09/08/2026
I just discovered this page and can’t look away.
📌 Newark Earthworks — Heath/Newark, Ohio
📍 40°03'05.86"N, 82°25'57.25"W
Less than 10 percent of this ancient landscape survives, and it still spans two sites a mile apart, connected by geometry precise enough to track the moon's 18.6-year cycle.
Nearly 2,000 years ago, Indigenous people transformed several square miles of what is now Newark and Heath into one of the most extraordinary geometric landscapes ever built in ancient North America. Hopewell communities constructed it between roughly 100 BC and AD 400, originally extending across more than four square miles, with circles, squares, an octagon, mounds, and long parallel avenues connecting different parts of an enormous ceremonial landscape used for ceremony, gathering, trade, worship, and honoring the dead.
Only a fraction survived the growth of modern Newark, but two of its greatest monuments remain remarkably intact, the Octagon Earthworks and the Great Circle Earthworks, sitting roughly a mile apart. The Great Circle in Heath is enormous, about 1,200 feet across, with an earthen wall rising as much as 14 feet in places and a deep ditch running around the inside. Near its center sits the unusual Eagle Mound, and excavation in 1928 revealed it wasn't simply a burial mound at all, beneath it stood a rectangular ceremonial structure with a central hearth, apparently deliberately dismantled before the mound was built over it.
About a mile northwest stands the Octagon, where Hopewell engineering gets even more impressive. A 20-acre circular enclosure connects by parallel walls to a 50-acre octagon, its eight sides each roughly 550 feet long. That geometry wasn't arbitrary, either. The Octagon was built in alignment with the moon's complicated 18.6-year lunar cycle, and from the Observatory Mound, the moon's northernmost rise appears through the Octagon's axis with extraordinary precision. Ohio History Connection notes that every 18.6 years, the moon rises directly through the passageway connecting the Observatory Circle and the Octagon.
These two surviving complexes were once part of something considerably larger. Nineteenth-century surveys recorded additional squares, circles, mounds, and long parallel avenues extending across the landscape between them, most of which has since disappeared beneath streets, houses, railroads, and other development, leaving less than 10 percent of the original Newark complex intact today.
That contrast is exactly what makes the LiDAR here so striking. Modern Newark virtually fades into shades of gray, while the surviving Hopewell geometry remains unmistakable, the Great Circle at one end, the enormous Circle-and-Octagon complex at the other, separated today by a city that didn't exist when either was built.
In 2023, the Newark Earthworks became part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognizing these surviving monuments as exceptional examples of ancient landscape architecture and astronomical knowledge.
This is a repost from an earlier LiDAR America post, now using much higher-resolution imagery that shows the relationship between the two surviving earthwork complexes far more clearly.
