Mound City Group: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, National Park Service

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park is located near the town of Chillicothe in south-central Ohio. The Mound City Group is one of the park’s five noncontiguous mound sites, together consisting of 1,170 acres and primary constructed along the waterways. This particular site, positioned along the west side of the Scioto River, serves as the location of park headquarters. The entire property consists of 120-acres, including a visitor center, administrative buildings, maintenance facilities, trails, and the mounds and earthworks themselves. The cultural landscape is defined as the 13-acre area within the earthwork walls, as well as two outlying mounds. The period of significance for the Mound City Group landscape corresponds to the period of time during which Native Americans of the Hopewell culture occupied the Ohio Valley, approximately 200 B.C. to 500 A.D. The cultural landscape inventory describes the term Hopewell as a broad network of beliefs and practices exhibited by different Native American groups over a large portion of eastern North America. The culture is characterized by the construction of earthen wall enclosures, often built in geometric patterns, and mounds of various shapes. The Hopewell culture is also characterized by an extensive trade network and use of waterways to import goods from as far away as the Rocky Mountains and parts of the Atlantic coast. The Mound City Group is one of the most important areas in preserving the expression of the Hopewell culture. First named during the 1846 excavation by Squier and Davis, the site’s importance was nationally recognized in 1923 when President Warren Harding established the Mound City Group National Monument. It was entered into the National Register in 1978, significant for exhibiting the distinctive characteristics of a type and period of construction, as well as for having yielded a significant amount of prehistoric information. Of the more than 135,000 artifacts found within the park, the majority have been excavated from the Mound City Group. The earthen remnants of the Hopwellian peoples convey an image of complex social, political, and religious systems, suggesting a society that was both highly specialized and remarkably stable. Their years of occupation and use of the area also reflect critical periods of agricultural development and communication. The mounds were constructed for a variety of purposes; for example, the Mound City Group appears to have been one of the primary centers for ceremonial preparation and burial of the dead. The landscape, which contains at least 25 mounds, is relatively flat and surrounded by wooded areas on the north, south, and east sides of the earthworks. The earthen walls rise to about 3 to 4 feet high and enclose one elliptical mound and multiple dome-shaped mounds. The walls and mounds are now grass-covered, and many have been reconstructed to appear as they did when surveyed by Squier and Davis. The mounds, already reduced by natural erosion, agriculture, and excavations, were nearly entirely leveled when Camp Sherman was built on the site during World War I (1917). Although the mound reconstructions are not prehistoric, they serve the interpretive function of depicting the original spatial layout and providing a view that is more similar to the historic appearance. Despite numerous alterations to the landscape, the Mound City Group retains integrity in aspects of location, design, setting, feeling, and association, and the landscape features contribute to an understanding of the site’s historic character and importance.

Mound City Group: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, National Park Service

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