Hopewell Sites

For many years I’ve been fascinated by what early peoples achieved. Some of these were in the Mississippi basin, and were called mound builders. The Hopewell people are amongst them.

I’ve been meeting people from Ohio throughout my journey, and whenever I tell them that I’m going to Ohio, the universal response is that there’s nothing to see in Ohio. Nobody told me that the Hopewell people were in Ohio. The first morning I was here, I looked for a park to walk in, and discovered that there are several Hopewell sites within a reasonable distance. You are going to get sick of mound builders! 

There are several peoples who built mounds. The Hopewell people did it around 2000 years ago. Some of their mounds are burial sites, where they built a cremation place, cremated someone and buried their ashes with grave goods. Some time later, generally after several people had been cremated, they covered the cremation place in layers of earth interspersed with sand to create a (generally circular) mound, more than a metre high. The picture is of some of these mounds in what’s known as Hopewell Mound City.

There are also long mounds defining square, rectangular, circular and octagon areas. These are thought to be ceremonial areas, and usually they incorporate some burial mounds inside the long mounds. Some of the long mounds are 4 miles long.

Unfortunately many mounds have been ploughed and destroyed in other ways. The field below is surrounded by mounds that have trees behind them. The gaps were aligned with various solar and lunar occurrences - including the most northerly full moon (this occurs every 18.6 years), and the gaps tend to be accurate to within an inch.

A picture of the third Hopewell site. Trees are growing on the mounds on two sides of a rectangle. This site is the biggest.