In 1848 Ephraim Squier and Edwin Da'is came to the “irresistible” conclusion that the earthen walls wrapped fortresslike around many Adena and Hopewell mounds were held “sacred, and thus set apart as ‘tabooed’ or consecrated ground” by their creators. Although some 19th-century thinkers, especially military men, thought that the walls were fortifications, archaeologists today agree with Squier and Davis that the rings marked literally hallowed ground.
The late Adena built simple enclosures consisting of circular walls and ditches up to 200 feet in diameter, interrupted by a single gateway, that encompassed a moatlike ditch and a central mound, much like the system shown in the Squier and Davis illustration Circle and
Mound, Greenup County, Kentucky (background). In addition to monuments like these, the Hopewell built enclosures that were far more elaborate and imaginative than those of the Adena, making use of various geometric configurations. Often the enclosures clustered in systems that stretched across the landscape for miles and contained dozens of mounds.
Once one of the largest groups of ancient monuments in the United States, Newark Eartijworks in Licking County, Ohio, sprawled across a four-mile expanse. Squier and Davis’s 19th-eentury map (below) reeords the primarily Hopewellian complex, with its causeways and variously shaped enclosures, in its entirety. Among its sole remnants is this circle of walls some 10 feet high (left), covering 26 acres, that connects to an octagon encompassing SO more acres. The surviving monuments are maintained today as part of a private golf course.
Second only to Cahokia in size, the earthworks at Moundville, Alabama, formed the hub of a Mississippian repion that may have had as many as 10,000 people. Its 20 larpe platform mounds—datinp from between AD 1250 and 1500—covered more than 300 fertile acres (below). The 1905 map at Itji shows the distribution, shapes, and relative sizes of all of the mounds, which were clustered together at a bend in the Black Warrior River.
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