Ohio's Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are about to be a UNESCO World Heritage site

Updated September 16, 2023 at 10:39 AM ET

This country's Grand Canyon, with its awe-inspiring layers of sculpted rich, red rock, is a marvel that draws millions of tourists to gape at its beauty or climb its rugged walls. The Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu in Peru is a collection of dramatic landscapes and buildings that are considered the most valuable remains of the Inca civilization.

The Grand Canyon and Machu Picchu are UNESCO World Heritage sites. Of just over a thousand sites worldwide deemed of universal importance and value to humankind, there are only 24 in the United States that carry that distinction.

Now, after more than a decade of work and planning, ancient earthworks in Ohio are poised to join them.

Delegates from around the world are meeting in Saudi Arabia to decide which world marvels will next become UNESCO World Heritage sites.

What are the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks?

The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks encompass eight sites — a collection of historic earthen mounds built by Indigenous peoples:

• Fort Ancient Earthworks and Nature Preserve
• Hopewell Culture National Historical Park (five geographically separate elements)
• Mound City Group
• Hopewell Mound Group
• Seip Earthworks
• High Bank Earthworks
• Hopeton Earthworks
• Newark Earthworks

All the sites were built 1,600 to 2,000 years ago by peoples formerly referred to as Hopewell.

"In the past we might sometimes say 'Hopewell culture' or 'Hopewell people,' but what we really understand 'Hopewell' to be now is not a new peoples," explains Bill Kennedy, site manager and site archeologist at Fort Ancient Earthworks and Nature Preserve. "It's a new religious movement of people. It's happening all throughout eastern North America. It reaches a fluorescence, though, in southern Ohio that it doesn't reach anywhere else."

Fort Ancient is located about 45 minutes north of Cincinnati, high atop a river bluff. Despite names like 'Fort' Ancient, the earthworks served as ceremonial centers, not military ones.

"Fort Ancient is one of the types of earthworks that these people build – it is what we will call a hilltop enclosure. This is the type of earthwork we see mostly in southwest Ohio," he explains. "Whereas in south central or eastern Ohio, we see mostly geometric earthworks. Earthworks are in the shapes of circles, squares, or octagons."

The mounds across Ohio range in height from three to more than 30 feet, and are miles long in some places.

Fort Ancient is huge. It is the largest hilltop enclosure in North America, with room to fit the World Heritage site the Great Pyramid of Giza inside.

"Just the walls alone of this site," Kennedy says of Fort Ancient, "are the equivalent of 125 million basket loads of soil at 30 pounds apiece."

"But how does such a relatively small group of people build something so monumental," he asks.

It's a pretty easy answer, he jokes.

"Slowly, really slowly."

Marvels of engineering and astronomy

It might be unusual to consider huge mounds of dirt as anything significant, however, UNESCO calls the earthworks a "masterpiece of human creative genius." That's one of the criteria for inclusion on the World Heritage List. Another calls for bearing "exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared."

The design and construction of the Earthworks show the people during this early era

had a clear understanding of geometry, architecture, and solar and lunar alignments and multi-year cycles.

Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe, who was involved in the earthworks nomination, also sees its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a step toward combating racist and ignorant stereotypes about his people and his ancestors.

"They're great civil engineers. They're artists, they're astronomers, mathematicians, and for my people, that's not the way that Shawnee people, or any Indigenous peoples in this country, are typically portrayed in media," he says.

In addition, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks address gaps in the World Heritage List identified by the World Heritage Committee. Specifically, a lack of sites representing pre-contact Indigenous American sacred architecture and sites that represent early understandings of science, culture and astronomy.

All together, 54 nominations are being considered at this month's UNESCO World Heritage conference. No locations were inscribed last year. Russia was to chair the World Heritage Committee, and a number of countries, including the U.S., objected given Russia's war on Ukraine — which puts half a dozen World Heritage Sites in Ukraine at risk.

Ohio's decade-long effort for World Heritage Site recognition

Jennifer Aultman is chief historic sites officer at Ohio History Connection, which worked with the National Park Service on the nomination. She says this day has been in the works since before 2008, with thousands of hours of research, meetings, site visits and finally, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, a 330-page nomination dossier.

"When we sent this off, it was New Year's Eve of 2021. FedExed it off to one of the Department of the Interior employees, to his home, because everyone was working from home. Then he needed to get it to the State Department, but they met in a parking lot and passed off a box because no one was working in the office," she recalls. "And then someone from (the) State Department actually carried it, I think, to Paris and hand delivered it."

Aultman jokes World Heritage status doesn't come with a pot of money at the end of the rainbow, but it could be an economic driver, attracting tourists from around the world to see and experience something so monumental.

"That's really an incredible idea — that there's something that all people, no matter their nationality, no matter where they grew up, that we should care about, because they help us understand what it means to be human," she says. "Then there are more local reasons. We work with our tribal partners, who (were) removed from Ohio in the 19th century, and this is a way to help elevate their heritage."

Today no federally recognized tribes remain in Ohio. They were all forcibly removed in the 17 and 1800s. Yet it was their ancestors who created these massive feats of design and engineering.

Glenna Wallace is chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and has been active in the World Heritage process. She says inscription on the World Heritage List is part of her mission to teach people about the earthworks that her ancestors built.

She says their inclusion would not be an ending, but another beginning.

"Our people may have been forced away from that place, and they may have disappeared, but what they built, what they constructed, what their values were, that's still there and that should be protected," she states.

"That's the reason for World Heritage."

In becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site, Wallace says she hopes the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks will finally attain the reverence and respect they deserve.

They will also become the 25th location in the United States to earn the coveted UNESCO distinction.

Copyright 2023 91.7 WVXU. To see more, visit 91.7 WVXU.