Ohio is home to the largest ancient geometric earthworks in the world. Created 2,000 years ago, these monumental precincts were built as social architecture elegantly aligned with the movement of celestial bodies. Thousands of people gathered at these sites, using staggering quantities of materials along with strikingly uniform geometric principles to create ceremonial masterpieces. Today these sites hold a world waiting to be rediscovered.
Learn more about the spectacular Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. Visit the online Storybook Trail and the touring exhibition Mounds, Moon & Stars: the Legacy of Ohio’s Magnificent Earthworks.
The Great Circle Alliance
The Great Circle Alliance (GCA) is an independent nonprofit organization with the goal of raising awareness and encouraging contemporary Native voices – artists, scholars, archeologists, and local communities – bringing human presence back into what was once a vibrant sophisticated culture. We operate an informal alliance with Native Americans connected to the sites, the OSU Newark Earthworks Center, the Ohio History Connection, Denison University, The Works! Museum, and Explore Licking County.
Our mission:
- Further the educational and interpretive activities at the Newark Earthworks
- Provide volunteer support for site programs, projects, and special events
- Support the GCA Artist in Residence program
“There is not another place in the world like Newark Earthworks. And they need to be shared, experienced on a daily basis by masses of people.”
Chief Glenna Wallace
Eastern Shawnee tribal nation
“The ancient people believed that everything in their world contained sparks of life – water and air, animals and plants, different kinds of earth and rocks, under the sky and stars. By taking this living material and shaping it precisely into gigantic shapes aligned to the recurring events around them, the people were gathering life force to create places of power.”
Marti Chaatsmith
(Comanche Nation Citizen/Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Direct Descendant),
Associate Director, Newark Earthworks Center of The Ohio State University
“Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Citizen Potawatomi Nation
The earthworks of the Ohio valley “reflect a spatial conception that is fundamentally beyond the grasp of the modern Western imagination.”
John Hancock
Retired professor of architecture,
University of Cincinnati
Astonishing Facts
50
Acres covered by The Octagon Earthworks
18000000
Indigenous people living in North America before arrival of Columbus
7000000
Cubic feet of earth moved during construction of the Newark Earthworks
1200
Feet comprising the diameter of the Great Circle Earthworks
Help us to preserve the history, art and ancient monumental indigenous sites of Ohio
The Great Circle Alliance offers programs encouraging and amplifying the contemporary human voice in the ancient monumental indigenous sites of Ohio.
We acknowledge our presence as guests in the unceded ancestral homelands of the living nations of: the Miami Tribe, the Shawnee Tribe, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, the Absentee Shawnee Tribe, the Delaware Nation, the Delaware Tribe, the Wyandot Nation, the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe, the Seneca Nation, the Ottawa Tribe, Peoria Tribe, Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Forest County Potawatomi, Tonawanda Seneca, and others.
We extend our respect and gratitude to the many Indigenous people who call these lands home.
©2022 The Great Circle Alliance.