometrically perfect square.

And in addition to the geometry, there's also this hilltop enclosure aspect.

Walls go up and over the bluffs over there behind the trees.

So it's not just this, this field that we can see today, but this would have actually included these, these bluffs here.

And then gone way, way into the distance.

Yeah.

All the way to that far.

This tree line there.

Hopewell ceremonial earthworks are masterpieces of indigenous landscape architecture.

They're places that encode the beliefs, the worldviews in the lives of indigenous people.

2000 years ago.

Onto these landscapes in ways that are, you know, similar across sites.

But always unique.

They were built by a Native American culture.

Ancestors of today's tribes as gathering places for people coming from not only the local vicinity, but from far across the continent.

They came from different walks of life.

They weren't speaking the same language, but they could work together on this language.

The earthwork construction.

Chillicothe was the center.

Tribes from all over North America came to.

And when they came, they brought what they considered their greatest treasure.

What can you tell me about what they did in the enclosure here?

2000 years ago, this was probably the most important center in an indigenous religious movement that really swept over half the continent.

And so people were coming here for festivals, for feasts and funerals, rites of passage.

I think people are kind of celebrating the the whole human spectrum in these kinds of places.

So not only are they looking at celestial bodies and understanding their movements and celebrating the cycles of the world around them, but more relatable human experiences, life, death, transformation these are very important life cycles, ceremonial sites.

They were able to use lunar and solar moments, and they use those moments to know when it was time to come here.

And they came up with sites like this to celebrate those moments.

It's all about ceremony here, and that's all Hopewell is.

None of these earthworks are cities or even villages.

The habitations would be outside.

So the walls enclosed sacred spaces, and many of them are just immense, like this one outside of Ohio.

There's no other site like this, one of this scale.

With this many mounds and monumental earthworks.

There's just nothing that compares in any of those other places.

Are there any particular earthworks you would like to point out?

Oh yeah.

Hopewell Mound, that seems to be a regional or even maybe larger center for the burial of the dead, where some of the most revered ancestors were laid to rest with objects that were important to them in their life and the roles they held in community and society.

It is a site of superlatives.

It has the most artifacts and beautiful artwork that's ever been discovered.

It has the geology.

It has the alignments.

It has the people.

It has the gatherings.

It is the site for the Hopewell.

And I can look at the mounds and I can I can hear the songs that they are singing, and I can feel and hear the stories that they tell.

I have a special connection with that place.

And so this is mound 17.

This is where two really spectacular offerings were made here 2000 years ago.

When it was excavated, there were three clay basins.

Two of them were just chock full of these amazing ceremonial offerings.

Can you tell me a little bit about that early archeological study of this place?

How were these items found?

It first came to the attention of the scientific world, really?

In 1820, Caleb Atwater published a map and description of this site.

Fairly crude, but it was the first sort of recognition that these monumental earthworks were out here in the Ohio Valley 20 some years later.

The very famous Squire and Davis came here.

They recorded many of these sites for the first time, or more completely than those before them.

And in many ways, their maps that they produce are some of the most accurate that we know of today.

And in some instances, they're the only record that exists for some of these sites.

The first volume, published by the Smithsonian Institution, mid 1840s, was called Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.

And it was about the Hopewell culture, earthworks in Ohio in that way.

American archeology got its beginning through excavation and study of the Hopewell ceremonial earthworks.

The place really gets on the map in 1891, when Warren King Morehead comes here, he rolls up in two wagons with a crew of about a dozen men, and they set up camp just like about a hundred yards right over there.

And they'd been sent here by Frederick Ward Putnam of Harvard, and he was organizing the World's Columbian Exposition, which is going to be in Chicago in 1893.

And one of the intents of that exposition was to show that America had antiquities every bit as fabulous as things that you might see in European museums.

For the time, it was the most remarkable excavation to be known in terms of the objects that were recovered and removed, mostly that were interred next to ancestors, and then ultimately exhibited in Chicago.

And millions of people visited that exhibit and came to recognize the amazing achievements that the indigenous people who built this place made.

So at what point does the ceremonial ism get called Hopewell?

Well, it starts about the time when when Morehead arrives here in 1891, this land was owned by Cloud Hopewell.

So that's where the name comes from.

It's just the gentleman in Chillicothe who happened to own this property.

Morehead begins to refer to Hopewell Mounds and the Hopewell earthwork.

And of course, Morehead had just come from excavations in the Miami River Valley.

And he notices the things he's finding here are very different from the villages and cemeteries that he was finding there.

And so he begins to understand that there are at least two great mound building cultures in southern Ohio.

So Adena culture was here in Ohio is an indigenous culture and mound building and burial mounds were really important.

The mounds were very tall, and they were burial mounds that were added to over time.

And sometimes they had small circular earthworks around the base.

This is during the Early Woodland period, beginning about 800 BCE, going all the way up into and through parts of the Hopewell period, maybe as much as, 100 A.D.. But the Hopewell emerges at around AD one, and it emerges from the Adena.

And then as you move into Hopewell, there's this transition where the earthworks become huge and such a focus, and the mounds are much smaller.

For whatever reason, they stopped building them.

But all the evidence is that they continued to care for and came back to them, even into what we would call the contact period.

We know that there were at least 5000 years in which mounds were built.

That meant that everybody in the area knew about mounds the minute they were born.

The details of the chronology is, is something that we're still struggling with, trying to understand how different activities on this landscape relate to one another.

The late Naomi Greber says it's an explosion of art, ritual and ceremony that comes out of Edina, and that that speaks to the rapidity that how fast this transition happens and this place, Hopewell Mound is the best example of that really explosive aspect of it.

It is where everything takes off from.

We've used examples of that to compare to other sites.

Yep.

That's Hopewell, that's the Hopewell style.

That's their pottery.

That's their craftsmanship.

And using that material.

It is a place where these diagnostic examples of what makes Hopewell Hopewell is one of those places where that happened.

Don't.

So this is mound 25 here.

And in the foreground here you can see another geometric enclosure, the D-shaped enclosure.

It's unusual that surrounds the biggest mound ever built in Hopewell World.

Originally it stands over a huge ceremonial floor.

It's like 500ft long and 180ft wide.

And then in the center of that gigantic floor was a huge multi roomed timber structure.

We do know there was more than 100 people laid to rest in that building.

Some of the most important members of these societies were laid to rest, as evidenced by the objects that were laid to rest with them.

It gives us insight into the people in the social structure of Hopewell societies.

But on the other hand, it is a place where we sort of see the fluorescence of craft productions, of the work of artisans making really important symbolic objects.

Hopewell Mound Group is important because that's where the biggest collection of spectacular artistry came from.

And that helps to tell us that this was probably the epicenter of the entire Hopewell influential world.

The Hopewell interaction sphere is a concept to describe where the exotic items came from that were found in the graves.

There were many kinds of beautifully crafted items made of materials that don't exist here.

Archeologists have uncovered copper from the Upper Peninsula and perhaps even as far north as Hudson Bay.

Shells from the Atlantic Ocean.

Shells from the Gulf of Mexico.

People were traveling from all over North America, from as far away as Canada, the Atlantic coast, the Gulf Coast, the Rockies and Yellowstone area.

Hundreds of pounds of obsidian mica from the Blue Ridge Mountains, barracuda jars, and these exotic, far flung materials.

There is enough evidence that people from communities across a large portion of North America were engaged at those specific places, whether that was moving and transporting baskets of earth or offering gifts to revered leaders in this community, or potentially even bringing their own, a revered community members to be interred at these places.

We also know that some of these materials that were crafted here were most likely being derived by people here going out, getting them, and coming back.

So we think of, you know, Hopewell, my group, and mound 25 is the greatest example of this, not just serving a local community, but serving multiple communities as a, as a like a regional center.

So it's possible that there are people from hundreds of miles away buried here.

These sites are called Hopewell, but that doesn't really resonate with me because it's just named after one person who happened to have the land, but it doesn't really represent the actual people that would have built these places.

Well, I mean, you're absolutely right.

It doesn't represent the indigenous people.

There were no indigenous people when the archeologists started working here, so they didn't know which tribes might be more connected.

But it's also simply just archeological convention that when you excavate a site and recognize a distinctive new culture, you name it after the property.

I think it's an unfortunate accident of the archeological period, especially early archeology, where they started ascribing these names to the discovers.

These are not the names that the indigenous peoples had for these places.

We have a debate, you know, often within and outside of the native community, whether we should continue to use that name other than ancestors.

We don't know what they called themselves.

My reaction, to the name Hopewell, is mixed.

I would say that there is no perfect title or name for these ancestral people, these ancestral practices.

It's a name that's always kind of been there.

I don't really necessarily like it.

I don't necessarily dislike it.

I think it needs to be something else, and I'm not in a rush to change it, by the way, because this is what we have read.

This is the common term that we have to talk about.

I hate the name personally.

Just to be candid, it's not representative of my history, my culture, my people, or any of the other tribes that historically have connection to these lands.

And I would love to come up with some sort of inter-tribal name.

The complexity is that all of the tribal governments were removed from Ohio in the 19th century.

So there are many native people who live in Ohio, but their governments aren't located here.

4550, 55 tribes have a connection to Ohio.

But when we talk about 2000 years ago, which of those tribes has the right to say what name we should use or which group of tribes?

That's a lot of hard work that's in front of us in the discussions over World Heritage.

We were talking about the name Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.

Some of the tribes just didn't like it.

And we tried to get them together.

I think you were involved in that.

And people could not come up with a possible answer.

So they said, let's keep it as a placeholder name until we can come up with something better.

We're using this name, but we know it's not the name that they would have referred to themselves.

And that's something that our tribal partners have asked us to try to do, is make that separation, make that distinguishing of what this name actually represents.

I think has entity states, the feds, international community, tribal nations has.

We continue to talk and collaborate on these sites.

It allows us to, maybe change it one day, find a more appropriate term.

And I think the greater public and archeology as a whole should challenge itself to come up with a different name for these sites that are indigenous sites.

They're beautiful inscriptions into the earth that tell stories of the indigenous people that lived here.

Over time.

I can understand those thoughts, but we have waited so long to get recognition at all that I think it would be more dangerous to now try to change that.

So there might be a time where we have a consensus around a particular kind of word that might be used to rename the sites.

But for right now, it's the word that's being used.

I do think that that is an important part of the conversation is, is keeping those communications open and changeable.

If if the tribes eventually do come up with the name that they deem is better and more accurate.

Yeah.

Many, many tribal people having been removed to Oklahoma centuries ago, have never visited these sites in these earthworks and at those reconnections and connections build and grow.

This conversation is going to continue.

To do well.

So this is the this is the great circle, Wood henge, Hopewell Mound Group.

It's an interesting thing because it reflects some of the changes that have been happening in archeology over the past few decades.

In 1848, Squire and Davis mapped this feature.

But then over the next 50 years, it was entirely plowed away.

So when Moorhead gets here in 1891, he scrawls on his version of Squire Davis's map, obliterated as part of the the lead up to the World Heritage nomination.

I ran into a partnership with the German Archeological Institute out of Berlin, and they had been experimenting in Europe with landscape scale magnetic surveys, magnetometer that had been used in North America since probably the 1950s on a small scale with single handheld instruments.

Today, archeologists, they have many tools in their basket.

Magnetometer.

Geomagnetic opportunities come in so we can see in the ground without actually digging in the ground.

That's not something we want to do here, because we do look at this as a very sacred place.

This is a burial ground.

We can figure out what's under the landscape and not tear the whole place up.

And that tool has helped uncover how were these people building them?

How were they surviving?

How were they thriving?

And what else is there?

So we had actually contacted at many of our sites in 2013 with high value archeology to do these landscape scale geophysical surveys.

And so the German sort of took that up a scale, and they did it in a much more efficient manner.

They brought a towed cart with 16 magnetometers spaced at quarter meter intervals, that's towed behind the vehicle.

And over the course of about three weeks, we were able to survey the entire Hopewell matter.

And it turns out from this magnetic data that there's all kinds of wooden architecture, timber posts, circles, wooden buildings, and lots and lots of pit features that were probably used for cooking.

So if you can imagine standing here 2000 years ago, you'd be in the middle of this wooden post circle.

There's probably an earthen embankment and then this outer ditch.

Within its boundaries were these four large cooking features.

What archeologists traditionally call earth ovens that were set in the exact center of this circle.

And from the middle between those earth ovens to the northwest, gateway is actually in alignment with the summer solstice sunset.

And archeologists have come to believe that this is a place where individuals gathered to share ceremony for large ovens of that scale could probably provision hundreds of people.

And again, it's a whole different view of what Hopewell was about.

It's not all about burial mounds and those kind of activity.

People had rich, varied lives, just like ourselves.

These places are amazing there, but they're also places that people were buried.

They are home to things that were never really meant to be seen again.

How do you guys see archeology going forward?

How do you hope it goes forward as it reckons with its own past?

The tragedy of most of the archeology that was done here among group and other Hopewell sites is it was done after Indian Removal.

Traditionally it has been about Euro Americans inserting their hands and mines into our ancestral places.

And practices and trying to piece together this puzzle.

But it is a mono perspective.

Archeology is beginning to understand that there are pieces of that puzzle within our modern tribal communities that hold value, and that's where a lot of the connections started today.

Archeology in the United States at least, is part of anthropology.

So it's focused on people and culture and understanding how people lived and not just about finding their stuff, whatever these items may be coming from.

The purpose of burials were to leave them there.

You wouldn't want to go to your grandmother's grave digger up and put her on display.

They're not time capsules.

They're not supposed to be opened up.

The field is actually changing, and we are communicating, and we're having friendships, and we're having long term projects, and the attitudes change.

And we see the attitudes change over time with things like Nagpra.

So the native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or Nagpra, was a law that was passed in the 90s.

That was a first effort by the federal government to require museums, organizations that were stewards of indigenous artifacts or individuals remains to get them back into the ground, or to work with tribes today to consult about what would be the appropriate care or stewardship.

It seeks to kind of safeguard our cultural legacy from being destroyed by these destructive practices.

I worked for a long time for the National Park Service, and as a federal agency, we were required to consult with American Indian tribes under Nagpra to decide what should become of the human remains and belongings that were excavated from places like this.

And that forced us into a conversation during that the initial period when Nagpra was passed.

And in the period sort of immediately following it as a museum curator, I felt that we were robbing the world of this amazing story.

Archeologists dig up ancient human remains all over the world, and it's a way of learning more about those people.

It's a way of wanting to learn their stories.

You find out that men and women in Hopewell society had very close statuses.

You can find out aspects about their health, how long they lived.

We would never be able to tell the stories of the regalia that were associated with them.

I had to actually go out and consult with indigenous people to meet them, to learn their stories, to hear why they felt so aggrieved before.

Like it dawned on me that, yeah, they're right and we need to do this and this is the way forward.

So yeah, I made a big sea change myself over that period.

Now we are seeing people and organizations who are trying to take a step back and rethink the whole the whole relationship from the ground up.

How can we get tribal people involved from the very beginning?

My career started actually, after Nagpra had been around for for many, many years on one hand.

I came into a sort of intellectual community that I think had already gone through a lot of evolution around this issue.

But on the other hand, I think in indigenous notion that, you know, things are going to continue to change and hopefully improve as time goes along.

We see a lot of participation and I don't see it going away.

I only see it growing.

And I think that is really great because I really like the story being told.

I like what's being celebrated right now, but to me it means that we're only at the beginning of this.

If there's to be an American archeology in the future, it's going to be an archeology that is done in full collaboration with the indigenous people.

And that's the key.

That's the key to fixing what was wrong with American archeology for hundreds of years.

You know.

We're just outside the northeast corner of the enclosure here, and you really get a sense of the scale of the place.

This area up on the top of the moraine here was never plowed.

So the wall is still about six feet tall there.

So now that this is on the World Heritage List, what does that mean for these sites?

Well, from my perspective, it means they're this ancient indigenous heritage is lifted up to be on the same level as the pyramids of Egypt and the Parthenon and Machu Picchu.

The process that led to that listing has really cemented some relationships that, you know, really weren't there before.

And it's brought organizations like the National Park Service and Ohio History Connection, together with tribes, as stewards of these places.

Sites like these are worth it.

They are worth building these relationships.

They are worth showing off to the whole world that our past is worth telling.

And not just archeological sites.

To us, they are sacred things that are still alive to us.

We've learned a lot together, but we have a lot more to learn.

We've really only just begun this journey.

Hopeful.

Earthworks.

Stories written on the land.

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