Rediscovering Thousands of Years of Landscape Artistry in North America
Before the arrival of Europeans, the North American landscape east of the Rockies was marked everywhere by Indigenous earthworks in the form of sculpted burial mounds, beautiful effigies, and monumental geometric shapes. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they were constructed by various Indigenous cultural groups over thousands of years, but most are now lost. The beauty and purpose of those few that remain are slowly being rediscovered as scholars collaborate with Native people to enlighten us.
Click images below to enlarge.
Before the arrival of Europeans, the North American landscape east of the Rockies was marked everywhere by Indigenous earthworks in the form of sculpted burial mounds, beautiful effigies, and monumental geometric shapes. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they were constructed by various Indigenous cultural groups over thousands of years, but most are now lost. The beauty and purpose of those few that remain are slowly being rediscovered as scholars collaborate with Native people to enlighten us.
Click images below to enlarge.
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Earthworks In Your State and Across North America. Working on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas spent years surveying Indigenous earthworks in the United States east of the Rockies, producing an 1894 map pinpointing their locations.
The Continent-Wide Influence of the Hopewell Culture
In the early centuries of the first millenium CE, archaeological evidence tells us that the monumental Hopewell earthworks of what is now Southern Ohio drew pilgrims from across North America. Obsidian that could only have come from the Wyoming-Idaho area, copper from the Northern Great Lakes, mica from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, shells and shark teeth from the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts -- all were found at Ohio Hopewell sites. The shaded areas indicate population settlements with evidence of significant Hopewell-influence. Ohio's Eight Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks
These UNESCO World Heirtage Sites stretch across three counties. Courtesy of Ohio History Connection. Cultural Appropriation
For as long as Europeans have lived in the Americas, wild speculation about the origin of North American earthworks served to deprive Native people of credit for their rich contributions to our cultural heritage in the form of landscape art. The Newark Holy Stones (at right) were just one example of phoney evidence meant to erase or belittle Indigenous cultural acheivement. Sciota Valley, Ohio
Sixty miles south of the Newark Octagon, the city of Chillicothe was surrounded by ancient earthwork sites, as rich a collection of monumental Hopewell land art as any. From Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, World Digital Library, Library of Congress. |
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Illinois and Chicago-area Earthworks.
The Carl Dilg map from the 1880-1890s showed a "lizard" effigy mound located about a mile south of Wrigley Field in Chicago. There's no hint of it today. Courtesy Chicago History Museum, Charles A. Dilg Collection. A statewide map can be seen here. It is still possible to see remnants of ancient mounds in Northern Illinois, at places such as Briscoe Mounds in Channahon, Winfield Mounds Forest Preserve near West Chicago, and at Beloit College just north of Rockford and the Illinois border. Of course, downstate, east of St. Louis, is the spectacular Cahokia Mounds, built by the Mississippian culture that arose some 600 years after the Hopewell culture in Ohio. Cahokia became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1982. |
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