Believe it or not, there are stranger things happening in America than Trump’s trade policies. For example, did you know that the USA has massive mounds built a mysterious civilisation over 2000 years ago? Brandon Withrow writes for the BBC:
“Autumn leaves crackled under our shoes as dozens of eager tourists and I followed a guide along a grassy mound. We stopped when we reached the opening of a turf-topped circle, which was formed by another wall of mounded earth. We were at The Octagon, part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, a large network of hand-constructed hills spread throughout central and southern Ohio that were built as many as 2,000 years ago. Indigenous people would come to The Octagon from hundreds of miles away, gathering regularly for shared rituals and worship …
All these prehistoric ceremonial earthworks in Ohio were created by what is now called the Hopewell Culture, a network of Native American societies that gathered from as far away as Montana and the Gulf of Mexico between roughly 100 BCE and 500 CE and were connected by a series of trade routes. Their earthworks in Ohio consist of shapes – like circles, squares and octagons – that were often connected to each other. Archaeologists are only now beginning to understand the sophistication of these engineering marvels.
Built with astonishing mathematical precision, as well as a complex astronomical alignment, these are the largest geometrical earthworks in the world that were not built as fortifications or defensive structures….
In 2023, eight of Hopewell’s earthworks were inscribed as a Unesco World Heritage site. These include The Great Circle and The Octagon in Newark, Ohio, as well Ohio’s first state park, Fort Ancient (not an actual fort). The other five are part of the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: Mound City, Hopeton Earthworks, High Bank Works, Hopewell Mound Group and Seip Earthworks.
Lepper told me The Octagon and The Great Circle were once a larger, single Hopewell complex spanning 4.5 square miles and connected by a series of roads lined by earthwork walls. Walking through both sites today, there is an immediate shock of scale. The Great Circle, where the museum for Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks is found, is 1,200ft in diameter. Its walls rise up to 14ft high and are outlined on the inside by a deep ditch. The Great Circle was once connected to a square and a burial ellipse, with only part of the square still visible today. The Octagon sprawls a massive 50 acres and is attached to the 20-acre Observatory Circle, a large earthwork circle for gathering and rituals connected to the observation of the night sky.
“You could put four Roman Colosseums inside just The Octagon,” Lepper told me…
Lepper explained that the circumference of The Great Circle “is equal to the perimeter of the perfect square that it was connected to”, and that “the area of that perfect square is equal to the area of the [Observatory Circle] that’s connected to The Octagon”.
He added: “If you draw a square inside The Octagon by drawing a line from alternate corners of The Octagon, the sides of that square [1,054ft] are equal to the diameter of the circle that it’s attached to [1,054ft].””
It sounds like 2000 years ago Americans had already figured how to “Make America Great”.
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