Only a few weeks after its inscription on the WH List, I managed to visit a number of the Hopewell Earthworks in southern Ohio. I had a fine day driving around and discovering the various components, but the site doesn’t come without its issues.

The Celebrations

To celebrate its newly won status, Fort Ancient (one of the component sites) organized special activities during the weekend of 7 and 8 October. I joined their free guided tour on Sunday morning at 9.30, and I was glad I did as it added a deep dive into the subject that I wasn’t able to get at the other locations. The tour was conducted by the Site Manager and he talked for 75 minutes about the complex history of this specific site.

Fort Ancient has multiple historic layers, of which the ‘Hopewell’ layer is only one. The visible remains are mostly original (ICOMOS called it “near pristine”), but it is hard or even impossible to get a feel of how the site looked like and was used some 2,000 years ago. For example, it now is fully covered by a forest while there was no vegetation except for grass when the ‘fort’ was developed. A lot of myths about who built it and why have been proven wrong over the years. Today’s view, in line with the other Hopewell sites, is that it was a ceremonial center where people gathered now and then (but it stayed uninhabited).

The Components

Over the day, I visited 5 out of the 8 inscribed components. From West to East, these were:

(photos in brackets, numbered top-down, left to right)

Fort Ancient (3): the odd one out, as it is a hilltop construction with a long earthen wall following the plateau’s contours. Takes a lot of walking and it is hard to see anything of interest here on your own; even the guide only stopped three times to point out a specific feature. These were the ‘southern gate’, the remains of a water reservoir and the alignment of a circle and a small mound for the winter solstice. The site has a museum as well, which didn’t add anything to the story I just listened to but could be a welcome introduction when you’re not on a tour.

Seip Earthworks (1): if you only have time for one of the locations, I would pick this one as it shows earthworks of a square, a small circle, a large circle and a large mound. They lie in an open setting just by the side of the road.

Mound City Group (2): this is a large group of tumuli within a walled enclosure. Also a good site for photos, but it has nothing but tumuli (including an elliptical one). Practically all mounds you see in the Hopewell area were burial sites.

Great Circle (4): this one in Newark has the most urban setting, and is used nowadays as a city park with dogs and kids running around. Its walled circle indeed is huge, but I found nothing of real interest and there is virtually no interpretation on site (the small visitor center was closed on Sunday).

Octagon Earthworks (5): these lie some 2km from the Great Circle in a nicer suburb of Newark. Access is limited due to the active use of the site as a golf course. There is a small wooden watchtower just outside the earthen walls that you can climb to get an overview.

The Issues

Despite all the efforts of the good people at Fort Ancient, I could not bring myself to rate this site higher than two stars. It’s because it comes with issues, notably:

1. It is hard to grasp what ‘Hopewell’ really means. It wasn’t a people, it may not even have been a culture (the guide at Fort Ancient called it "a set of behaviors"). You ‘just’ have these geometrically precise earthworks in what is now southern Ohio that were made in roughly the same period (1-400 A.D.). Their context still is poorly understood.
2. The diverse management and lack of common interpretation. It feels like a mishmash of sites – because it is. They are managed by 3 different organizations and lie quite far from each other: there are 3 hours of driving between the 5 that I visited. The organizations operate independently, have different ways of funding, different research objectives and their own ways of interpreting their site(s). They "have to" collaborate with dozens of Native tribal leaders who view them as the works of their ancestors.
3. The infamous Golf Course is still in use at the Octagon Earthworks component. ICOMOS referred to the issue as if it were done and dusted, but it isn’t. At the time of inscription, the golf club still was allowed to use the site and no settlement has been reached on what needs to be done (paid?) to evict them. In the meantime, regular visitors can hardly appreciate the site and I guess some alterations have to be made to bring it back to its original state (I did notice a paved access ramp for golf carts for example).