Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Hopewell
1st-century BCE, 1st-century, 2nd-century, 3rd-century, 4th-century
Heath, OH: 455 Hebron Road
94%
Great Circle Earthwork. 100 BCE-400 CE
This is far and away the greatest prehistoric earthwork in North America, more significant aesthetically than any of the Woodland effigies that dot Ohio and Iowa and Wisconsin, more magnificent than even the Mississippian mounds at Cahokia. Its greatness resides partly in its size, partly in the rare state of its preservation. It is an enormous circle — you could play several games of football inside it — enclosed by a bump and a ditch, with an entryway at one end and a squat eagle sculpted in relief at its center. Between the outsides of this eagle and any edge of the enclosing circle lie 100 feet of flat ground or more. To experience the earthwork is to feel both placeless and precisely located at once. The walls of the circle and the bird at its core articulate a site — obviously a sacral site — that's distinct from the world outside it, but then when you're inside you're put at a remove from these very forms that have created your "inness": the ditch around the interior of the circle makes the arcing wall beyond it into something of a figment, literally out of reach; the expanse of grass in all directions swallows the animal and the moat and the wall altogether, and you along with them. It may be that there was more going on in the circle's center — structures, ceremony — when it was in living use some millennia ago, but that's lost to us. What remains is a place that alienates as it ensconces and even soothes us, that bares all the bigness and latency of existence while making us feel dwarved before it, but also involved. There's religion to this, though absent (stripped, perhaps, by the years) of any pretence to theology — it's a deep humanity. (TFS, 2025)