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There are now 25 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States. Delegates from around the world amassed in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday approved the addition of the ceremonial earthworks in Hopewell, Ohio, to the prestigious list. UNESCO assigns this designation to sites considered to be of universal importance and price to humanity. There are a thousand sites in the world, and Ohio’s earthworks are now located along wonders like the Grand Canyon, with its stunning layers of rich carved red rocks, the Statue of Liberty, and Frank Lloyd. Wright’s twentieth-century architecture.
“Just three months after joining UNESCO, the United States has inscribed its twenty-fifth place on the World Heritage List, illustrating the richness and diversity of the country’s cultural and herbarium heritage,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a statement.
Hopewell’s ceremonial earthworks surround 8 sites, a set of historic earthen mounds built by indigenous peoples:
All sites were built 1,600 to 2,000 years ago by formerly Hopewell peoples.
“In the past, we rarely referred to it as ‘Hopewell culture’ or ‘Hopewell people,’ but what we actually perceive today as ‘Hopewell’ is not a new town,” says Bill Kennedy, site director and archaeologist at Fort Ancient Earthworks and Nature Preserve. This is a new devout movement. However, it is successful in fluorescence in southern Ohio that is not successful anywhere else. “
Fort Ancient is about forty-five minutes north of Cincinnati, atop a river cliff. Despite names like “Fort” Ancient, the earthworks served as ceremonial, not military, centers.
“Fort Ancient is one of the types of earthworks that other people are building; This is what we will call a hilltop enclosure. That’s the kind of earthworks we’re seeing primarily in southwest Ohio,” he said. “While in south-central eastern Ohio, we most commonly see geometric ground movements. Earthworks are shaped like circles, squares or octagons. “
Mounds throughout Ohio range from 3 to more than 30 feet high and miles long in some places.
Fort Ancient is huge. It is the largest hilltop enclosure in North America, with space for the World Heritage site, the Great Pyramid of Giza.
“The walls of this alone,” Kennedy says of Fort Ancient, “are equivalent to 125 million baskets of earth weighing 30 pounds each. “
“But how can a small organization of other people build something so monumental?” he asks.
It’s a fair answer, he jokes.
“Slowly, very slowly. “
It might be uncommon to consider huge mounds of earth as important, but UNESCO calls the earthworks “a masterpiece of human artistic genius. “This is one of the 10 imaginable criteria for inscription on the World Heritage List. Another requires “an exceptional testimony of a cultural culture or civilization living or extinct. “
The design and structure of the earthworks show that the people of this early era had a clear geometry of architecture, alignments of the sun and moon, and multi-year cycles.
Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee tribe, who participated in the nomination of the earthworks, also sees their inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as a step toward fighting racist and ignorant stereotypes about their other peoples and ancestors.
“They are perfect civil engineers. They’re artists, astronomers, mathematicians, and to my other friends, that’s not how the media portrays the Shawnee, or any other indigenous people in this country,” he said.
In addition, ceremonial earthworks at Hopewell fill gaps in the World Heritage List known through the World Heritage Committee. Specifically, the lack of sites that constitute sacred architecture of pre-contact Native Americans and sites that constitute early understandings of science, culture, and astronomy. .
A total of 54 nominations are being tested this month at the UNESCO World Heritage Conference. No positions were registered last year. Russia will chair the World Heritage Committee, and several countries, including the United States, opposed it given Russia’s war on Ukraine. – endangering a dozen World Heritage sites in Ukraine.
Jennifer Aultman is the historical manager for Ohio History Connection, which worked with the National Park Service on the offering. She says this day had been in the works since before 2008, with thousands of hours of research, meetings, visits, and finally, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, a 330-page application dossier.
“When we sent this, it was New Year’s Eve 2021. FedEx sent it to one of the Interior Ministry workers, to his home, because they were all running away from home. Then he had to send it to the State Department, but we didn’t meet in a parking lot and hand out a box because there was no one running around in the office,” he recalls. “And then someone from the State Department transported it, I think, to Paris and delivered it personally. “
Aultman jokes: World Heritage prestige doesn’t come with a sum of money at the end of the rainbow, but it can simply be an economic engine that attracts tourists from all over the world to see and revel in something so monumental.
“It’s an amazing idea: there’s something that all people, regardless of their nationality or where they grew up, deserve to worry about, because they help us understand what it means to be human,” he says. “Then there are more local ideas “For reasons. We ran with our tribal partners, who (were) driven out of Ohio in the nineteenth century, and this is a way to help lift their legacy. “
Today, there are no federally identified tribes left in Ohio. All were forcibly evicted in the 17s and 1800s. However, it was their ancestors who created those great feats of design and engineering.
Glenna Wallace is chief of the Shawnee Tribe of eastern Oklahoma and has been actively involved in the World Heritage process. He says the inscription on the World Heritage List is part of his project to raise awareness about the earthworks built by their ancestors.
Addressing the World Heritage Committee after Tuesday’s decision, she said she was moved, honored and “very grateful that the world, despite everything, is detecting the commitment, spirituality, wisdom of astronomy, mathematics, art, geology and aesthetic vision,” that gave rise to the imaginative thinking used by our ancestors to create those magnificent earthworks.
“They weren’t just geniuses; They were ordinary geniuses. “
An earlier edition of the story said Jennifer Aultman, director of historic sites and museums for Ohio Hitale Connection, is to blame for the organization’s historic sites.