Hopewell site fi lls winter solstice role
FORT ANCIENT — As people did millennia ago, scores huddled and shivered in the pre-dawn gloom Thursday, waiting for the cosmic calendar to flip once again.
The crowd quieted as an orange sun peeked through a strategically placed gap in the 2,000-year-old walls. The year’s shortest day had arrived, marking the moment when Earth’s axis begins to tilt the Northern Hemisphere back toward the
sun, lengthening the days and — eventually — ushering in spring before tilting back again.
Thursday was the 24th modern observance of the winter solstice at Fort Ancient, a giant ceremonial enclosure that Indians of the Hopewell Culture built out of dirt dug by hand between 100 B.C. and A.D. 300, said Jack Blosser, manager of the National Historic Landmark in Warren County. And, with about 80 showing up on a clear December morning, it was by far the largest group in memory to gather at the site, about 70 miles southwest of Columbus.
So what draws modern people out into the freezing cold on the darkest day of the year, and why would their prehistoric predecessors engage in generations of backbreaking labor to mark it?
“Winter solstice is the most important day,” Christine Hadley of Cincinnati said just after the sun had made its appearance. “It’s when the days get longer. It amazes me that (Hopewell Indians) were able to mark it this way.”
In some agricultural societies, the solstice was marked when the fermentation of wine and beer was complete, and the time had come to slaughter livestock to preserve grain until spring. Those practices at least play into pagan traditions such as the Scandinavian Feast of Juul and the ancient Roman Saturnalia.
Christmas itself has some roots in earlier, wintersolstice traditions, said Brad Lepper, chief archaeology curator at the Ohio History Connection. But though the historic holidays are tied to the solar calendar partly through agriculture, the prehistoric Hopewell observances in what is now Ohio were tied to the heavens by something even deeper, he said.
“I think of these structures as ceremonial machines,” Lepper said of the Hopewell earthworks such as Fort Ancient that are aligned with solar and lunar cycles. Their builders “were incredibly meticulous observers of what was going on in the heavens.”
Yet they didn’t have much of an agricultural reason for building them.
Humans have lived as hunter- gatherers for more than 90 percent of our history, and 2,000 years ago in this part of North America, they were still making the
“Neolithic transition” — or the change to an agricultural society, Lepper said. The plants the Hopewell people did use — squash, sunflower, goosefoot and knotweed — grow so easily in these parts that modern farmers regard them as weeds, he said.
And even if the Hopewell people did need a guide for intensive agriculture, “farmers don’t need a gigantic earthen calendar to figure that out,” Lepper said.
To illustrate how gigantic Fort Ancient is, Blosser said that if all the soil mounded over 400 years were scooped into dump trucks, they’d stretch most of the way from Cincinnati to Cleveland.
Lepper said that although there are no texts saying so, it’s almost certain that such a massive project was undertaken for spiritual reasons. He described a time when people were much more closely connected to what went on in the sky, and when they discerned patterns, “they must have thought they made some kind of a big discovery about the mind of god.”
So they built their massive earthworks, aligning them with phases of the sun and moon. And on much-earlier winter solstices, people gathered near the spot where others did on Thursday, waiting for the sun to peak up through the same notch in the earthen wall.
When it did, Leppert said, the ancient Indians must have thought the gears of their ceremonial machines had meshed with the cosmos, “and the doorway of heaven opens.”