Newark Earthworks: Hopewell Geometry and Moon Alignments in Ohio

The Newark Earthworks in Licking County, Ohio, are the largest set of geometric earthen enclosures known anywhere in the world. Built by people of the Hopewell culture roughly between AD 1 and AD 400, the complex of circles, squares, an octagon and long parallel walls once covered more than four square miles. Its Octagon is aligned with remarkable precision to the 18.6-year cycle of the moon.

Background: the Hopewell world

The Hopewell were not a single tribe or empire. The name describes a shared tradition of ceremony, trade and earthwork building among Native American communities, centred in southern Ohio and the Illinois Valley, that followed the earlier Adena culture.

Hopewell people lived in small farming and foraging settlements. Yet they took part in exchange networks reaching across much of North America, bringing obsidian from the Yellowstone region, copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the southern Appalachians and shells from the Gulf of Mexico. Earthwork centres such as Newark were where these goods and people came together.

The earthworks

The Newark complex was laid out along a valley near the meeting of the Licking River’s branches. Its main parts were:

• The Great Circle: an enclosure about 365 metres (1,200 feet) in diameter, with walls up to about 4 metres high near the entrance and a deep ditch inside the wall. A low mound, sometimes called Eagle Mound, stands at the centre.
• The Octagon: an eight-sided enclosure of about 20 hectares (50 acres), joined by a short avenue to the Observatory Circle, about 320 metres across.
• The Square: a smaller enclosure, now known as the Wright Earthworks, of which only a fragment survives.
• Parallel walls: long walled avenues linked the parts, and one may have run many kilometres south towards other Hopewell centres.

The layout shows sophisticated geometry. The Octagon and Observatory Circle are linked by a common unit of measurement, and the same proportions appear at other Hopewell sites.

The lunar alignments

In 1982 two physicists from Earlham College, Ray Hively and Robert Horn, published a study showing that the Octagon’s walls and avenue point to the moon’s extreme rising and setting points. The moon’s horizon positions swing between northern and southern limits over a cycle of about 18.6 years.

At Newark, the northernmost moonrise lines up with the axis through the Observatory Circle and the Octagon. Several other alignments fit the same cycle. Tracking such a slow pattern would have required careful observation across generations.

How the earthworks were used

No large town grew up inside the Newark enclosures, and archaeologists have found few signs of permanent houses within them. Most researchers see Newark as a ceremonial centre where scattered communities gathered at certain times for rituals, feasts, trade, funerals and perhaps the renewal of alliances.

Building the walls required moving millions of basket-loads of earth by hand, without draught animals or metal tools. That work itself may have been a communal ritual that bound groups together. Some archaeologists have suggested that Newark drew pilgrims from a wide area, given its size and the exotic materials found at Hopewell sites.

Burial mounds associated with the complex, many now destroyed, once contained cremations and offerings. Elsewhere in Ohio, such Hopewell mounds held copper ornaments, mica cut-outs and carved stone pipes.

Destruction and survival

When settlers founded the town of Newark in the early nineteenth century, much of the complex was ploughed, built over or cut by the Ohio and Erie Canal and railways. Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis mapped the earthworks for their 1848 survey, the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution, preserving a record of what was later lost.

The Great Circle served as the county fairground in the second half of the nineteenth century. From 1910 the Octagon was leased to a country club and covered by a golf course. After a lengthy legal dispute, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the Ohio History Connection could end the lease, allowing full public access.

Myths and facts

Myth: The earthworks were built by a vanished non-Native race of “Mound Builders”. Fact: This nineteenth-century idea, often used to justify taking Native land, has been disproved. The builders were ancestors of Native American peoples.

Myth: The “Newark Holy Stones” prove ancient Hebrews lived in Ohio. Fact: The inscribed stones found by David Wyrick near Newark in 1860 are widely regarded by archaeologists as forgeries.

Timeline

• c. AD 1–400: Hopewell people build and use the Newark Earthworks (dates vary by source).
• 1848: Squier and Davis publish their survey in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.
• 1860: The “Holy Stones” are found near Newark.
• 1910: The Octagon is leased to a country club and later becomes a golf course.
• 1982: Hively and Horn publish the lunar alignment study.
• 2023: The Ohio Supreme Court rules on the Octagon lease; UNESCO inscribes the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.

Why it matters

Newark shows that Native American societies of the Ohio Valley combined monumental engineering, geometry and long-term astronomy two thousand years ago. Like Watson Brake and later centres such as Cahokia, it overturns the old myth that North America had no ancient monumental architecture.