Great Hopewell Road
The Great Hopewell Road is hypothesized to have connected two Hopewell culture earthwork monuments located in Newark and Chillicothe, a distance of through the heart of Ohio, United States. The Newark complex was built 2,000 to 1,800 years ago.
Archaeologist Brad Lepper claims that traces of the road remain at four additional places along the line connecting Newark and Chillicothe. Parts of the road can be seen from the air and with infrared photography. There is precedent for such a sacred road at other complexes. More "ground truthing" needs to be performed but the evidence is suggestive.
The first south of the parallel-walled roadway of the Newark Earthworks is known as the Van Voorhis Walls; this confirmed earthwork terminates at Ramp Creek in Heath. South of there, the projected path of the Hopewell Road passes through fields toward Millersport. Evidence from early accounts and 1930s aerial photography suggests that the Hopewell Road may continue south of Ramp Creek, and a cultural resource management study provides equivocal, yet suggestive evidence of the earthwork south of Ramp Creek. In 2016, an analysis of previous studies found enough evidence to indicate that archaeologists should continue to search below Ramp Creek for evidence of the Great Hopewell Road.
Description
The Great Hopewell Road is thought to have connected the Newark Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, to an undetermined site approximately away in Chillicothe. The azimuth of the road is 212°. Today, the path is mostly uninterrupted farmland, and most of the road has been destroyed; however, in 1995, two parallel walls were still visible above ground in a woodland about south of the Newark Earthworks. This section from the Newark Octagon south to Ramp Creek is now known as the "Van Voorhis Walls". Additional examination of the area with LiDAR suggests the road was lower than the surrounding land, sunk between the walls. Other traces of road south of the Van Voorhis Walls have since been found.In 2009, test excavations near the Van Voorhis Walls revealed a thin layer of white limestone, which could potentially have been used to pave the road; similar paving was known to have been performed in other parts of North and South America. One such report is of a "white road" described by the Lenape people, who used such large roads for international travel, cutting through the terrain and covering the pathway with white sand.
The southern terminus of the road has not been determined, although it has been speculated based on the trajectory of the road's hypothesized path. Brad Lepper has suggested that the road may have connected the Newark complex to one of several sites along the Scioto River Valley, such as the High Bank Works. This site and the Newark Earthworks are the only two known Hopewellian sites to have large circular and octagonal enclosures, and both may have had some astronomical and/or spiritual significance.
History of study
Historians and archaeologists have speculated about the existence of a road running southward from the Newark Earthworks in Newark since the early 19th century. In 1820, Caleb Atwater claimed in Descriptions of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio that a southwesterly road may have extended for at least, potentially ending at a site at the Hocking River. In 1848, Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis mapped two parallel earthen walls extending southwards for.In 1862, brothers Charles and James Salisbury surveyed the first of this road, noting it was marked by parallel earthen banks almost apart and leading from the Newark Earthworks. The Salisburys determined that the extant road ended at Ramp Creek, a tributary of the South Fork Licking River, but said that the road likely extended much farther south from Newark in the direction of Chillicothe. Early settlers did report the existence of previous traces of roadway further south but that large swaths of these earthworks had since been destroyed or otherwise no longer existed.
In the 1930s, aerial surveys revealed traces of the road which extended for toward the Hopewellian center of present-day Chillicothe. Pilots Warren Weiant, Jr. and Dache Reeves recorded and photographed extant parallel lines demarcating the road's width. Brad Lepper was the first to name the pathway the "Great Hopewell Road" in 1995. Further aerial imagery and LiDAR studies since the 1990s suggest more subsurface traces of the road south of Ramp Creek still exist.
Analysis
Lepper has suggested that the road may have been used as a corridor between sites of spiritual significance, as a pilgrimage route, and/or as a connection between nations. Others also propose that goods may have travelled and been traded along the road.There are no surviving or recorded Native American histories for this specific road or the associated sites, but parallels have been drawn between the Great Hopewell Road and other pathways constructed by Native American cultures across North and South America, such as the Maya, Ancestral Puebloans, Nazca, and Mississippians.
The construction of the road is also debated. Giulio Magli has suggested that tracing a linear path over a long distance may have been achieved by use of both astronomical calculations and visual ground markers, such as use of a grid or aligning the path to a star.