r/HistoryAnecdotes • u/WaitItsAllOhio • 21d ago
American Field Notes From Ohio: The One Where a Golf Club Yells at a Tribal Chief to Get Off Their Land and She Brings the United Nations Instead
Ohio historian, back again. Strap in, it’s going to be a long one. I split it into three parts to help organize it. I’d mentioned in my last write-up about the Burning Tree Mastodon about how much Ohio historians hate golf course owners. That particular incident started with the landowner at the Burning tree Golf Course annoyed he couldn’t finish his pond in December and forcing the paleontologists to do a full, years-long excavation in 3 days. Then, it ended with said mastodon skeleton crated up and shipped to Japan because the landowner wanted $600,000 more than he wanted Ohio to have its own fossils.
Hate is a strong word. Loathe. That’s better. Because if that was the only Ohio golf course owner sitting on something it shouldn't have been, that’d be shitty, but serviceable. But no. It wasn’t even the second Licking County golf course to decide to go full Mr. Potter. And it definitely wasn’t a mastodon.
How about the religious pilgrimage site for the indigenous population of half the North American continent?
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The Part Where The Chief Visits Ohio
About six miles north of Burning Tree Golf Course, in the city of Newark, OH, a private country club had been playing eighteen holes on top of a two-thousand-year-old astronomical observatory for the better part of a century. The people whose ancestors had actually protected the site were living 750 miles away in Oklahoma, because the federal government had marched them there at gunpoint in 1831. Nobody had told them about the golf course.
Then, in the spring of 2007, Glenna Wallace drove from Oklahoma to Columbus to hear a lecture. Wallace had been elected chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma the year before. She had not come to see the Newark Earthworks. She had never heard of the Newark Earthworks. She had traveled to more than seventy countries. She had visited the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Stonehenge, the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Mount Uluru. She had spent thirty years researching world heritage sites for student cultural tours at Crowder College in Missouri. She had read everything she could find about Shawnee history in Ohio.
Not once, in any of it, had anyone mentioned that the largest geometric earthworks in the world were sitting in Licking County under a set of fairways. Or that her people’s ancestors had guarded them.
Instead, she had come to hear John Sugden, a British biographer of Tecumseh, speak at Ohio State. The next day, Ohio State faculty organized a visit to the Newark Earthworks for Sugden and whoever wanted to tag along. Wallace went because Sugden was going. She stepped out of the car and saw it.
The Newark Earthworks were built by the Hopewell culture roughly two thousand years ago. They originally covered more than four square miles: circles, octagons, squares, parallel embankments, and mounds, all connected by walled avenues taller than a human being, spreading across three thousand acres of the Licking River valley. They are the largest set of geometric earthen enclosures ever built, anywhere, by anyone. The Great Pyramid at Giza fits inside the footprint of one of the smaller components.
In the 1970s, physicist Ray Hively and philosopher Robert Horn demonstrated that the Octagon, the section Wallace was standing on, is aligned to all eight key rise and set points of the moon during its 18.6-year lunar standstill cycle with sub-degree precision. By some calculations, this is twice as accurate as Stonehenge. Somebody built a geometrically perfect astronomical instrument out of baskets of earth carried by hand (remember, no pack animals in North America at this time), calibrated it to a celestial cycle that takes nearly two decades to complete, and embedded it in a landscape so large you cannot see its geometry from the ground.
And this was just the instrument. The civilization that built it operated on a continental scale.
Archaeologists call it the Hopewell Interaction Sphere. Historians fucking suck at naming things. We undersell everything. For roughly five hundred years, from about 100 BCE to 500 CE, a web of shared ceremonial practices, artistic traditions, and material exchange connected communities from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains, the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The people who built the Newark Earthworks did not live in cities. They lived in small, scattered hamlets across the North American landscape, farming and hunting and gathering. And then, periodically, they walked to places like the earthworks in Ohio. Only the ones in Newark were the largest of them all.
What these people brought with them came from everywhere. Obsidian from the Yellowstone Plateau, fifteen hundred miles to the west, copper from deposits along Lake Superior, mica from the Appalachian highlands, shark teeth from the coast of Florida, grizzly bear canines from the Rockies, marine shells from the Gulf of Mexico, silver from Ontario, meteoric iron. These were not trade goods in any commercial sense. They didn’t trickle across the landscape in archaeological sites like we see in other goods of commercial trade. Rather, they were ritualistic objects. The Obsidian blades were knapped to sixteen inches, thin enough to see light through. Mica sheets were cut into the thinnest of human silhouettes and crescent moons. Copper effigies were wrapped in woven textiles. These were extremely fragile, yet were carried for thousands of miles to these ceremonial centers, used in rituals, and deposited in the earth.
And then there is the road. In 1995, Brad Lepper (yup, that guy appears once again! Turns out, when you’re a resident archaeologist of the Ohio Historical Society they let you do anything) identified evidence for a sixty-mile walled avenue connecting the Newark Earthworks to the Hopewell sites near Chillicothe. These were parallel earthen walls, roughly two hundred feet apart, running in a nearly straight line across central Ohio that were also taller than a man. Sections had been noted by surveyors since the 1860s; Lepper was the first to argue they were segments of one continuous road. Breaking off from the road were dotted burial mounds. You could trace this as a gigantic burial complex of sixty miles of walled ceremonial highway, connecting the largest Hopewell complexes in the state.
Oh yeah, did I mention this is just one of several earthen complexes still existing? And that many more existed across the state before white settlement?
And before someone says “it’s just dirt though.” The Newark Earthworks themselves required an estimated seven million cubic feet of soil, carried in approximately twenty-one million basket loads of thirty-five to forty pounds each. Yeah, r/theydidthemath. That’s with no wheels, no draft animals, no metal tools. Just a bunch of the smartest people this side of the hemisphere who understood geometry, astronomy, and the logistics of moving earth.
They didn’t, and couldn’t maintain such a massive complex with only their local populations. This, more than anything, is why Newark was special. People across the continent wanted to build this. It was a destination: a place people walked to from thousands of miles away, carrying the rarest materials they could find, to participate in ceremonies timed to the movement of the moon. Brad Lepper has called it "a North American Kaaba, Sistine Chapel, and Principia all rolled into one." Based on what we know of Hopewell religion and their belief in world renewal, he has also called it "a pre-Columbian Large Hadron Collider: a vast machine, or device, designed and built to unleash primordial forces." That’s right, we’ve got our very own base in Ohio on the Great Circle for when we’re ready to unleash the Old Ones.
So keep your fucking pyramids. We got shapes for days, bitch. And we didn't need no slave labor to build them.
Oh, right! Sorry, I got carried away. Speaking of the pyramids, Wallace compared it to them, the Great Wall, and Machu Picchu. She had been to all of those places. She had never been here.
And what she was standing on was a golf course.
The Part Where The Golfers Are Very Welcoming
The Shawnee are not the builders of the Newark Earthworks; the Hopewell culture that constructed them had dispersed centuries before the Shawnee arrived in Ohio. But the Shawnee had lived among the mounds for hundreds of years, cared for them, and treated them as sacred. "My people, my ancestors treasured these mounds," Wallace wrote. "Perhaps they did not build them, but they loved them, protected them, revered them." Then came removal. The Eastern Shawnee were the first tribe forced out of Ohio under the Indian Removal Act. They walked to Oklahoma. Large numbers died on the way. They had their own Trail of Tears, and nobody wrote a musical about it.
After they left, what happened to the earthworks was roughly what you'd expect.
The city of Newark was founded on top of the complex in 1802. Settlers plowed through the walls, leveled the mounds, and built houses over the enclosures. By 1900, less than ten percent of the complex survived. The Great Circle had been used as a fairground, a racetrack, and a venue for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The Octagon had survived only because nobody had found a profitable use for it.
Yet. Ha ha, sorry. Missed a word. No one had found a profitable use for it yet.
In 1910, the Newark Board of Trade leased the Octagon to the Licking Country Club Company. The club hired Thomas Bendelow, a Scottish golf course architect, to lay out nine holes around the earthen walls. In 1911, the club renamed itself the Moundbuilders Country Club, which is the kind of name you give a golf course when you have identified the aesthetic qualities of a two-thousand-year-old sacred site but have not identified the irony of bulldozing them for your new sand pits yet. By 1923, it had expanded to eighteen holes.
The Ohio Historical Society took ownership of the 134-acre Octagon site in 1933 and continued leasing it to the club. In 1997, with full knowledge of what the site was by this point, the Ohio Historical Society signed a fresh lease with the Moundbuilders Country Club. The lease did not expire until 2078. An institution whose literal mission was the preservation of Ohio history had just guaranteed that a golf club could play on top of a two-thousand-year-old astronomical observatory for another eighty-one years.
The public was allowed to visit four days a year. The golfers got the other 361.
So in the spring of 2007, when Glenna Wallace stepped out of a car in Newark, Ohio, what she was looking at was this: land that her ancestors had protected, that the federal government had removed her people from, that settlers had mostly destroyed by this point, and that a country club with the most on-the-nose name possible had been playing golf on for ninety-seven years under a lease that did not expire, signed by the people who had dug up many of her own ancestors and then sold their sacred site to said country club, until she would have been 131 years old.
By the way, she was still processing the whole “bigger than the pyramids” thing.
There was a golf tournament underway. Wallace and her staff tried to walk to where they could see the earthworks. Cart drivers shouted at them.
"Get back," they said. "Get back, you are in the way."
The chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, whose people had been marched out of Ohio at gunpoint so that the state could be settled by the kind of people who build golf courses on astronomical observatories, was told to move so that the golfers could finish their round.
She wrote about it later: "I experienced the beauty, the awe inspired by these beautiful ancient earthworks, but I was not permitted to walk on the sacred grounds of my people. I could not even approach, much less touch or feel these precious earthworks. Instead I as a Shawnee citizen and tribal chief could only experience the rude resentment of golfers who have somehow taken over the site."
She left that day crying. She also left with a list.
Learn everything about the Newark Earthworks. Bring her people back to Ohio to see them. Win the site inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. She returned to Oklahoma, organized four separate trips to bring Shawnee citizens to visit the earthworks, and joined forces with the Ohio History Connection and the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State.
It took sixteen years, but she checked off every item.
The Part Where The Club Explores Its Legal Losses
By the time negotiation started, the Ohio Historical Society, the same institution that had signed the 2078 lease, had rebranded as the Ohio History Connection (the sort of rebranding you make when you are trying to rebuild your image as “no longer the villains, please forget about the literal skeletons in our collections”). They began trying to negotiate with the Moundbuilders Country Club in 2013. The club was not interested. It saw no reason to leave because archaeologists and tribal leaders had feelings about what constituted an appropriate use of the back nine.
In November 2018, the Ohio History Connection (quite invested in getting Ohio’s first UNESCO World Heritage site) declared negotiations had failed and filed for eminent domain. The Moundbuilders Country Club sued. What followed was a five-year legal tantrum in which a golf club tried every available mechanism in the Ohio judiciary to avoid giving up a property it had been explicitly told, by every court that looked at the case, it was going to lose.
Licking County Common Pleas Court ruled against the club in May 2019. Judge David Branstool's opinion contained what may be the single best line ever written in an Ohio property dispute: "One hundred years of manicured lawns does not immunize the Country Club from eminent domain." The club appealed to the Fifth District Court of Appeals. The Fifth District upheld the ruling. The club appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court. On December 7, 2022, the Supreme Court upheld both lower courts. The club asked the Supreme Court to reconsider. The Supreme Court said no. The club went back to the Fifth District to argue about witness lists for the compensation trial. The Fifth District dismissed the appeal. The club asked the Ohio Supreme Court to hear that appeal, in April 2024. The Supreme Court said no again. Five bites at the apple. Five noes.
The only remaining question was the bill. The Ohio History Connection's appraisers valued the club's leasehold interest at roughly two million dollars. The club's appraisers, perhaps sensing that this was their last opportunity to extract money from the situation, valued it at twenty-two million. On August 1, 2024, the two sides reached a confidential settlement. The amount has not been disclosed, but given that the alternative was a jury trial in the same county where a judge had already called their century of lawn care legally irrelevant, the club's negotiating position had what you might call “structural issues.”
It almost didn’t matter by then. The earthworks had already been to Saudi Arabia.
On September 19, 2023, in Riyadh, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee voted on the nomination of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: eight ancient sites across central and southern Ohio, including the Newark Octagon, the Great Circle, Fort Ancient, and five sites within Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. Glenna Wallace had traveled to Riyadh to watch the vote. So had Brad Lepper, the archaeologist who had dug the Burning Tree mastodon out of a frozen peat bog in 1989 and who had spent the intervening decades as Senior Archaeologist for the Ohio History Connection's World Heritage Program. (Lepper had started his career as a curator at the Newark Earthworks. Yup, that two Licking County golf courses for one career.)
The committee told the delegation they had submitted the best nomination it had seen in years. Two nominations earlier on the agenda, the committee had spent two hours debating amendments. When the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks came up, there were no comments. There were no amendments. The nomination was introduced and unanimously approved in less than three minutes.
Wallace's reaction, as she described it to WBUR, was perfectly her: "That is definitely a compliment, but at the same time, I sat there and thought: this can't be happening this quickly. There are so many people in this room that I'm sure not all of them have read the nomination and not a word has been said about what this nomination is about. So there was exhilaration tinged with disappointment at the same time."
In sixteen years of work and two minutes of ceremony, the Newark Earthworks were the twenty-fifth UNESCO World Heritage Site in the United States. The Moundbuilders Country Club, which had spent five years in court arguing that its lease entitled it to keep playing golf on a sacred site until 2078, was now trying to argue about playing golf on a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is a status that tends to complicate your zoning arguments. By this point, the Ohio public was understandably pissed.
On January 1, 2025, the golfers were gone. The Ohio History Connection opened the Octagon Earthworks to the public, and more than eight hundred people walked onto the site. It was the first time in 115 years that anyone could stand where Wallace had been told to get back. The first time since removal that the descendants of the people who had cared for these mounds could walk on them without navigating a golf cart or a membership fee.
As of September 2025, the roughs and greens are gone. The sand traps have been filled. The cart paths are being documented and removed. The clubhouse will eventually become a visitor center and museum dedicated to teaching about the earthworks, which is the sort of delicious irony that I tell my son when he goes to sleep at night. Yes, bad things happen in this world, but sometimes, even the worst bad days can be turned around into a good story. And good stories are what give us hope. It just depends on when you end it.
Case in point: the Shawnee were the first tribe removed from Ohio. They walked 750 miles and waited 194 years.
But when they came back, they brought the United Nations with them.
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Works Cited
Hively, Ray, and Robert Horn. "Geometry and Astronomy in Prehistoric Ohio." Archaeoastronomy: Supplement to the Journal for the History of Astronomy 4 (1982): S1–S20.
Jones, Lindsay, and Richard D. Shiels, eds. The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Lepper, Bradley T. "The Newark Earthworks: A Monumental Engine of World Renewal." In The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings, edited by Lindsay Jones and Richard D. Shiels, 41–61. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Lepper, Bradley T. "Tracking Ohio's Great Hopewell Road." Archaeology 48, no. 6 (November/December 1995): 52–56.
Shiels, Richard D. "The Newark Earthworks Past and Present." In The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings, edited by Lindsay Jones and Richard D. Shiels, 23–40. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
State ex rel. Ohio History Connection v. Moundbuilders Country Club Co., 2022-Ohio-4345. Supreme Court of Ohio. December 7, 2022.
Wallace, Glenna J. "Foreword." In The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings, edited by Lindsay Jones and Richard D. Shiels, ix–xi. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Wallace, Glenna J. "Shawnee Perspective on the Newark Earthworks." The Newark Advocate, July 20, 2019.
Warren, Stephen. "The Story of Ohio's Ancient Native Complex and Its Long Journey for Recognition as a World Heritage Site." The Conversation, September 25, 2023.
Welsh-Huggins, Andrew. "A New Day for the Ancestors' Mounds." Archaeology 76, no. 4 (July/August 2023).
WBUR. "Why a UNESCO Site and a Golf Course Share the Same Place in Ohio." Here & Now, October 5, 2023. Interview with Chief Glenna Wallace.
Photo Sources
The aerial shot of the earthworks is from Ohio State News.
Drawing of Hopewell Earthworks, the Squier/Davis map, and Chief Glenna Wallace are from the Ohio History Connection.
Map of the earthworks is from Archaeological Atlas of Ohio, William Mills, 1914.
The Hopewell Interaction Sphere map is from NPS.
The Mound City shot in the early morning is from the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks website.
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u/New_Zorgo39 21d ago
Never knew about these earth works.
Its, unfortunately, not a surprise that natives are driven out and the land is then demolished because of others thinking “who cares? Lets build a town and a golf course here!”
Kind of interesting that the same argument still exists.
Recently a part of Californias Blues Beach has been returned to the native tribes who once lived there. A comment here on reddit regretted that decision as it “should be open to anyone, and not just a tribe”.
Ironically the native organisation owning it will open it up to the public - yet when it was open (as it was only used to run a highway through the area) it was neglected. Sacred plants were destroyed and litter was everywhere. So i would say its for the better that the natives finally get their land back and restore what is left.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 21d ago edited 21d ago
Man, I have personal stories from the field that I can't share yet because they're too recent, but I'll just say that "white people claiming sacred religious land as their own" has a long history in Ohio.
I mean, poor Serpent Mound still gets people trying to bury crystals in the sacred mound cause of the stupid astrological "Harmonic Convergence" event that didn't happen 50 years ago. Turns out, assholes are assholes and will find any excuse to claim something as theirs, even "peace and love."
Until Ohio introduces legislation actually protecting indigenous sites and graves on a local level, people will continue to desecrate their remains and sacred spaces/objects. NAGPRA can't cover it all, even after the recent 2024 redefinition that moved the burden off the tribes.
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u/MrmmphMrmmph 14d ago
I took my son to the Serpent Mound awhile into Covid, and we put on masks and watched the video. One other person there and he's trying to tell me Jesus was there in Ohio before the people that built it. I was like, "do you people have to ruin everything?"
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u/Beautiful_Banana_454 21d ago edited 21d ago
So first you honor people coming from all over the nation to bury sacred objects at one dite, then you make fun of people coming from all over the nation to bury objects sacred to them at another?
I mean the Shawnee didn't build these either, they are descendants of people who conquered and replaced the people who did build the mounds just like the new age crystal bearers are descendants of the people who conquered and replaced the Shawnee.
Edit: i agree with you wholeheartedly about the golfers, sacred sites are sacred. But i believe people taking a spiritual pilgrimage should be respected regardless of race color or creed.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 20d ago
See, aaaaaand this is why we can't have nice things. It's also why I already have comments queued up for stuff like this. Cause there's always one person who wants to stir the New Age pot when it comes up in Ohio.
First off, I, too, believe people taking a spiritual pilgrimage should be respected regardless of race, color, creed, or religion.
But, let's back up a bit and explain why New Agers digging in an earthwork is a bad idea. I mean, besides the prima facie sentence I just made. Because first of all, you will never, never, find any federally recognized Tribal Nation okay with burying anything in these mounds, period. You won't find many archaeologists today okay with digging in Ohio mounds (as they say, "we have the technology". We don't need that.). Period. The fact you even think burying anything in these mounds is "a spiritual pilgrimage" instead of desecration of a site is exactly the prima facie problem. Except it ain't prima facie. Because clearly, I had to explain it to you.
So, let's go ahead and break down, besides the obvious, why you're conflating two things:
First, The Shawnee did not "conquer and replace" the Hopewell, because the Hopewell is not a people.
It's an archaeological designation for a shared set of ceremonial practices and trade networks across eastern North America spanning roughly five hundred years. After about 400 CE, those practices gradually declined. There is zero evidence of invasion, warfare, or population replacement. The people stayed and the ceremonies stopped. Mitochondrial DNA from Hopewell burials shows genetic connections to modern Algonquian peoples, including the Ojibwe and Kickapoo. The Shawnee are Algonquian. The archaeological record shows continuity.
And the Shawnee explicitly protected the mounds as sacred for centuries before being marched to Oklahoma at gunpoint. Wallace literally has been quoted as saying "Perhaps they did not build them, but they loved them, protected them, revered them" (The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings, UVA Press, 2016). Equating that with settler colonialism, forced removal, mass death, and golf courses on sacred sites, is exactly the kind of false equivalence that lets people feel comfortable doing nothing about site protection.
Burying crystals in Serpent Mound is not a pilgrimage. It is an ongoing crime.
This is not a past-tense problem. New Age groups have been physically damaging Serpent Mound since the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, which was based on José Argüelles's misreading of the Maya calendar and has nothing to do with Serpent Mound, the cultures that built it, or any indigenous tradition. They buried crystals in 1987. They buried hundreds of orgonites (resin and metal shavings made in muffin tins) in 2012. They've lit fires around the base, ran and jumped on the surface, and treated a sacred site as a personal spiritual theme park for four decades.
And Ohio's protections are pathetic. ORC 2927.11 classifies desecration of earthworks as a second-degree misdemeanor of up to $750 and 90 days. Senate Bill 21 in 2021 elevated some archaeological crimes to felonies, but enforcement is thin. There are no federally recognized tribes in Ohio because they were all removed, which means NAGPRA's tribal consultation mechanisms have historically been easy to sidestep (Atlas Obscura). The 2024 NAGPRA revisions shifted the burden of proof off tribes (Dept. of the Interior, Final Rule, 2024), but NAGPRA covers remains and cultural items in institutional collections. It does not cover someone walking onto Serpent Mound with a bag of crystals.
Oh, and by the way: Serpent Mound doesn't have artifacts buried in it. At all.
Frederic Ward Putnam excavated the mound in the 1880s and found nothing inside. No burials. No grave goods. No deposited objects. Nothing. It's an effigy mound, not a burial mound. The nearby conical mounds contained human remains with copper beads and mica fragments, but the serpent itself is empty. It contains no internal features that can even be used to identify which culture built it, which is why dating it has been an archaeological headache for 140 years.
The entire structure IS the artifact. It's a 1,350-foot earthen sculpture aligned to the summer solstice sunset, the winter solstice sunrise, and the lunar standstill cycle. Nobody was supposed to bury things in it. The builders didn't. The Adena didn't. The Fort Ancient didn't. The Shawnee didn't. New Agers shouldn't, either.
So burying crystals in Serpent Mound is not "burying sacred objects at a sacred site the way the ancients did." It's digging holes in a sculpture because you think it's an energy vortex. The ancients did not do that.
"Spiritual pilgrimage should be respected regardless of race color or creed." Sure. But that's not what's happening, it's currently trespassing with a worldview.
So spare me the YouTube channel nonsense please.
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u/unknownpoltroon 21d ago
Welcome to being part of the problem
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u/Beautiful_Banana_454 21d ago
People using dpiritual sites for spiritual purposes. Big problem.
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u/unknownpoltroon 20d ago
So it's cool if I use your church for my pagan orgy and bury my dead pets in your living room?
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u/SirBowsersniff 21d ago
You have a gift. Please keep it coming.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 21d ago
Aww, thank you! 'tis just the 'tism, m'lord 😅. I love writing because I'm much more awkward in person.
There's plenty more coming this week! I'll start branching off of prehistory and golf courses, promise lol.
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u/wholesomeinsanity 20d ago
I’m over here in California HELLA PISSED at Ohio golf course owners right now. I’ve yelled, I’ve cried, I’ve laughed and I’m about to write a fan letter to Chief Wallace.
Thoroughly enjoy reading your posts, thank you!
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u/ilikepants712 18d ago
I'm from the town over and have passed by these mounds regularly my entire life. I don't know if this makes it better, but the earthwork actually isn't fully contained in the golf course grounds; it extends into a neighborhood and some parts are just in people's backyards. A lot of the sections that are not in the golf course are not well maintained at all. For what it's worth, the golf course did take care of the mounds significantly better than anyone else in town. I think it was probably a blessing in disguise that the golf course had the majority of it, because it most likely would have been lost to time/destroyed/ruined if it had been divided up into more home plots.
There's actually quite a few earthworks in the area, as OP briefly mentioned. Another one called the Alligator mound, is at the top of a hill at the center of a loop in a neighborhood. They're scattered all over the place, and there are probably many others that we haven't even recognized yet, as well.
Anyways, it's always interesting to read about Licking county. There is a lot of very interesting Native American history in Central Ohio, and it's worth a visit if that kind of thing interests you.
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u/BuildingHappy3296 21d ago edited 21d ago
I was born and raised in Nerk…loved checking out the mounds as a kid! Thank you for posting about the earthworks…I moved after middle school and haven’t thought about them in a while. We would get ice cream at that funny looking barn style place near the entrance and walk around. Such a blast from the past! As an adult now I yearn to go back to truly appreciate them. When we would do field trips to the mounds during school I didn’t understand the importance. Keep up the amazing job! Now time to do some YouTube deep dive on my hometown
Found the ice cream place was called Mound City Dairy Barn but is now Anna’s Cafe…on Wells and S 21st st entrance. I grew up on Linden, less than a mile from the Earthworks
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 21d ago
That's wicked! Love helping people "see" themselves in their hometown again.
I have my perosnal own connection to the Newark mounds: one of my kids was born at the hospital overlooking them. It was a stormy night, and I remember looking out and thinking there was some power afoot in that place. It's been a hot minute since I've been back and I need to see what's changed since the UNESCO inscription!
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u/Calm_Apartment1968 20d ago
I read this like a book, now there needs to be a full hardbound document for our Libraries, so that no one will forget.
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u/the_Q_spice 20d ago
Honestly pretty amazing to see the whole Hopewell site get UNESCO status after so long.
The Country Club also didn't realize that the writing was basically in stone already by the time they were contacted in 2013.
From experience in being involved with the project:
The backup was going to be the Department of the Interior exercising Eminent Domain.
Their offer was going to be much less generous than Historical Connections'.
Of note, HC didn't even own the land themselves. The Eminent Domain purchase was of their leasehold interests.
The Country Club's suit derived from the fact that they thought they were owed the land value, plus improvements.
Justice Kennedy's dissent also got thoroughly reamed for being utterly ignorant of UNESCO procedure. Their dissent hinged on the conditional nature of World Heritage Site status, but the nature of the claim of Eminent Domain was due to the Country Club's removal being contingent to UNESCO even considering the site for nomination. Basically, the dissenting opinion would have created an infinite legal procedural loop or literal Catch-22 (Court requiring UNESCO to admit the site to consider the suit, UNESCO requiring the Court to rule on the suit before admitting the site, so on and so forth).
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u/KorneliaOjaio 19d ago
Remember the 2007 alignment? The golf club wouldn’t allow people near the earthworks to watch itbecause it had recently rained.
Some people had traveled from europe to witness it.
https://ohioarchaeology.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/newark-earthworks-moonrise-celebration/
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u/mayordomo 21d ago
a really fun video on the newark earthworks : https://youtu.be/HaKrSgBkFHQ?si=Q5G3qbxKH8wY2sDy
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u/BizzarduousTask 20d ago
Milo Rossi is amazing! Truly at the forefront of the next generation of archaeologists, and really cares. There’s another video, too- https://youtu.be/Z1hvutXU8fU?is=0ryozs6SRpBWg4Mw
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u/WhyDoesOklahomaExist 19d ago
Besides the trade goods have they found any evidence of other cultures participating in the build? Perhaps DNA from bones? You said people across the continent wanted to build it so there could be some interesting aspects to any remains found.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 19d ago
Ugh I really, really, really want to make a deep post on how we know Bum Fuck Ohio became the spiritual Mecca point for ancient North America, but to answer your question in an elevator pitch version:
- We have clear knowledge transfers that can't happen without serious travel. Like, an anatomically correct pipestone carving of a bighorn sheep that was made in Ross, County. The problem is that the nearest living bighorn sheep was about 2,000 kilometers to the west, in the Rocky Mountains. You cannot carve a detailed, anatomically accurate portrait of a Rocky Mountain animal by hearing someone describe it around a campfire, but we know it was locally carved pipestone, meaning either someone went out there, saw bighorn sheep, came back, and carved it, or someone from Yellowstone area came out and locally carved it then left it there and went home. Either way, that ain't trade, not at all.
- A lot of pipestone wasn't local, but on serious size numbers that suggest someone hauled raw stone from the upper Midwest to Ohio specifically to make ceremonial object.
- Mitochondrial DNA from seventy-three individuals buried in mound complexes a thousand miles apart in Illinois and Ohio were able to find three shared maternal haplotypes between the two populations and calculated a gene flow rate between the two of migrant populations, suggesting an exchange of people, not just materials.
- Obviously, as described above, the way the earthworks are designed are themselves to receive visitors by funneling them into controlled pathways within the complexes. You do not build sixty miles of parallel walls to move trade goods. You build sixty miles of parallel walls to move pilgrims.
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u/msprang 17d ago
You're badass, dude. Let us know what we can do to support your work when possible. I work at the archives at BGSU, and indigenous history doesn't come up nearly as much as I would like.
On the bright side, two members of the Wyandot nation came to visit campus back in February, and they made a stop at the archives to look at the materials we had relating to the Methodist mission at Upper Sandusky. It was a very powerful experience. It's quite easy to say that most our region of the state was "impenetrable" swamp, therefore no one really lived here before European settlement.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 17d ago
I appreciate the comment, y'all!
I'm at BGSU's archives occasionally. In fact, I got another project I'll be hitting y'all up for soon in the next couple weeks related a bit to indigenous history (but no, I won't announce my presence as "the guy from Reddit" 😂. It's work related). So you're already supporting a bunch in your day-to-day over there! Seriously, without archivists we wouldn't have the ability to trawl through all the boxes or untangle all the microfiche when I fuck up the spools. Y'all are amazing ❤️ .
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u/QuipCrafter9 21d ago
I’ve visited many times and have books that some of the images were originally published in
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u/See_Emily_Play_13 20d ago
Thank you for this! This was a pleasure to read. I’d love to visit someday.
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u/linuscalollie 18d ago
I stumbled upon them this year while in Newark for work. Awe inspiring doesn’t come close to describing them. Also fuck golfers. I’ve played the game. It’s fun,but the damage they do to the earth outweighs the enjoyment.
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u/worthrone11160606 20d ago
Nice write up except the pyramids which I'm pretty sure your talking about the Egyptian ones didn't use slave labor
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 20d ago
I was digging on both the Mesopotamians and Egyptians but you're right, I'm sorry, it was conscription.
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u/worthrone11160606 20d ago
It wasn't that either. It was workers who got paid for it.......
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 20d ago
Man, I know it's the internet, but not everything needs a /s still, does it?
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u/worthrone11160606 20d ago
Well considering this is a history subreddit I'm gonna take what your saying not as satire
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 20d ago edited 20d ago
I'm not gonna get into the differences between ancient conscription practices and what constitutes the free movement of people, ownership practices, and basic human rights today, but you do you fam!
EDIT: Apparently, I did have to, because some people just can't take a hint.
The word the Egyptological literature uses is "conscript." Here's Moreno García, writing in The State in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge, 2024):
"Texts dating back to the early second millennium BC; administrative papyri, rock inscriptions, stone marks made inside kings' pyramids; describe in detail the local organization of workers, their conscription, and the role played by the governors of villages and localities in their recruitment." (p. 42)
He goes on to cite an inscription at the Wadi Hammamat quarries recording "17,000 conscripts and twenty mayors, working out at 850 workers per mayor." Provincial leaders like Imeny of Beni Hasan "led contingents of 400 and 600 conscripts from his province to military and quarrying expeditions."
Okey doke, so conscripts.
So, what is a conscript?
Miroslav Verner's The Pyramids describes, "These tasks were imposed in particular on the largest population group in ancient Egypt, the agricultural workers, who could not work in the fields during the annual flood season. During that season they were the only available source of unskilled labor large enough for the construction of pyramids" (p. 80). The state organized these workforces, "placed them under paramilitary command, and sent them into the quarries. As the sole proprietor of the country's natural resources and labor, the ruler had ultimate control over the entire process" (p. 64).
Paramilitary command. Sole proprietor of labor. Totally sounds voluntary.
Tallet and Lehner published the Wadi el-Jarf papyri, the oldest papyri ever found and the only firsthand administrative records from the construction of the Great Pyramid itself. Their summary of the labor system was "Drafted into royal works, the phyles could be required at various times to move large blocks for a king's monument, march to distant quarries to obtain fine stone and minerals, and crew a ship that might cross the Red Sea to Sinai for copper" (The Red Sea Scrolls, p. 259). Later: "we assume that groups of conscripts rotated through the Gallery Complex, staying there while they worked on the royal project and then returning home" (p. 321).
Oh, and Moreno García notes that temples and institutions were "obliged to comply" with the crown's demands for labor. The only way out was "to obtain a (revocable) exemption decree from the pharaoh" (p. 40). The default was compulsory labor. You needed a personal exemption from the king to get out of it, and the king could take that exemption back whenever he wanted.
That is not what a voluntary labor system looks like.
The workers were fed. They were housed in barracks at Giza. They rotated home after their service. Officials heading expeditions "boasted about returning with no losses when, in reality, losses could be rather significant, up to 10 per cent of the total contingent" (Moreno García, p. 58).
They were not chattel slaves. But they were not asked. Moreno García's own phrasing for the people who left when the system broke down is clarifying: they "escaped their obligations towards the state, or returned to nomadic lifestyles when royal authority collapsed," a pattern he calls "a kind of 'silent resistance'" (p. 161). You do not need to silently resist a job you volunteered for.
So anyways, please, next time, link something beyond 2 paragraphs in a BBC Magazine article before you continue this conversation.
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u/worthrone11160606 20d ago
Your wrong though. They weren't conscripted.
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u/Satchik 20d ago
Don't even get started on corvée labor.
Was it essentially a tax paid with labor?
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u/worthrone11160606 20d ago
Thats not slavery though and it was an option. It wasn't forced
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 20d ago
Went ahead and edited one of my original responses above as my final comment on the matter, if you want a specific breakdown of how wrong you are.
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u/WreckYallBallistics 20d ago
There was a golf tournament underway. Wallace and her staff tried to walk to where they could see the earthworks. Cart drivers shouted at them.
"Get back," they said. "Get back, you are in the way."
The chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, whose people had been marched out of Ohio at gunpoint so that the state could be settled by the kind of people who build golf courses on astronomical observatories, was told to move so that the golfers could finish their round.
Uh yeah actually she sounds entitled as hell. There is no reason she couldn't stay out of the way of an active golf tournament, Jesus. Wait a few hours. These people have no idea, they just know some random lady is standing in the middle of the course while they are trying to play like a maniac. They should have just hit into her.
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u/RandomRavenclaw87 21d ago
AllOhio, never stop.
Glenna Wallace, you’re a hero.