Native America by Kenneth L. Feder

Author:Kenneth L. Feder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2025-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Sacred Spaces

Along with burial mounds, the Hopewell used relatively narrow and tall earth mounds to demarcate spaces in a way that appears to have been an effort to isolate and differentiate those enclosed spaces from the surrounding area. Some of these encompassing mounds followed the irregular path delineating the flat top of a bluff, thereby enclosing the irregular space at the top of the bluff. Some of these mounds reflect, on a sometimes huge scale, a geometric delineation, enclosing a round, rectangular, square, or even octagonal space.

For example, in Newark, Ohio, one element of the Newark Earthworks State Memorial is the Great Circle Earthworks. Those earthworks represent, just as the name implies, a mound enclosing a circular space of more than 100,000 square meters (26 acres). The mound encircling the space is generally about 2.5 meters (8 feet) high. Piling up that dirt created what amounts to a moat about 1.5 meters (5 feet) deep around the entirety of the space. The mound-enclosed circle is about 365 meters (1,200 feet) in diameter, and the circumference is 1,150 meters (3,800 feet; in other words, the circular mound is that length around). I have seen a jogger running along the top of that ridge, which is a little more than one kilometer. So a decent workout. In the center of the space is a low-lying mound that seems to resemble an effigy of a bird, perhaps an eagle—though, as at Poverty Point, erosion makes that difficult to confirm.

The Octagon Earthworks is another part of the Newark Earthworks State Memorial. It consists of a series of segmented linear mounds that together enclose a vast octagon of about 200,000 square meters (50 acres). At the southwest side of the octagonal enclosure is an opening, a break in that part of the enclosure. The break (about 20 meters, or 70 feet, wide) is flanked by two linear mounds that run at about ninety degrees from the adjacent octagon walls and connect the octagon with another enclosure, this one circular and measuring about 80,000 square meters (20 acres). Part of the southwest wall of the circle is a mound far more massive and taller than the rest of the enclosure walls. The entire site is truly stunning and looks like, and is, a beautiful landscape sculpture (Figure 12.4).

FIGURE 12.4. Drawing of the Octagon Earthworks, part of the Newark Earthworks in Newark, Ohio. As you can see in the drawing, the octagon encloses an area of 50 acres (over 200,000 square meters). The attached circular earthwork encloses an area of 20 acres (80,000 square meters). From Squire and Davis 1848

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