The Hopewell network

Hopewell is not a people and not a kingdom. It is the name archaeologists have given a set of forms, rituals and exchange relations that over four centuries linked half of North America without anyone governing it.

The earthworks

In Ohio lie geometric enclosures of earth: perfect circles, squares and octagons, some large enough to hold several football pitches. The circle at Newark has the same area as the square beside it — they knew the relationship between the area of a circle and of a square, and built to it.

The Newark octagon is also aligned to the moon's extremes. The moon has a cycle of 18.6 years, and finding its limits requires observation across at least a generation. Somebody kept track, and passed the knowledge on.

Timeline

100 BCE

the first Hopewell-type burial mounds in Ohio

100 CE

the network at its height; the earthworks at Newark and Chillicothe

200

obsidian from Yellowstone and shells from the Gulf in the same grave

400

construction slows

500

the network is gone

1894

the Smithsonian refutes the myth of a "mound builder race"

2023

the earthworks become a UNESCO World Heritage Site

What travelled

The graves hold obsidian from the Rockies, copper from Lake Superior, mica from the Appalachians, shark teeth and shells from the Atlantic and the Gulf, and grizzly teeth from the west. That is over three thousand kilometres from end to end.

But it was not traded as we think of trade. The materials almost always end as grave goods or ritual objects, not as tools. It resembles pilgrimage and gift exchange more than a market.

No central power

There is no capital, no palace, no sign of an army. The villages were small and scattered. Yet they built works requiring tens of thousands of days of labour, and did so to shared forms across an enormous area.

It is a kind of society that does not fit the usual sequence from village to chiefdom to state, and that is what makes Hopewell interesting: coordination at scale with nobody commanding.

The myth that filled the gap

In the nineteenth century it was widely believed the mounds had been built by a vanished race — Phoenicians, Vikings, Israelites, anyone but the ancestors of the people then being displaced. Cyrus Thomas's survey for the Smithsonian refuted it in 1894, with excavation. The myth persisted for decades regardless, because it was useful.