If you surf the internet intelligently, one of the things you discover is that there is a vast amount of useful knowledge out there about all manner of things that even a well-educated person wouldn’t necessarily know. Recently I came across an article in the BBC travel section about the incredible mound structures in Ohio built by the Hopewell Culture of Indigenous Americans dating back 2000 years. These structures are vast and built with extreme measurement precision. Like Stonehenge in England, archeologists speculate these structures were for ritual, astronomical, and community gathering purposes. According to the article:
The Hopewell Culture, a network of Native American societies that gathered from as far away as Montana and the Gulf of Mexico between roughly 100 BCE and 500 CE and were connected by a series of trade routes. Their earthworks in Ohio consist of shapes–like circles, squares and octagons–that were often connected to each other. Archaeologists are only now beginning to understand the sophistication of these engineering marvels.
Apparently long before Europeans arrived, there was a complex confederation of Indigenous peoples, connected by waterways that spanned the entire country. It wasn’t just isolated tribes here and there, it was a full-fledged nation.
[T]he circumference of The Great Circle is equal to the perimeter of the perfect square that it was connected to, and that the area of that perfect square is equal to the area of the [Observatory Circle] that’s connected to The Octagon.
Although there is an effort underway to declare these structures a UNESCO world heritage site, at present The Octagon is being used as a golf course. How ironic!
Even though the Hopewell civilization is long gone, some present-day tribes still remember and attempt to preserve its legacy. Chief Glenna Wallace of the Eastern Shawnee says of the Hopewell structures:
We may not have been responsible for building or creating them, but I know that my ancestors lived there and that my ancestors protected them and respected them.
Europeans throughout history colonized wherever they went, greedy for land, gold, and power. Their technologies made the world we live in today, which still often glorifies those colonial values. What is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, if not a war of conquest, little different than the Spanish conquest of ancient Mexico or the Portuguese invasion and slave trading in ancient Brazil? What happened to the Indigenous descendants of the Hopewell Culture is still happening now.
It’s so sad to contemplate that the world as it once was, with all its nature-sensitive sophistication, is all but gone, replaced by a cruder worldview that we have myopia and ignorance to call “modern.” Yes, it’s modern in the sense of modern technology, but our gifts of technology have a Faustian shadow. We have given away so much of our heart and soul as human beings to acquire the glitz and glitter that satisfies us no more deeply than cotton candy.
No so-called “modern” society today is building a monument to their worship of the moon and sun, as the Hopewell Culture—just like the Incas, the Mayans, the Druids, the Egyptians, and so many other ancient peoples. Today, the moon and sun are just objects of scientific study—or in the case of the moon, a new source of precious metals for which the great powers of the world are itching to compete.
Let’s fasten our seatbelts for the upcoming War of the Moon, and as we do try to remember that there was a time when the moon was not coveted for its metals but worshipped for its mystery.
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Watch the National Park Service’s Video:
This is the official 19-minute orientation film of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto
