Hopewell Culture: Earthworks and Trade Networks of Ancient Ohio

The Hopewell culture is the name archaeologists give to a remarkable tradition of Native American communities in eastern North America, which flourished from about 100 BC to AD 500. Its heartland lay in the river valleys of southern Ohio, where people built huge geometric earthworks of circles, squares and octagons. Through a far-reaching exchange network they gathered copper, mica, shells and obsidian from across the continent and turned them into some of the finest art of ancient North America.

What “Hopewell” means

Hopewell was not an empire, a city or a single people. It describes a shared set of ceremonies, burial customs, artistic styles and exchange practices that spread among many communities, especially in Ohio and Illinois. These communities probably spoke different languages and had their own local identities.

The name comes from a farm in Ross County, Ohio, owned by Mordecai Cloud Hopewell. In 1891–1892 the archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead dug into the mounds there to collect objects for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The term stuck, even though it refers to a 19th-century landowner rather than to the ancient people.

In 1964 the archaeologist Joseph Caldwell introduced the phrase “Hopewell Interaction Sphere” to describe the network of exchange and shared ideas that linked regions from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast.

Origins and way of life

The Hopewell tradition grew out of earlier cultures of the Eastern Woodlands, especially the Adena culture of the Ohio valley, which had built burial mounds since around 500 BC. The two traditions overlapped for some time, and there is no sharp break between them.

Hopewell people did not live in large towns. Most lived in small, scattered hamlets of a few households along river valleys. They hunted deer and other game, fished and gathered nuts, and they cultivated a group of native plants known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex, including goosefoot, maygrass, knotweed, sumpweed, squash and sunflower. Maize was known but played only a minor role.

The earthworks

The most striking legacy of Hopewell is its monumental earthworks. Communities moved millions of basket-loads of soil to build walls and mounds laid out in precise geometric shapes: circles, squares and octagons, often joined by long parallel walls.

The Newark Earthworks in Licking County, Ohio, once covered several square kilometres. Its Octagon is joined to a circle and aligned with the points where the moon rises and sets over its 18.6-year cycle. Fort Ancient, in Warren County, is a hilltop enclosure with more than 5 km of earthen walls. In the Scioto valley around Chillicothe, sites such as the Mound City Group, Hopewell Mound Group, Seip, High Bank and Hopeton contained enclosures and burial mounds.

Many of these structures were used for gatherings, ceremonies and the burial of honoured dead, often in wooden charnel houses later covered by mounds. They were built by communities working together over generations, without cities or a central state.

A continental exchange network

Hopewell ceremonial sites contain materials from an extraordinary range of places. Copper came from the Lake Superior region, mica from the southern Appalachian Mountains, conch shells and shark and alligator teeth from the Gulf Coast. Obsidian came from the Yellowstone region in present-day Wyoming, and grizzly bear teeth from the Rocky Mountains.

In return, Ohio’s colourful Flint Ridge flint was carried widely. Archaeologists debate how these materials moved. They may have travelled through chains of exchange between neighbouring groups, or people may have made long journeys to sacred sources and ceremonial centres. Either way, the network connected much of eastern North America.

Crafts and art

Hopewell artisans turned these materials into objects of great skill. They cut sheets of mica into silhouettes of hands, claws and human figures, hammered copper into ear spools, breastplates and headdresses, and carved stone platform pipes topped with realistic animals such as birds, frogs and otters.

A single mound at Mound City contained a cache of around 200 platform pipes. Many of the finest objects were deliberately placed in burials or ritual deposits, suggesting that they were made for ceremony rather than everyday use.

Burials and society

Hopewell burials give the clearest view of how society was organised. Some individuals were laid out on log platforms or clay basins inside large wooden buildings, accompanied by copper, pearls, mica and finely made tools. Others were cremated. When a building had served its purpose, it was often burned or dismantled and covered with earth to create a mound.

The richest burials suggest that some people held special roles, perhaps as ritual leaders, healers or heads of kin groups. However, archaeologists have found no palaces, no royal tombs on the scale of a dynasty and no sign of a ruling capital. Many scholars think that status was earned through ceremonial knowledge and generosity rather than inherited power.

The great mounds could be very large. Mound 25 at the Hopewell Mound Group, the largest known Hopewell mound, was about 150 metres long and around 10 metres high before excavation. Such projects required many people to gather at the same place, which may itself have been one of their purposes.

Decline and later history

From about AD 400–500 the building of large geometric earthworks stopped, and long-distance exchange declined. Possible explanations include changes in climate, growing populations, increased conflict and the spread of the bow and arrow, which changed hunting and warfare. The people themselves did not disappear; their descendants lived on in the region, and later cultures, such as the Mississippian builders of Cahokia, developed their own mound traditions.

Many Hopewell sites were damaged by farming and urban growth after European American settlement. In 1848 Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis published Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution, which recorded many earthworks before they were ploughed away. Mound City was largely levelled when the US Army built Camp Sherman there during the First World War, and its mounds were later reconstructed.

Myths and facts

Myth: the mounds were built by a lost race. In the 19th century many Americans claimed that the earthworks were made by a vanished people rather than by Native Americans. Research by the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, summarised by Cyrus Thomas in 1894, showed that the mounds were built by the ancestors of Native Americans.

Myth: the earthworks were forts. A few hilltop enclosures were once interpreted as defensive, but most Hopewell earthworks have gaps, ditches inside the walls or astronomical alignments that make more sense as ceremonial spaces.

Timeline

• c. 100 BC: Hopewell ceremonial traditions emerge in Ohio and Illinois.
• c. AD 1–400: Main period of earthwork building and long-distance exchange.
• c. AD 400–500: Construction of geometric earthworks ends; exchange declines.
• 1848: Squier and Davis publish Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.
• 1891–1892: Warren K. Moorehead excavates the Hopewell farm mounds.
• 1923: Mound City Group National Monument is established.
• 1992: The site becomes part of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.
• September 2023: UNESCO inscribes the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks as a World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

The Hopewell earthworks show that people without cities, writing or kings could plan and build monuments on a scale comparable to those of many ancient states. Their exchange network linked much of a continent two thousand years ago. Today they are recognised as world heritage and as an important part of the history of Native American peoples.