UNESCO just added 42 new places to its World Heritage Sites.
Of those 42, just one is in the United States: the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks in Ohio.
A group of giant mounds built by Native Americans thousands of years ago just became the US’ newest World Heritage Site
Oh excellent! I was hoping that would happen since I read about it a few months ago! Absolutely deserved.
What’s under the mounds?
They are often burial mounds, but some are ceremonial. Many don’t exist anymore, or don’t exist as much more than a little bump because they’ve been plowed over. Some were reconstructed in the early 20th century and have nothing under them in either case. But they took an amazing amount of collaborative work, and from the finds in the mounds, it appears that people from the east coast to the Rockies were involved in the building of these mounds. They are not impressive to look at in general, but they are an incredibly important cultural artifact.
Thank you never heard of these mounds but glad we are preserving them.
They’re relatively unknown in general, so this will help educate people about them and about a cultural religious center for much of a continent. I forgot to say that some of them are astronomically aligned based on a lunar calendar, one cycle of which takes something like 19 years, so they had to keep track of all of that despite having no apparent writing system. Just incredible.
That is incredible! Man I love Lemmy discovery a new YouTube channel were the host does disabled history. She pretty cool. Now this.
Thanks for the heads up, I’ll look for the channel.
https://youtube.com/@MeekaS-ef4mr?si=zsCqu2h6ocT5ozma
Thank you!