(Photo: John E. Hancock/Ohio History Connection/UNESCO World Heritage Nomination Office)

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Newark Earthworks joins World Heritage sites that include the Taj Mahal an Stonehenge

By Kent Mallett, Newark Advocate

Twenty months after Licking County won the Super Bowl of economic development with Intel Corporation, the Newark-Heath area became part of a worldwide cultural hall of fame.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday voted to recognize the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks for inscription on the World Heritage List, which also includes the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge and the Great Barrier Reef.

This is Ohio’s first World Heritage site, the 25^th in the United States and one of about 1,000 sites around the world.

The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks nomination included the Octagon Earthworks in Newark and the Great Circle in Newark and Heath as part of eight large earthen enclosures built by ancient American Indian peoples in central and southern Ohio between about AD 1 and 400.

The Octagon Earthworks includes remnants of a 2,000-year-old complex that is the largest set of geometric earthworks ever known. It is currently home to Moundbuilders Country Club under a lease agreement the Ohio History Connection is trying to end early through the courts.

“Inscription on the World Heritage List will call international attention to these treasures long known to Ohioans,” Megan Wood, executive director and CEO of the Ohio History Connection, said in a statement.

The other sites are the Fort Ancient Earthworks in Warren County and five sites that are part of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Ross County.

The U.S. Department of the Interior made the nomination in January 2022 to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s prestigious World Heritage List, created in 1972 to recognize the earth’s most significant cultural and natural attractions.

Dick Shiels, former director of the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State University-Newark, explained what World Heritage status would mean for the community back in 2016.

"What we have in Newark is what’s going to draw tourists,” Shiels said. “This is the site people are going to want to see. There were 600 sites in Ohio that had mounds from 100 BC to 300 AD. Two remain and we’ve got them both."

In addition to their size and age, the Newark Earthworks also follow an 18.6 year moon cycle where the central axis of the entire Octagon aligns with the northernmost rising of the moon, with other walls aligning with different moonrises.

Earlham College professors Ray Hively and Robert Horn rediscovered the alignments in the 1970s and said the walls of the Newark Octagon “define the most accurate astronomical alignments known in the prehistoric world.”

The Ohio History Connection noted all the sites across the state were built between 1,600 and 2,000 years ago and were complex landscape architecture "masterpieces" that are exceptional for their "enormous scale, geometric precision and astronomical alignments."

After earning inscription, Chief Glenna Wallace, of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, thanked the committee for recognizing the incredible knowledge of astronomy and art her ancestors showed in constructing the earthworks.

"They were not just geniuses, they were uncommon geniuses," she said.

Providing access to earthworks

World Heritage status, along with the eventual transformation of the Octagon Earthworks from part of Moundbuilders Country Club into a public park, will complete an effort dating back more than 20 years, Shiels said. The goals were access and recognition.

“This is what we were working for —– full public access,” Shiels said. “In 1999, Brad Lepper, Jeff Gill and I called a meeting of what became Friends of the Mounds. Native Americans and others organized. That was the beginning of this movement.”

Shiels said that in late 1999, Ohio State’s historic site manager Amos Loveday visited him at the OSU-Newark campus, and one comment helped start the effort to publicize the Newark attraction.

“On his way out, I said, ‘I’d find a way to remove the golf course,’ and he said he agreed with me, and we met with him a number of times," Shiels said.

Gill, who leads tours as a volunteer with Newark Earthworks Center and Ohio History Connection, and is a World Heritage ambassador, said he remembers Shiels' frustration that history textbooks made no mention of the Newark Earthworks, but began with the Cahokia Mounds, in Collinsville, Illinois, which is a World Heritage site.

In a 2016 story, Shiels told The (Newark) Advocate, "In 1999, Cahokia cracked the textbooks. That’s when it caught my attention. Most of the textbooks begin in Cahokia in the year 1200, not with Christopher Columbus. As a historian, that’s really what drives me. I taught American history. I’m in this because it changes the way we understand American history.”

A gratifying quarter century of work

The World Heritage effort dates back to about 1999, Gill said, and was part of a 2003 cultural resource management plan, which included community leaders and Moundbuilders Country Club.

"This is gratifying because it's the result of a quarter-century of work," Gill said. "It's just been a steady growth of more partners."

The Ohio Supreme Court in December ruled against Moundbuilders Country Club in its appeal of lower court rulings allowing the Ohio History Connection to reclaim the lease on the Newark golf course property by eminent domain.

The price to buy back the lease will be determined in Licking County Common Pleas Court this fall. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for Sept. 29 and a jury trial for Oct. 17.

During the presentation to the committee, it was mentioned that follow-up must be done to ensure the Octagon is fully reacquired from the golf course.

On Oct. 15, Gill will lead a tour of the earthworks sites in Newark and Heath, starting at 9 a.m. at the Great Circle, and ending at noon at the same location. An open house is scheduled for 12-4 p.m. at the Octagon Earthworks on one of four golf-free days at Moundbuilders Country Club.

Newark Earthworks

Following is a breakdown of the three Newark Earthworks sites:

Octagon Earthworks is part of Newark Earthworks, remnants of a 2,000-year-old complex that is the largest set of geometric earthworks known. Enclosing 50 acres, the Octagon Earthworks has eight walls, each measuring about 550 feet long and from five to six feet in height. Address: 125 N. 33rd St., Newark.

Great Circle Earthworks is nearly 1,200 feet in diameter and was likely used as a vast ceremonial center by its builders. The 8-foot-high walls surround a 5-foot-deep moat, except at the entrance where the dimensions are even greater and more impressive. Address: 455 Hebron Road, Heath.

Wright Earthworks consists of a fragment of a geometrically near-perfect square enclosure and part of one wall that originally formed a set of parallel embankments, which led from the square to a large oval enclosure. Originally, the sides of the Newark square ranged from 940 to 950 feet in length, and they enclose a total area of about 20 acres. Address: 136-154 James St., Newark, north of Grant Street, parallel to Ohio 79 in Newark.