Greater Cincinnati Native American Coalition

Fort Ancient: History & Culture April Hester, Director of Education

The Fort Ancient Earthworks is one of the most extensive earthworks in the United States.  It is comprised of a network of earthen hilltop enclosures, embankments, and gateways created by Native American Peoples over two millennia ago.  The earthworks are an impressive complex of 18,000 feet of structures that cover 100 acres in Southwest Ohio along the Little Miami River.  

The Fort Ancient Earthworks is a sacred site built by the Hopewell culture; an advanced Native American People who flourished in the years 100 B.C. to 500 A.D. in the areas now known as the Midwest United States.  The Hopewell culture is not a single Native nation or tribe, but are the Native Peoples who are recognized for similarities in their subsistence and settlement patterns, architecture, as well as their extensive trade system.  Their settlements were smaller in size and often temporary due to their subsistence strategies which included hunting, fishing, gathering and farming.  The Hopewell culture is recognized for their domestication of seeds, including sunflower, squash, goosefoot, and maygrass.  

The Hopewell were influential throughout the eastern part of the United States for centuries.  They strategically settled near waterways which aided in long distance trade connecting Native Peoples of numerous associating regions.  The Hopewell culture were notably supplied with materials and goods from a various locations.  This is evident in the materials used in their ceramics and other pieces of brilliant Hopewell art.  

The name Fort Ancient may be misleading.  There is no evidence of defensive fortification at the site.  In fact, there were over 60 gateways integrated into the earthworks that allowed for easy entry.  It was a meeting place and held space for ceremony, not warfare.  The name of the earthworks itself came from the confusion between the era of Hopewell culture and the sub sequential culture known to archaeologists as the Fort Ancient culture.  The Fort Ancient culture occupied an area of the site much later than the Hopewell, around 1000 A.D.-1200 A.D.  Archaeological evidence shows the two cultures flourishing at different times.  However, both cultures are integral components of Ohio Native American history.

The Fort Ancient Earthworks site is divided into two major sections, the South Fort and North Fort.  It contains walls filled with stone pavement, evidence of dwellings and building structures, and mounds.  The mounds present at the site have little evidence of burials.  Many of these mounds mark the way to a gate entry and are made up of limestone slabs.  In the North Fort of the site, there are four mounds placed to create an exact square, each side 512 feet in length.  These stone mounds were sacred places that held enormous fires, kept cleared without building structures, likely used for spiritual purposes.  There are three gateways that form alignments from the southwestern mound to the wall to feature significant astronomical events including the summer solstice.

In 1992 i was given a scrimshaw piece from an Anishanaabe Elder. It was a beautiful piece depicting a serpent swallowing what looked like an egg. I had never seen this design before and he told me of a place called Serpent Mound, a significant place to the Eastern Woodland Tribes of this region, the place of The Ancient Ones.  Years later I would travel to Fort Ancient and Serpent Mound to see these sacred spaces for the first time, where I found non-native reenactors entertaining tourists with a “Pow Wow” and performing rituals of questionable european origin on top of the serpent mound itself. How did it come to this? How is it possible, and why? It would seem it is easier to believe that the mounds were built by aliens or Vikings than an advanced Indigenous culture of mound builders which stretched as far as Cahokia, a thriving metropolis of 10,000 outside of what is now St. Louis. The theory that Native Peoples in the Ohio Valley area during and after contact were negligent in the care of these sites ignores their forced removal from these lands and the violence of westward expansion. By perpetuating false claims, the legitimacy of those descendants is called into question.

Once the cultural identity of those ancestors is removed, the foundation is laid to coop the sites for pseudo religious rituals and masturbatory spiritual practices. This disconnect reduces these ancestors to mythology, dehumanizes indigenous culture, and perpetuates the assimilation narrative. This is the same narrative which emboldens non natives to use the first amendment as the edict which gives them the right to our religion, a right we didn't even possess as natives until 1978.

As indigenous people it is our responsibility to protect these sacred sites wherever they may be, even if it is from our own.

To those reading this who would be allies, I would challenge you, to call out those who choose to distort indigenous history to push their own agenda. Do not be afraid to speak up when you see those appropriating cultures that don't belong to them. Currency isn't always money, and social currency sometimes can be even more harmful.

Arvol Looking Horse was born on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. At the age of 12, he was given the responsibility of becoming the 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, the youngest ever. He is widely recognized as a chief and the spiritual leader of all three branches of the Sioux tribe.

He is the author of White Buffalo Teachings and a guest columnist for Indian Country Today. A tireless advocate of maintaining traditional spiritual practices, Chief Looking Horse is the founder of Big Foot Riders which memorializes the massacre of Big Foot's band at Wounded Knee. He lives on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota.