Newark Earthworks

The Newark Earthworks were raised by people archaeologists call the Hopewell, a name for a widespread ancient way of life rather than a single tribe. They were the ancestors of Native American peoples, part of the continuous human story of the Ohio country, which is the ancestral homeland of the Shawnee, Miami, Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot, and other nations. Those nations were forcibly removed from Ohio in the 1800s, and their descendant communities continue today, largely in Oklahoma, and remain connected to these sacred places.

The Hopewell of the Scioto and Licking valleys were at the center of a trade and ceremonial network that reached across the continent, drawing materials like copper, mica, obsidian, and seashell from thousands of miles away. Great earthwork centers like Newark were gathering places, likely drawing people from across the region for ceremony, exchange, and the marking of important astronomical and ritual events.

The scale and precision of the Newark Earthworks are what stun visitors and scholars alike. The Great Circle is an enormous ring of earthen wall enclosing a huge open space, its bank rising well above head height in places, all of it heaped up basket by basket without metal tools, wheels, or draft animals. The Octagon, connected to a large circle, encloses ground vast enough to contain many football fields.

Even more remarkable is the mathematics embedded in the works. The circles and the octagon share consistent units of measure and geometric relationships, evidence of careful planning and a shared body of knowledge. The builders laid out these giant forms across the landscape with an accuracy that speaks to sophisticated surveying and design, achievements that overturn old assumptions about the ancient peoples of North America.

Perhaps the most extraordinary discovery about the Newark Earthworks concerns the Octagon. Researchers found that its walls and openings are aligned to the points on the horizon where the moon rises and sets across its long, complex cycle, a pattern that takes over eighteen years to complete before repeating. Tracking that cycle requires generations of patient observation, and the Octagon appears to encode that knowledge in earth.

This makes the site a monumental astronomical instrument as well as a ceremonial center, a place where the movements of the sky were observed, honored, and built into the landscape itself. That an ancient people could measure and memorialize so subtle a celestial rhythm, and do so on such a colossal scale, is a large part of why these earthworks are counted among the wonders of the ancient world.

As Newark grew, much of the ancient complex was plowed, built over, or lost, and for many years part of the Octagon lay within a private golf course, a source of long controversy. Yet key pieces survived, protected as public sites, and in 2023 the Newark Earthworks joined seven other Ohio sites as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks World Heritage Site, the first such site in the state, with growing efforts to open the grounds more fully to the public.

Today visitors can walk within the Great Circle and view the Octagon, standing where people gathered two thousand years ago. Because these are sacred places and places of burial and ceremony, guests are asked to treat them with care and respect. Interpretive resources nearby help make sense of the geometry and astronomy, turning what might look like grassy ridges into a window onto a brilliant ancient civilization.

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