I recently watched the documentary Searching for the Great Hopewell Road. The Hopewell were one of the ancient Moundbuilder civilizations that “built thousands of monumental earthworks in the central Ohio Valley, including the largest geometric enclosures in the world.” Most fascinating to me were the links made between some of the cultural beliefs of the Woodland Indians of this region, the Anasazi of the Southwest, and the Mayas. All three purportedly had a belief that the Milky Way was some sort of sacred road of the spirit world, and all three constructed long, wide, straight roads that may have represented on earth the spiritual road they discerned in the night sky. The focus of the documentary is the discovery of what may be a straight road, 100 feet wide, connecting two sites of mound enclosures 60 miles apart. It is maddening how little is known about the ancient cultures of this continent, especially in this region.
Another thing of great interest to me were the interviews with descendents of some of the Ohio tribes, such as the Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware, who described various beliefs, some of which may have been inherited by their ancestors from the Moundbuilders. I was particularly interested in their Creation myth, which involved an endless expanse of water and a turtle coming up with the idea of creating the Earth by diving to the bottom, gathering mud, and piling it up to make some land. A mischievous muskrat helped, but he piled the mud on the turtle’s shell instead, and the turtle itself become the land. Creation by way of practical joke — it makes sense to me (and explains quite a lot, if taken further). I was also interested in two other ideas that separated the Woodland tribes from most others: they referred to the Great Spirit as “She,” and the moon was far more important to them than the sun. This last revelation was what led some of the scholars studying one of the great mounds connected by the road to look for lunar, rather than solar, observation markers at the mound. Sure enough, whereas there had been no evidence indicating any conscious attempts to trace the passage of the sun, there is evidence that the mound was used to trace the much more complicated lunar cycle.
I only wish the documentary had been longer. I love this sort of thing.
Tags: documentaries, history