Silverman: International perspectives on the Newark Earthworks as a World Heritage Site
More than half of 1,154 “properties” currently on UNESCO’s World Heritage List are “cultural sites”, a category that includes historic urban centers, unique buildings, human-made landscapes, and archaeological ruins, among other kinds of built features.
UNESCO’s location map of these sites (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/?&type=cultural) shows Europe so densely covered with World Heritage treasures that the user must click the expansion tool on the website to see the individual inscriptions. In contrast, the United States has only 11 World Heritage cultural sites and, of these, only four are aboriginal (having been produced by societies in America prior to the arrival of Europeans): Mesa Verde, Cahokia, Chaco Canyon and Poverty Point. This dearth of representation will soon be amended by the addition of the Newark Earthworks and its related sites, which were the product of the brilliant Hopewell Culture whose epicenter was today’s State of Ohio. As such, not only will the Earthworks join the other globally recognized testaments to the vast complexity and originality of Native American people here, but also inscribe the ancient Hopewell landscape as one of the most significant in the long history of human society.
The Newark Earthworks are exceptional in their own right as archaeologists and collaborating scholars have shown: produced by Indigenous people without a hierarchy of leaders, without an agricultural economy, and without cities. The Hopewellian tribes were able to organize themselves to move and mold countless tons of earth into geometrically precise forms that served as places of mass congregation at particular times of the year and that, moreover, were aligned with a lunar calendar. They also created and maintained vast exchange networks for exotic materials, often resulting in craft and artistic masterpieces. It is this system of “have and have not” features that makes the Newark Earthworks and Hopewell so interesting.
Marking a landscape for ritual purposes is well known around the world, but Newark stands out in the comparisons that can be made. The most obvious case of massive ground alteration for ceremonial use are the so-called “Lines of Nazca”– the great linear and figural tracings on desert plains and flat hilltops of south-coastal Peru. Rather than piling up earth as with Newark, the ancient Peruvians broke the hard, pebble-covered surface to etch long lines, trapezoids, spirals, and animal figures on the ground. But unlike the long distances traversed as pilgrimage roads by the Hopewellians, archaeologists think that local Nazca groups made their own geoglyphs (literally, earth markings) and that the very act of making and performing the geoglyphs into existence was the end goal. It is unknown how often Nazca groups might have returned to their geoglyphs, unlike the communal space created by the enclosing earthen embankments of Newark, which saw repeated visits for ceremonies.
At the other end of the spectrum of human organization there are the Australian Aboriginal “songlines”, which mark the continent’s landscape but which are invisible. Traditionally (before the European disruption), Aboriginals lived in small-scale family groups that were mobile in search of plant and animal food. They produced no material remains of note. However, the Aboriginals created a monumental landscape of the mind: routes that groups physically traversed across Australia, enacting their complex myths of creation and cosmology (Dreamtime), going back tens of thousands of years. Rather than having built physical marks on the landscape, it is the natural landscape that is interpreted by Aboriginals as sacred and whose particular features prompt ceremonies and their stories. But the environment was so challenging as to inhibit the gathering of large groups of people, unlike in Hopewellian and all of the other human societies labelled “civilization.”
It is fascinating to consider the rituals and religion of Hopewell in comparative perspective, so as to appreciate why and how this ancient society created its most striking feature: the Newark Earthworks. Hopewellian society left archaeologists great physical monuments on the landscape and evidence of an extraordinary economic and symbolic interaction sphere. The UNESCO World Heritage List inscription will protect and preserve this native legacy well into the future while stimulating more research and engendering contemporary benefits through an expanded tourism market.
Helaine Silverman is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois.
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Silverman: International perspectives on the Newark Earthworks
