In Search of Ancient North America
EXCERPT
The scene is one of faded glory, but glory nonetheless. On an August morning so new and fresh that dew glistens in the fields, drenching all in lush color, Mark Lynott and I peer out the window at a gentle roll of land just north of Chillicothe. Along the quiet country road beside us, morning glory threads the grasses in a wild tangle of alabaster blooms; trumpet vine, escaped from some long vanished farmhouse garden, splashes fence posts with brilliant orange. But ahead, in the newly mown field, nature is trimmed and tamed. Lynott, a tall, husky Midwesterner with a boyish thatch of straight dark hair, hunches over the steering wheel and gazes into the distance, arms crossed. "Right here in front of us," he says finally, pointing a finger to a barely perceptible swell of land, "you can see a little bit of rise where the hay is piled up. That's one of the walls."
We have come here this morning, Lynott and I, to see one of the fragile mysteries of North American archaeology - an immense geometric riddle known as the Hopeton Earthworks. Built more than a millennium and a half ago and battered by modern plowshares, the massive earthen maze has nearly tumbled. But in the early morning light, shadows outline its surviving mounds. I follow Lynott's gaze. Directly ahead of where we sit, he explains, 12-foot-high earthen walls once framed a giant square: more than 100 grassy baseball diamonds could have nestled comfortably inside. Nearby, another great wall measuring 40 feet wide inscribed a huge circle. In the distance, two parallel embankments coursed straight and true - as if drawn with the edge of some gargantuan ruler - for nearly half a mile southwest to the floodplain of the Scioto.
Sitting here in the early morning light, envisioning this great maze, I am humbled. Like the famous standing stones of Europe - the menhirs of Brittany or Stonehenge in England - Hopeton reaches out beyond the strict confines of time and place. Translating faith, belief and knowledge into the pure beauty of geometry, it transcends generations and cultures. And Hopeton was no mere isolated work. Less than a mile north of here stood another colossal square enclosure, Cedar Banks; to the east, just about the Scioto, lay the earthen edifices of Mound City. "What's so spooky," says Lynott, shaking his head solemnly, "is how many of these things existed at tone time." Indeed, nearly two dozen of these geometric wonders - combinations of circles, squares, octagons, straight lines, and a miscellany of mounds and embankments - once graced the river valleys of southern Ohio. In one twelve-mile strip of the Scioto River alone, eight of these works crowned the terraces.