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. Click on these titles to 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 a nonprofit organization created to develop and offer public programs, exhibits, and an indigenous artist residency with the aim of bringing a more contemporary voice to the ancient ceremonial sites of the Newark Earthworks.
Watch 2024 Artists in Residence in their Indigenous People’s Day public Program. Click here to visit the presentation Aya! We’re Still Here! on YouTube.
The Great Circle Alliance works to advance educational and interpretive programs, promoting visibility of Native American artists, especially those whose Ancestors were forcibly removed from Ohio. GCA aims to amplify the living legacy of the ancestral homelands and a worldview embedded in the earthworks, reflecting the visionary and influential Hopewell era peoples. We operate in informal alliance with Native Americans connected to the sites, the OSU Newark Earthworks Center, the Ohio History Connection, Denison University, Explore Licking County, OSU Urban Arts Space and Otterbein University.
Our mission:
- To bring greater public awareness and appreciation to the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks
- To promote greater visibility of Native American artists expressing their indigenous worldviews and traditions
- To encourage contemporary Native and non-Native voices to play an active role in building a richer understanding of Ohio's ancient history
“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
Acres covered by The Octagon Earthworks
50
Indigenous people living in North America before arrival of Columbus
18000000
Cubic feet of earth moved during construction of the Newark Earthworks
7000000
Feet comprising the diameter of the Great Circle Earthworks
1200
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.