Fort Ancient: The People Before the City
Ohio
Thirty miles northeast of Cincinnati, on a plateau above the Little Miami River, stands one of the most elaborate earthwork complexes in North America. The walls are made of earth, piled to heights of up to twenty-three feet, running for roughly three and a half miles in an irregular enclosure covering about a hundred acres. They were built by the Hopewell culture, people who lived here between roughly one hundred BCE and five hundred CE. No one from the Hopewell culture is alive today to explain what the earthworks were for.
Archaeologists have studied Fort Ancient for more than a century. The walls are precisely aligned with solar and lunar events. The gateways correspond to the rising and setting of the sun at solstices and equinoxes. The interior shows evidence of feasting, ceremony, and burial. The most likely interpretation is that the site was a ceremonial gathering place, used by communities across a wide region for events tied to the agricultural and astronomical calendar.
The Fort Ancient culture, which followed the Hopewell and used the site differently, gave the earthworks their modern name but was not the builders. Later, Shawnee and Delaware peoples lived throughout the Ohio River valley, including the Cincinnati basin. The Shawnee were pushed out through a series of treaties and military campaigns in the late eighteenth century. The Battle of Fallen Timbers in seventeen ninety-four and the Treaty of Greenville in seventeen ninety-five effectively ended organized Shawnee resistance in Ohio. The last Shawnee were removed from Ohio by the eighteen thirties.
The city of Cincinnati sits on what was Shawnee homeland. The earthworks northeast of the city are a record of who was here two thousand years before any European arrived. They were listed as a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-six and added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in twenty twenty-three, as part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks designation.
The people who built them are gone. The walls they built are still here.
