Qualla: Hopewell Culture National Historical Park

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephanie A. Terry, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two thousand years before European surveyors arrived in the Ohio Valley, someone was already measuring the landscape with extraordinary precision. Near present-day Chillicothe, the Hopewell people built enormous earthen walls in the shapes of perfect circles, squares, and octagons - some more than a thousand feet across - and aligned them to the movements of the sun and moon. They carried earth in handwoven baskets, load after load, to raise walls that still stand today. In 2023, UNESCO recognized these earthworks as a World Heritage Site, placing them alongside Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids as monuments of global significance. The Hopewell Culture National Historical Park preserves six of these sites across Ross County, scattered along the Scioto River valley in a landscape the Hopewell people shaped with purpose we are still working to understand.

Image: Stephanie A. Terry | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: Geometry in Earth

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS, Public domain. The Hopewell culture flourished from about 200 BC to AD 500, and its people built on a monumental scale. At Hopeton Earthworks, a circle and a similarly sized square sit side by side, connected by parallel earthen walls that follow the sun's path on the winter solstice. At High B...

Image: NPS | Public domain

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: Cities of the Dead

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Moorehead, Public domain. Mound City, the park's most accessible site and home to its visitor center, contains 23 earthen mounds enclosed within a roughly square earthen wall. Each mound covers the remains of a charnel house. The Hopewell cremated their dead, then burned the wooden charnel houses and rais...

Image: Moorehead | Public domain

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: Lost, Destroyed, and Saved

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS, Public domain. European Americans first mapped these earthworks in the 1840s. Archaeologists Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis excavated Mound City and amassed a large collection of artifacts that ended up at the British Museum in London, where much of it remains today. Then came d...

Image: NPS | Public domain

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: A World Heritage Landscape

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ephraim George Squier and en:Edwin Hamilton Davis, Public domain. The six sites within the park each offer a different window into Hopewell culture. Spruce Hill Earthworks stands apart from the others, enclosed by a stone wall rather than earthen embankments, perched on a hill overlooking Paint Creek with four entry points that suggest ceremoni...

Image: Ephraim George Squier and en:Edwin Hamilton Davis | Public domain