Opinions

NEWARK, Ohio — The Octagon Earthworks here speak to us from 2,000 years ago — and they speak to the fraught cultural moment in which we find ourselves.

In terms of importance, the archaeologist who’s studied the site as much as anyone else likens it to Mecca and Jerusalem. 

In 2023, it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, joining the Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and the Taj Mahal in India on the list of the world’s greatest cultural or natural places. 

Modern indigenes find in the declaration an affirmation that Native peoples in North America are descended not from primitive simpletons, but from accomplished astronomers, mathematicians, engineers, and thinkers.

However, even after the complex was named a World Heritage Site, wealthy Newark residents continued to golf on this vast lunar observatory.

The club had earlier claimed that its use — as a private country club — was better than making it a public monument to an accomplished group of prehistoric people.

And then, after he resumed the presidency this year, President Donald Trump again pulled the United States out of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — the agency that gave the Ohio sites their World Heritage designation.

Trump accused UNESCO of supporting “woke, divisive cultural and social causes.” 

The World Heritage designation celebrates a surpassing achievement. And unlike so many other monuments from antiquity, there’s no evidence that kings bullied slaves or serfs or peasants into building them.

So it would seem that some enemies of “woke” aren’t just opposed to history that might make the dominant group look or feel bad. They seem to be against history that makes anybody else look good.

But regardless of where the builders came from, how they looked, or what they believed, they’re obviously worthy of study. 

Somehow, peace reigned among them for centuries. 

Somehow, people scattered across a vast expanse of tiny settlements shared common beliefs strong enough to get them to come and build on a grand scale.

Somehow, those earthworks were built with geometric and astronomical precision that astound modern scientists.

Around the time Jesus was launching his ministry in Galilee, a powerful belief system took fire on this continent, burning brightest and taking physical form in the Ohio Valley.

Whether it was ignited by one person or a group is unknown. 

But it was a grand expression of the human need to share. To be elaborately social and reach beyond the mortal sphere. To transcend the parochial and tiny and become part of eternity.

And then for some still-unknown reason, it all stopped.

Maybe it’s just hard for Ohioans who think of home as “flyover country” to believe that something so profound could have happened here. But surely we’d be smart to learn from what lies almost literally in our backyard.

Magnificent numbers

By any objective standard, the Octagon Earthworks are astounding.

Walk the vast site or stand on any of the observation points and it’s obvious that they’re made by humans. The 20-acre Observatory Circle curves perfectly. The walls of the octagon are arrow-straight. 

Measurement shows the dimensions were no accident. 

The Observatory Circle is 1,054 feet in diameter. A square with 1,054-foot sides fits perfectly inside the 50-acre octagon.

Those dimensions were identical to those at three other sites of the same period 60 miles to the south in the Scioto Valley.

Other dimensions repeat at other sites. The axis of another circle-and-octagon structure built by the same culture — the High Bank Works — sits at a 90-degree angle to that in Newark.

Finding those and other marvels, 19th-century Europeans knew they’d stumbled onto something extraordinary.

So much so that in 1848 the earthworks became the subject of the Smithsonian Institution’s first volume in its “Contributions to Knowledge” series.

But too many in the nascent field of archaeology were stunted by their racism.

They didn’t know the purpose of the monumental works. But they “knew” that whatever it was, it was beyond the ability of native ancestors.

“When Europeans crossed the Appalachians and into the Ohio Valley, they’re dumbfounded by all this,” said Brad Lepper, an archaeologist who’s spent his career studying the Newark earthworks and those to the southwest in the Scioto Valley. 

By the 19th century, the better part of two millennia had passed, things had dramatically changed in this part of the world, and many Europeans used those facts as license to come to a self-serving conclusion.

“When they’re looking at the Native Americans who are living alongside (the earthworks), they’re living a very different life,” Lepper said.

“Everything’s all grown up in trees. So it’s obviously ancient people who (built this) and so they think the (contemporary) Indians came in recently. There’s this Moundbuilder Myth that’s terribly racist. They say, ‘Oh, this must be an ancient civilization of white people; Phoenicians, lost tribes of Israel. They think savage Indians came in later and wiped them out. Sort of like the Roman Empire destroyed by Visigoths and Goths. There’s no basis for that. They just made stuff up to say, ‘Oh no. This couldn’t be Indians. Because if Indians did this, maybe they’re actually civilized and maybe we should respect them.

“But no. We want the land.”

The myth had dire implications for 19th century Native peoples.

In the 1830s, “when the federal government began removing Indians from Ohio and other states and resettling them in what would become Oklahoma, the public was ready to believe that the Indians were not smart enough to have built these monumental structures throughout the lands they were being forced to leave,” Richard D. Shiels, a historian and former director of Ohio State’s Newark Earthworks Center, wrote in “The Fertile Earth and the Ordered Cosmos,” a 2023 collection of essays. 

A peaceful, cityless society

While later civilizations such as the Cahokia near modern St. Louis and the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City) also built monumental structures, what happened in the Ohio Valley two millennia ago was quite different. 

The later works were built in cities that were part of highly centralized kingdoms.

Not only wasn’t there a Hopewell tribe, the name isn’t even indigenous. It was given to the culture in the 1890s by archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead after he found earthworks on land in Ross County that was owned by Mordecai Hopewell.

It might even be a stretch to regard the earthworks of the period as built by a single culture.

Archaeologists have found ceremonial items “that have been crafted from literally the ends of their world — conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico, copper and silver from southern Canada,” Lepper said.

“Fossil shark teeth from the Atlantic Coast. Even obsidian — black volcanic glass — that we’ve chemically traced to Obsidian Cliff at Yellowstone National Park.” 

There’s no evidence of cities — and the kings and armies they imply — from that period. Just far-flung settlements that were too small even to be regarded as villages.

Lepper said it’s unlikely that all the groups even spoke the same language. But something strange was happening.

There’s no known climatological or other natural event to explain it. But no graves from the time have yielded skeletons with bashed skulls or other marks of war.

All those people, sparsely scattered across that vast territory, were on the same spiritual page and at peace. For centuries.

“There seems to be an unparalleled lack of conflict,” Lepper said. “We see (conflict) in earlier and later cultures. But the Hopewell period appears to be a period of immense peace.”

Meshing with the heavens

What was the basis of that peace? The earthworks offer clues.

Lepper believes the octagon complex at Newark is the culmination of centuries of work started 60 miles southwest, down the Hopewell Road in the Scioto and Little Miami valleys.

One of the its builders’ celestial goals was re-discovered by academics who were trying to show there might not have been any.

In the 1970s Ray Hively, an astrophysicist, and Robert Horn, a philosopher, were showing students at Indiana’s Earlham College how easy it is to attribute mistaken astronomical meanings to ancient structures.

They had shown how many of the solar alignments believed to be intentionally charted in England’s 5,000-year-old Stonehenge turned out just to be flukes.

“If you put Stonehenge on a roulette wheel and spin it a thousand times, 997 times there will be a solstice alignment, but it’s just chance,” Lepper said.

The scholars went to Newark to see if they could corroborate that principle.

But as they analyzed the complex, they saw something that had a very low chance of being mere chance.

Exactly zero of the gaps between the octagon’s walls matched up with a solstice alignment the way the massive Fort Ancient earthworks above the Little Miami River mark the longest and shortest days.

Hively and Horn found something else that turned out not to be happenstance.

They eventually found more than a dozen alignments in which the octagon charts the 18.6-year trek the moon takes across the sky.

Decades of study and wonder followed.

“The physical scale and precision of (the ancient Newark works) is a great accomplishment, but the fact that this structure simultaneously encodes geometrical and astronomical information is an astounding and highly motivating discovery for any society that makes it,” Hively wrote in the 2023 “Guide to the Ceremonial Hopewell Earthworks.”

“Even today, modern physicists are motivated in a sense by the same kind of dual desire… the passion, in fact, to find a correspondence between mathematical symmetry and natural phenomena. That is a very powerful discovery, and I think we’re dealing with something like that here.”

Generational feat

It’s an understatement to say the ancients faced big challenges mapping what is known as the “lunar standstill.” 

Due to gravitation, the plane on which the moon orbits the Earth and the one on which the Earth orbits the sun fluctuate relative to one another in an 18.6-year cycle.

Over that time, the full moon rises in maximum northern and southern parts of the eastern horizon, and sets at high and low points in the western sky before changing direction.

That’s called a “maximum lunar standstill.”

On June 11, the Strawberry Moon marked the southernmost moonrise since 2006 — the most recent maximum lunar standstill.

It’s called a standstill because as it changes direction, the moon seems stalled in one part of the sky for a long time.

As part of the cycle, the moon also rises and sets at minimum high and low points on the horizons before again changing direction and creating a “minimum lunar standstill.”

It would have required meticulous observation to notice those standstills. But before TV, movies and electricity, people were much more connected to the night sky and much more attuned to celestial phenomena.

They weren’t just evening entertainment, they were used to explain the origins of Earth and life and the caprices of the gods.

It’s unclear what significance the moon held for people building the Hopewell structures. But there are indigenous traditions that it is a grandmother and others that it is a mother — both life-givers and nurturers.

Think what it would have taken to not just notice the lunar standstill, but to figure out the entire lunar cycle. You’d have to do that before you could even conceive of building.

First, it would take a long while to recognize the parameters of the moon’s long, slow, back-and-forth march across the sky.

As anybody who lives in this part of the world knows, it’s a sky frequently obscured by clouds, so it’s often hard to see the moon at all.

Then to chart it, you’d have to watch the full cycle at least twice to corroborate your original hunch and to mark the waypoints. That’s at least 37.2 years — and likely much longer.

“You probably had to take 100 years of observations,” Lepper said. “It would require generations.”

Supercollider

Then you’d have to figure out how to design the thing. 

As with Pythagoras in Greece several hundred years earlier, somebody would have had to have insights into geometry as he or she tried to explain the cosmos.

It might be hard for those of us who learned this stuff in school to grasp, but neither Pythagoras nor the builders of Ohio Valley earthworks were doing what we think of as “math,” Lepper said.

“These people were parallel” to Pythagoras, he said. “He doesn’t view himself as a mathematician. He views himself as a philosopher and he thought geometry was sort of like figuring out what was in the mind of God. It wasn’t just abstract geometry — this is the way God thinks. It’s nature. These people were on that parallel track. They’re seeing patterns. They’re seeing things that appear to be an outgrowth of nature. And they want to sort of recreate it and show the gods that they’ve figured it out.”

Lepper believes that the Octagon Earthworks in modern Newark were the crowning achievement of the Hopewell period, which seems to have ended between 300 and 400 A.D.

“I think all of this geometry is figured out in the Chillicothe area,” he said. “You have a circle and an octagon in Chillicothe… So we have people in Chillicothe with all this knowledge. Some singular genius pulls it all together, comes 60 miles north, near Flint Ridge, and builds the grand synthesis of Hopewell geometry, astronomy, religion, science — everything here — and puts it all together. It’s like a religious super-conducting supercollider.” 

Pilgrimage

Not only are the Octagon Earthworks a masterpiece of design, they were engineered to last 2,000 years and longer.

Enough people had to make long journeys afoot that using just sticks, hoes and picks, they could dig up and move 7 million cubic feet of earth one basket at a time and create giant, perfectly formed shapes.

It was no casual undertaking. 

“Reasonably, this could have been built in 40 years,” Lepper said, explaining that people would have come in the summer, and many of their trips likely were timed to coincide with the cycles of the moon. 

The builders may have chosen the site because earlier Indians used fire to clear the land near Raccoon Creek to better hunt deer and other animals attracted to the salt licks here.

They give modern Licking County its name. Located as it is near the intersection of the creek and the Licking River, people could follow natural highways to get here.

Jim Williams of the Ohio History Connection wrote of the confounding sophistication of the enterprise.

“Imagine the vision and charisma of the leaders of this project to get all the people involved, select gifted astronomers, mathematicians, and engineers, and then orchestrate the building of this place without the benefit of email, snail mail, or microphones,” he wrote in, “The Fertile Earth and the Ordered Cosmos.”

After the complex was completed, Lepper said, tens of thousands likely showed up for the biggest occasions such as maximum lunar standstills.

It was a way to meet, worship, socialize, and trade. It was probably also a way to find a spouse and bring fresh genes to an isolated family group.

Standing in one of the observation points, the walls are so low, long and hidden behind trees that it can be difficult to get a clear idea of the scope of the project. But imagine 20,000 ancient people in the Observatory Circle under the night sky and it becomes animated. 

It seems certain they played music, sang, and danced. Surely they wore ceremonial costumes signifying the sacred importance of the occasion.

Imagine what an experience that would be if you’d spent almost all your life cut off in a tiny forest hamlet hundreds of miles away, thousands of years in the past.

Then you made the pilgrimage to this area, following in the steps of your grandparents’ grandparents.

Big as they were, the March on Washington or Woodstock couldn’t begin to describe the depth of it.

“Gods-eye view”

Lepper said the earthworks were built on a horizontal scale because they were built to impress not humans, but a celestial observer.

“They don’t see the moon as a rock orbiting around the Earth,” he said. “The moon and the sun are powerful spiritual beings — gods, sort of, but maybe they didn’t think of it quite that way.” 

Of the low walls of the Octagon Earthworks, Lepper said, “It doesn’t go up. It goes off to the horizons practically. But in spite of being so huge, it’s really precise… Hively and Horn think they made (the Observatory Circle) perfect, because they want the moon to see that it’s perfect and that they figured out all the cycles so the moon will look down and bless it and say ‘Yes, you’ve figured it all out.'” 

Hively and Horn called it a “gods-eye view.”

Due to the lack of any surviving written record, it isn’t known why, of all places, central Ohio was the center of such profound belief.

“This is Mecca. This is Jerusalem,” Lepper said. “And we don’t know why it’s here as opposed to somewhere else because we don’t have a Koran or a Bible to tell us the history of what happened here… It’s like the rise of Christianity or Islam. There’s some Buddha or some Moses. There’s some transformative figure here in the Ohio Valley who changes everybody’s lives.”

And then sometime after about 300 A.D., it all stopped. 

Lepper said the reason is unknown, but it might have been like the Apollo space program. The original goal was to reach the moon. Once that was achieved (by an Ohioan from the old Shawnee town of Wapakoneta), energy and resources drifted elsewhere.

In a 2022 ruling saying the Ohio History Connection could take back control of the earthworks and banish the golfers, the Ohio Supreme Court declared the site a transcendent example of human genius.

“The Octagon Earthworks align with the 18.6-year cycle of the moon’s orbital path around the earth with unparalleled geometric precision at a scale that dwarfs the Great Pyramid of Giza,” the opinion said.

“Of all known prehistoric earthworks in the world, they offer a unique example of human ingenuity and the perennial desire to understand the universe and its celestial bodies. The historical, archeological, and astronomical significance of the Octagon Earthworks is arguably equivalent to Stonehenge or Machu Picchu.” 

Slow appreciation

It’s a painful irony that what is likely the capstone of all Hopewell structures in Ohio long was one of the least studied.

Lepper said that in the early, less scientific days of archaeology, researchers focused less on what the ancients were trying to say with the structures and more on plundering their artifacts.  

But for him, it’s been something of a boon. Going to work in 1988 at what is now the Ohio History Connection, Lepper has gotten to spend a career piecing together the fascinating story of a highly sophisticated group of prehistoric people.

He wasn’t the first American to appreciate the earthworks. 

In the 1880s, Newark residents voted to tax themselves to preserve the site and offer its use to the Ohio State Militia, now known as the Ohio National Guard.

By 1908, the militia had outgrown it and passed control to the Newark Board of Trade.

Ownership of the land remained with the public, but in 1910 it was leased to a private country club to which every member of the Board of Trade belonged, Lepper said.

They ignored public calls to use the land as a park.

Those calls give the lie to claims that the country club somehow saved the earthworks, Lepper said.

“They saved them from becoming a public park,” he said.

Ownership of the land passed to what is now the History Connection in 1933 and over the following decades support grew among the public and interested professionals to open the site to the public, allow unfettered research and preserve it as a park.

Even so, in 1997, the leadership of the History Connection agreed to extend the country club’s lease for generations, all the way to 2078.

Lepper said it was a serious misreading of public sentiment.

“I don’t think they had a clue that some people in the community were so angry about it,” he said.

“When people found out about this lease extension, our director thought it was business as usual. But things had changed. They were blindsided by the reaction from Native Americans, archaeologists, historians — all kinds of people who should be our allies — but now were mad at us.”

Ancient ancestors?

Glenna Wallace knows something about that anger.

After becoming chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma in 2006, she attended a lecture at Ohio State in 2007.

As Wallace prepared to take the top post in the tribe, she worked to overcome something that non-dominant groups commonly face — a lack of ready access to its history.

Shawnees were forced from Ohio and surrounding states to Oklahoma in the 1830s as part of the broader Trail of Tears. Preserving tribal history took a back seat to more pressing needs, Wallace said.

“The emphasis was not on keeping records,” she said. “The emphasis was not on having meetings and writing minutes. The emphasis was on staying alive. My tribe knew very little or anything about our history.”

Wallace said she spent years learning all she could. An important element of that history is that even though the Shawnees moved about over the last 300 years, the tribe has deep roots in the Ohio Valley.

“Ohio was our homeland,” Wallace said. 

It may be impossible now to say for sure whether the Shawnees directly descended from the people who built the Hopewell structures. But it’s possible.

Lepper said there’s an oral tradition involving Simon Kenton, who fought the Shawnees in the late 1700s.

According to it, Kenton said Shawnees would stop at Fort Ancient to pay homage to its builders — who even then were ancient — whenever the Indians were in the area.

“They recognized it as a sacred place,” Lepper said.

For Wallace, it’s a connection. 

“We are a small tribe,” she said. “We got down to only 63, we didn’t know our history, people just tried to exist.”

Then she went out to see the Octagon Earthworks during her 2007 visit to Ohio State.

“I knew that what I was seeing was equal to — if  not superior to — the Great Wall of China, or the Pyramids in Egypt, or Machu Picchu in Peru,” Wallace said. “The amount of effort, the amount of work, the amount of dedication, the sophistication… It was unbelievable. It was life-changing.”

Yet she also saw the activity that greatly restricted research at the site — and throttled how many school kids and others could visit.

Members of a private club were driving carts along and taking divots out of those ancient walls as they golfed, perhaps obliviously, away.

“I could not understand why there was a golf course on top of this beautiful, sacred place,” Wallace said. “I walked away saying the biblical verse, ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.'”

Striving for global recognition

Wallace joined the effort, already underway, to have the Octagon and other Hopewell-era earthworks declared a World Heritage Site.

But the Ohio History Connection had to contend with country club lessees who somehow were granted an 81-year extension back in 1997. 

In 2018, the History Connection offered to buy out the lease for $800,000. The country club didn’t respond.

The country club later argued to the courts that it was unlikely that the Octagon Earthworks would gain a World Heritage inscription.

It argued that researchers and the public already were allowed to see the place when the club saw fit to let them.

And it argued that maintaining it as a private golf course was a higher, better use than what the History Connection and its allies had in mind — turning it into a public park and seeking global recognition as one of the most important cultural sites in the country.

In court, the Moundbuilders Country Club argued “that a governmental entity can establish that (eminent domain) is necessary for a public use only if it shows that its proposed use of the property would provide more of a benefit to the public than the current private use,” the Ohio Supreme Court wrote in 2022.

It was part of a ruling in which the court disagreed and allowed the History Connection to invoke eminent domain.

By last year, the History Connection and the country club agreed to an undisclosed sum for the lease.

With no apparent irony, the owner of the land where the country club planned to move said the country club “got shoved out of their land,” the New York Times reported.

But before that, in September 2023, a team that included Lepper and Wallace traveled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

There they received a global verdict on the Octagon Earthworks that was starkly at odds with the claims of the private club that didn’t want to leave the site.

It took just minutes for the UNESCO panel to declare that the works passed its highly selective muster.

That made them and other Hopewell earthworks the only World Heritage Site in Ohio, one of just 26 in the United States, and of 1,248 in the world. 

Redemption

On July 24, the World Heritage status seemed poised to deliver on its promises of increased tourism. 

The old clubhouse was still in the process of being converted to a visitor center. Asphalt cart paths and remnants of sand traps were still visible in the earthworks, where trees still obscured many views. Temperatures exceeded 90 degrees. The humidity was brutal. 

Yet more than a dozen visitors — most seeming in late middle age — were in the center and more were outside.

The benefits may grow exponentially.

For example, Mount Sanqingshan National Park in China made the World Heritage list in 2008. The number of visitors there grew from 1.48 million that year to 23.95 million in 2019 — a sixteen-fold increase, researchers reported in 2023. 

But on July 22, the Trump administration announced that it was pulling out of the organization that named the Newark site to the global list. It said it was over its “woke” views and a supposed anti-Israel bias. 

Yet while Israel undeniably has a lot of history, it has less than 1% of the population of the United States and less than 1% of its area.

Even so, supposedly anti-Israel UNESCO has granted nine Israeli sites World Heritage status — nearly 35% as many as the vastly larger, more-powerful United States.

For Wallace, the Shawnee chief, UNESCO’s inscription of the Hopewell earthworks as a World Heritage Site means redemption.

She grew up not knowing her history amid a popular tradition that Indians were primitive, were savages.

“It’s a testament to our ancestors,” she said. “At last, they can be recognized. Not as savages, but as geniuses. Uncommon geniuses.”

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This story is provided by Ohio Capital Journal, a part of States Newsroom, a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit. See the original story here.