Fragments of Pilgrimage - The Great Hopewell Road

Sketch of the main components of the Newark Earthworks [Hively & Horn 2023, fig 1, p 3]

"At his worktable, he shows me. 'This is Haitsee-a Shield if you want to call it that-and it is used as a Guide.' It is a thin splinted strip of hanpaani made into a circle, which will fit into the palm of your hand. 'There is a star in the center-I will make it out of string tied to the edges of the circle. This is a guide to find your way, to know the directions by. It is round because the moon is round. It is the night sky, which is a circle all around in which the stars and moon sit. It's a circle, that's why. This is part of it, to know the directions you are going, to know where you are at.'

He shows me a stick about the thickness of his thumb. The stick is an oak limb split in half, and he runs the edge of his thumbnail along the core of the wood, the dark streak at the very center of the wood. The streak does not run completely straight, but it flows very definitely from one end to the other. And my father says, 'This is the Heeyahimani. This is to return you safely. This is so you will know the points on your return back, the straight and safe way. So you will be definite and true on your return course. It is placed at the beginning of your journey. This line here is that, a true road.'"

[Ortiz 2003, p. 116]

Introduction

Study Area in relation to North America [Author Map 2025]

Over two thousand years ago, in what is now the US state of Ohio, the native peoples living there built immense earthworks, some with precise geometric forms, including circles, squares, and octagons. These were built on flat ridges above major waterways; sometimes, the ridges' tops were manually flattened. Major collections of earthworks are centered around the current cities of Chillicothe, on the Scioto River, and Newark, on the Licking River. The Scioto flows into the Ohio at the present-day city of Portsmouth, which also once contained extensive earthworks. The Licking River flows into the Muskingum River, which meets the Ohio at the present-day city of Marietta. Again, the land above the mouth of the Muskingum contained extensive earthworks.

Portsmouth Works [Squier & Davis 1847, plate XXVII]

Marietta Works [Squier & Davis 1847, plate XXVI]

Newark Earthworks is approximately 55 miles (88.5 km) northeast of Chillicothe, and it has been proposed that a pilgrimage path or built road, consisting of parallel earth walls, ditches, and a raised center, was constructed between the two earthwork complexes. [Lepper 1995] Marietta Works had a walled pathway leading from the Muskingum River to the earthworks, and Portsmouth Works rivaled Newark as to the length of its walled passages. At the northern terminus at Newark, the road ends at the Octagon/Observatory Circle Complex, a calendric machine based on the motions of the moon. [Hively & Horn 2016]

It is unknown what the people who built these structures called themselves. I prefer the term Earth Builders over the settler name Hopewell. The historian Roger G. Kennedy contends that the etymology of 'build', because of its age, originally meant earthen structures, so just Builders might be a better name. [Kennedy 1994] He is talking about a pattern of construction in North America that lasted thousands of years, while the name Hopewell represents a certain time and place, and within this cultural space is a certain style of building, earthworks having strict geometrical forms. So these people would perhaps be better called Geobuilders, or perhaps Geomancers. [Romain 2000] Unfortunately, Hopewell is still the common term, but I will try to avoid it as much as possible.

These were a riverine people, living along the great rivers of the central Ohio country, and where they emptied into the Ohio River. Two of these rivers, the Scioto and the Muskingum, form huge watersheds and have extensive earthworks at their confluences. Another, smaller watershed, the Hocking, has earthworks near its terminus but nothing at the confluence. Most important to this culture is the Scioto River, with a large concentration of earthworks around the present city of Chillicothe, called the Scioto Core. The rivers, their watersheds, and the terraces, valleys, and bottomlands they formed are important geographical features. Another is the remnants of two periods of glaciation in Ohio: the Illinois (c.191,000 to c.130,000 years ago) [Wikipedia Illinoian (stage)], and the Wisconsin (c. 75,000 to c. 11,000 years ago). [Wikipedia Wisconsin] Cutting through Central Ohio are the remains of the maximal extent of both glaciations, where the glaciers ran into the Appalachian Plateau and survive then and today in the form of lakes, bogs, swamps, small hills called Kames, and a rich, fertile soil. This interface between highland and lowland provided a rich existence for a people transitioning from pure hunter-gatherers to a developing agricultural complex.

If this were a pilgrimage route, Portsmouth to Chillicothe by river to Newark by land to Marietta by river forms a 'Grand Tour' of Ohio holy sites.

Ohio River Drainages [Fig. 1 (geoPackage)]

Platform mounds meant for raised use are rare in Ohio and in the Middle Woodland in general, though they are a major construction feature of later Mississippian societies. Their usage does occur in the Middle Woodland, having been found in the Appalachian Summit in North Carolina [Wright 2014] and in 1990, N'omi Greber showed that at least one of two square platform mounds in Marietta was a Mississippian-style platform mound. [Greber & Pickard 1990] There are four platform mounds within a rough square made out of 16 segments. All but one have ramps leading up to them: 4, 3, and 2. Two are square, and the others are rectangular. The Observatory Mound in Newark is also a platform mound, but it is oval, not square. In 1836, the Calliopean Society of the Granville Literary and Theological Institution excavated the mound and found a stone pavement under it. [Lepper 1998] In addition, they disproved a conjecture by Caleb Atwater that the mound was a collapsed arch. Also, no burials or artifacts were found in the mound. The gap has parallel walls extending out from it like the entrance to the Great Circle. It looks like the mound was built at some time after the observatory circle was built; how long after is unknown. There is no hint of any ramps.

Current Octagon - Observatory Circle Complex 1.5' DEM [Author 2025, Ohio Imagery]

There are only two Octagon-Circle earthwork combinations currently in North America. A rumor of an octagon inside Mound City, West Virginia, and perhaps in Iowa, but little supporting evidence exists. [Norona 1950] [Riley & Tiffany 2014] [Green et al. 2021] The second is near Chillicothe at a location called High Bank. In addition, the two earthworks are at right angles to each other, the two circles are nearly identical in diameter, and both locations are designed using multiples of this diameter. [Hively & Horn 1984]

High Banks Works [Squier & Davis 1847, plate XVI]

Travel in Ohio during the Middle Woodland consisted of walking or paddling canoes. Canoes were made from hollowed logs or perhaps from bark stretched over a wooden frame. It is unknown when bark canoes were first used, as their fragility allows them to deteriorate quickly. [Adney & Chapelle 1964] Log canoes have been found in bogs dating back thousands of years. [Brose & Greber.1982] A route between Newark and Marietta is my speculation, whether by land or water. A water route between Portsmouth and Chillicothe is possible, and a land route has been proposed.  [Kennedy 1994, p. 241] What I will concern myself with here and in future articles is a land route between Chillicothe and Newark, a built, walled pathway linking the two ceremonial districts. Evidence for around eight miles of this pathway exists, but questions and controversy remain.

The Great Hopewell Road

Caleb Atwater settled in Circleville, Ohio, in 1815. [Wikipedia Caleb Atwater] Circleville was founded in 1810 inside a massive earthwork of concentric circles connected to a large, perfect square. [Anderson & Drive 2011] Atwater became the US Postmaster for Circleville and a local antiquarian. In 1820, he published Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States in the first volume of the American Antiquarian Society. He was the first to mention a walled roadway running south from Newark. He believed it went to the Hocking (then called Hockhocking) River, connected the Licking/Muskingum and Hocking watersheds, and linked the earthworks in Newark with those near Rock Mill, near the Hocking's source. These earthworks were believed to be, at the time, defensive forts, and Atwater believed that the walled roadway was a defensive line or fence, or perhaps a boundary of some kind. Here are his words:

Atwater's comments [Atwater 1820, p 193]

In 1847, Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis published Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley through the Smithsonian Institute. [Squier & Davis 1847] Squier, who ran the project, didn't do all the surveys but included other people's work into the finished maps. Charles Whittlesey, a surveyor in Ohio, had surveyed the Newark earthworks in 1838. Squier's finished map showed the passageway coming from the Octagon going directly south; Whittlesey's map showed it going south, then turning correctly southwest. Squier took pieces from different maps and cut and pasted them together, covering over the turn. [Wilson 2024a-c] Squier's map is still the iconic map of Newark earthworks despite this and other inaccuracies.

Dr. James Salisbury (1823 - 1905) and his brother Charles were antiquarians interested in the Newark earthworks. Salisbury settled in Bratenahl, Ohio, near Cleveland. He was interested in health and nutrition and invented the first fad diet around the Salisbury steak. In 1862, the brothers created a map of the Newark works. Salisbury's written work, including the map. ended up at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, until it was rediscovered by Ohio archaeologists in 1988: [The Bratenahl Historical Society 2025]

"I gave my first presentation on the Newark Earthworks for an archaeological audience in October of 1988 and that’s when the late N‘omi Greber told me about a card catalog entry at the American Antiquarian Society to a map of the Newark Earthworks. She didn’t know anything else about it because she was there doing research on the Hopewell Mound Group. I sent them a letter of inquiry with almost no expectation that it might turn out to be a map I hadn’t already seen. It probably wasn’t until 1989 that I got the microfilm from the AAS." [Lepper 2024, personal communication] [Salisbury 1862]

The map is now considered the best and most accurate of the Newark earthworks, although by 1861, some elements had been lost. They showed parallel walls going south, then turning southwest, out of the map's range. James' notes state that they followed the road 2.5 miles to where it crossed Ramp Creek. They continued to follow it some 6 miles further south, where it disappeared into a swamp. This is west of what is now called Buckeye Lake, originally part of a region called 'Big Swamp'. [Bonar & Lisska 1991] They believed that the ultimate destination was the works at Circleville and then south by the Scioto River to Chillicothe.

In 1930, an aerial photographer, Warren Weiant, Jr., discovered that just north of Ramp Creek, the walls included a small circle attached to the western side by a small walled avenue running east-west to an opening in the circle. This is where the present runway of the Licking County Airport is. He followed the road south towards Millisport (at the western end of Buckeye Lake). He saw similar-sized and positioned circles every 1 to 1.5 miles along the way. [Lepper 1998]

In 1934, Dash Reeves, a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, was hired to do an aerial photographic survey of mounds and earthworks for the Ohio Archeological Society. In 1936, he published a short piece in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly in which he describes the walls as they run from the Octagon to Ramp Creek. [Reeves 1936] He notes that many of these pathways go down to a stream, but Ramp Creek is a very minor tributary. Also, why wasn't there a passage to Raccon Creek from the Octagon, a much larger and much closer stream? He also mentions that the walls connecting the small circle with the main passageway are not parallel, but converge slightly toward the main avenue, avoiding a small hill. He mentions how straight and perfectly parallel the main avenue is.

Dache Reeves' photo of Ramp Creek [Reeves 1936]. Annotation by Timothy Price [Price 2007]

Brad Lepper did his undergraduate work at the University of New Mexico. He became familiar with Chaco Canyon and the idea of a ceremonial road system leading into it, particularly the long, straight road from Chaco to Casas Grande in Mexico, proposed by Stephen Lekson. [Lekson 2015] Lekson named a road leading north out of the canyon 'The Great North Road' after a road built by the Romans in Great Britain. Lepper first named the road 'The Great Hopewell Road' (GHR) in 1992, and the name has slowly been adopted. [Lepper 2024] Lepper was the first to name this a pilgrimage route and created the first modern map of the proposed route:

Map of the proposed path of the Great Hopewell Road [Lepper 1995, p. 53]

In 2006, William F. Romain and Jarrod Burks conducted a study of the GHR in the region between the Octagon and Ramp Creek, known as the Van Voorhis Walls, after a local land owner. In a woodlot just north of the Licking County Airport, they found remains of the road still as a 3-dimensional object. They compared it to the 'Sacra Via', a walled pathway in Marietta. Using LIDAR data, they were able to generate a set of cross sections of the walls and found them to be around 150' apart and around 1' deep. In addition, they mention the importance of Geller Hill, a large glacial Kame that the road passes close to. [Romain & Burks 2008] There are several small stone burial mounds on Geller Hill. Romain speculates that perhaps the remains of some builder of the GHR are here. Currently, the mounds are believed to be from a much earlier people of a Glacial Kame Culture, who buried their dead in Kames. [Lepper 2025, personal communication]

Cross Sections of the Woodlot Fragment [Romain & Burks 2008, fig. 12]

Timothy Price did a least path analysis of the route of the GHR in 2007 as a student at Ohio University. He created two Least Cost analyses. One, he calls suitability, which I believe means suitability for human occupation. This is the distance to rivers and lakes, and the distance to known mounds and earthworks. Does the road, if straight like Brad Lepper believes, connect possible population or ceremonial centers? He concludes that it doesn't.

Least Cost Paths based on suitability, distance to mounds, water, rivers, and earthworks [Price 2007, fig. 13]

His second question: Does the road follow an optimal path through the landscape? Using two variables, land cover and slope, he shows that it does.

Least Cost Paths based on slope and land cover [Price 2007, fig. 14]

Mr. Price has been kind enough to share his GIS data with me, and I hope to expand on his work in the future.

In 2008, Giulio Magli published Possible Astronomical References in the Planning of the Great Hopewell Road. [Magli 2008] He looks at the possibility of building a road of such length and keeping it straight. He uses examples of Roman, Mayan, and Chacoan roads. He suggests that the road was aligned at 90 degrees to the summer solstice sunset and the rising of the star Capella. This gives a construction date for the road as 100 CE.

Even with the findings of the Salisbury manuscripts and map, there was still no consensus that the road extended south of Ramp Creek, as stated by Squier and Davis. Kevin Schwartz, in 2016, published a study suggesting that this was true. [Schwartz 2016] This includes a study of a cross-section along a drainage pipe, where he found evidence of soil changes and pieces of limestone, suggesting that the road was perhaps 'paved' with white stone. He concludes that the section couldn't be called actual proof, but part of a string of partial discoveries:

Table of the strength of evidence for various locations of the Great Hopewell Road [Schwartz 2016, p. 29, table 1]

He concludes with a regression test on the data in the above table to see if the evidence becomes weaker as one moves further south from Ramp Creek. The results find only a slight weakening, and he ends with this comment:

"The analysis presented here thus provides an excellent example of a situation where each individual piece of evidence may not be strong in isolation, but the combined evidence is more compelling."

[Schwartz 2016, p. 30]

In 2022, a GIS map containing all the different data on Newark was created for the Ohio World Heritage to celebrate Newark being listed as a possible World Heritage Site. This map and it's data are public domain. [Aultman et al. 2022]

Jamie Davis heads an organization called 3D Archaeology. [Davis 2023] They have a Facebook page and, at the moment, no published work. Ohio now has whole county DEMs at 2.5 ft resolution (0.76 m) and 1 mile square ??? tiles at 1.25 ft resolution (0.38 m). [Ohio Department of Administrative Services 2025] Using these tiles, Davis and his group have found fragments of the GHR nearly to what Kevin Schwartz calls the 'Salisbury Limit,' the point where the Salisbury brothers lost the walled road. In addition, the current path of the road is slowly turning southeast. In a presentation this October at the annual 2025 Fall meeting of the Ohio Archaeological Council, they mention that if the road continues this slight bend, it will end up at Circleville. [OAC 2025] [Davis & Snider 2025]

Lidar discoveries of GHR [Davis 2023]

In another presentation, John Soderberg from Dennison University discussed an excavation north of the airport woodlot of a known location of the GHR. This cross-section was digitized as an object for further study. There was no discussion of Kevin Schwartz's cross-section of a possible section and how it compares to the two. [Soderberg 2025]

Status and Possibilities

As of this writing, there is little evidence of the road extending beyond what Schwartz calls the 'Salisbury limit'. That it went that far at all is an extraordinary achievement. Where it went beyond any present evidence opens up several possibilities, hypotheses that can be tested based on further evidence, and even without evidence, can be logically argued to achieve some measure of probability. For now, I won't go into the arguments for or against or the probabilities

• The GHR ends at the Salisbury limit.

The road disappears into a swampy region at the outer edge of the Licking/Muskingum watershed, just west of what was once called 'Big Swamp.' The Builder's walled paths often ended at a water source. Could this be the water source?

• The GHR is no longer a 'built' path beyond the Salisbury Limit.

This is the most testable hypothesis: Will fragments of a built road be found? Brad Lepper has suggested four other locations that he found by studying old aerial photographs, called the "Lepper spots" by Timothy Price. I don't know if they have been confirmed with LIDAR. [Lepper 1995] LIDAR confirmation is just one step, one piece of data, leading to a larger picture.

• The GHR goes to Circleville.

The current evidence suggests that the road is turning slowly to the west. Davis and Snider indicate that if it continues turning west at this rate, it will turn towards Circleville. They have not found any evidence of a built road north of the town.

• The GHR, whether built or unbuilt, runs all the way to Chillicothe.

Between 1796 and 1797, Col. Ebenezer Zane was commissioned to build a road, or 'trace', between Maysville, Kentucky, and Wheeling, (West) Virginia. Part of the road went between Chillicothe and the future town of Lancaster, Ohio, and is believed to follow an older native path, called the Moxahala Trail. Zane was given land in compensation, including land in Chillicothe where the road crossed the Scioto, and land where it crossed the Hocking near a prominent landmark called "Standing Rock". Zane's relatives founded Lancaster. [Martzloff 1905] It is possible that Zane's Trace and the GHR followed a similar path between the Hocking and the Scioto. There is currently a project with the Fairfield County GIS to find the exact route of Zane's Trace. [Ryan 2025]

Zane's Trace, the Ohio Canals, and the National Road [Bownocker 1923]

Phenomenology of Landscape

"Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions." [Smith 2018]

I commute from my home in Tucson, AZ, to Nogales, AZ, about two weeks a month. This is about 56 miles, around the same distance between Newark and Chillicothe. The freeway follows the Santa Cruz River valley and rises from the Sonoran Desert to the edge of the Maderean Highlands. On the way, I pass two missions from the 1700s, one still a working Catholic church. Mountain ranges rise and fall. Locations that are important both visually and from my own experiences pass by: Madera Canyon, Elephant Butte, the road to Arivaca, Tubac, where Juan Bautista de Anza, his men, and 200 settlers walked across two deserts to found San Francisco in 1776, and Pena Blanca Lake. Sometimes, far to the west, I can catch a glimpse of Baboquivari Peak, the sacred mountain of the O'odham. There are even earthworks, a great wall of tailings from the copper mines.

So, through my own intentionality, I give meaning to this landscape. So how did ancient peoples view the landscape? In Ohio, there is a disadvantage in that the native peoples were removed 180 years ago, long-term memories fractured by expulsion. All we have is the land itself. In 1994, Christopher Tilley published A Phenomenology of Landscape Places, Paths and Monuments, a philosophical and ethnographic attempt to understand this problem. [Tilley 1994] Tilley's purpose was a more complete understanding of landscape, complementing current ideas based on ecological and economic factors. [Wythe 1996] An important critique of landscape phenomenology is that it lacks a fixed methodology and quantitative theory, and instead offers only speculative musings. [Johnson 2012] The lone (male) archaeologist walking through the ruins snapping pictures. [Graves 2012] In other cases, comparison between human fieldwork and GIS viewshed on the Isle of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides shows that GIS missed important components. [Rennell 2012] Tilley's work was also used in critiques of the use of GIS in archaeology. [Gillings 2012] Gillings saw phenomenology as a problem for any theoretical GIS and suggested the concept of affordances drawn from perceptual psychology and the work of James J. Gibson. [Gibson 1979]

"Gibson advocated a direct theory of perception which argues that the environment within which a given animal is embedded (the world of objects, events and other animals) encodes meanings that are directly perceived by that animal (rather than created solely in the mind on the basis of a mass of raw sensory data as is the case in traditional indirect, or inferential, models). In the direct model of perception, the environment is laden with meaning that animals (like us) extract during the course of our sensory engagement with it ..." [Gillings 2012, p. 604] 

Performing a given behavior creates and eliminates affordances. [Wagman 2019, p. 137, fig. 8.5]

Landscape Affordance

The meaning that we extract from an environment through our sensory engagement is termed 'affordance.' This term can have several definitions. One definition is that the meaning we extract from affordances is environmental and that the ability to find environmental meaning has direct evolutionary benefits. These are called selectivist properties. [Turvey 1992] There is no doubt that environmental and evolutionary meaning comes out of direct perception, but selectionist theories all run into the same problem: how does one measure fitness? An example of this is the rich botanical and animal behavioral knowledge of non-Western societies and how Western biology is derived from so-called 'folk biology'. [Berlin 1992] Another definition of affordance looks at what are called 'dispositional properties'. [Turvey 1992]  Dispositions are how we act to properties of a certain environment. Edible objects exist because we are there to eat them. This puts a lock on both observer and observed. This causes conundrums like 'Which came first? Chicken or the egg?' and 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, does it exist?' Anthony Chemero proposed a solution to these conundrums and others. [Chemero 2003] This involves a perceptual shift; affordances are a relationship between observer and observed. This is also an empirical shift because relationship implies a network.

When one looks at a scene, the view can be divided into a foreground, a middle ground, and a background. These can be highly truncated or expanded out, limited by the curve of the Earth and atmospheric effects. [Malm 2016] A background view can often be divided into two parts, ground and sky, with the interface between them called a 'horizon'. A horizon is often composed of near and distant elements, often obscured by weather.

What is seen now may be quite different than the same view two thousand years ago. However, if some elements survive, a palimpsest of the landscape, and if the current landscape can somehow be extrapolated back in time, then perhaps some archaeological meaning can be obtained.

Computational Landscape

For landscape, the main analytical tools in GIS are Least Cost Paths (LCP} and viewsheds. This has expanded over the years with the ideas of circuit theory and cumulative viewsheds

Least Cost Paths take a raster or a set of multivariate rasters and two or more points and output an optimal line path between each point. LCP came out of Ecology and the study of animal movement. It involves two assumptions:

• Complete knowledge of the landscape

• A purely random search pattern

Animal movement data has challenged both of these assumptions. Another type of path analysis, based on electrical circuit theory, has gained traction in recent years. This searches for a path of least resistance with different assumptions:

• No knowledge of the landscape

• A mix of search strategies

Rasters are encoded into resistance surfaces; the calculations use network theory, and the output is a raster. This model doesn't replace LCP, but rather complements it. [Howey 2011]

The Paleo period in southern Ohio (13,500 - 11,400 B.P.) started with migration pulses and led to an established hunter-gatherer society. Large camps such as Sandy Springs existed on the Ohio River with other sites in inner watersheds. Stone tools for these sites were mostly Upper Mercer chert from further north and east. One question is: "What route did they follow?" The optimal path is up the Ohio to Portsmouth, and then north up the Scioto River. One problem is that there are no paleo sites in the lower Scioto watershed. An LCP leads up the Scioto, but if this path is blocked, then an alternate path appears, one that connects many paleo sites. This path is longer and more rugged, not optimal. One possible reason is that during this time, the larger rivers in Ohio were unstable with frequent floods. [Purtill 2020]

The Lower Scioto is the optimal path to flint deposits for Paleo hunter-gatherers, yet no sites have been found. By blocking the Scioto path, a second optimal path is found that connects known sites.  [Purtill 2020, p. 11, fig. 5]

A viewshed is a binary raster where the visibility of a landscape from a point is true or not. Cumulative viewsheds use a set of points and add together each viewshed. In sociology, there is the idea of social space, called space syntax. [Hillier & Hanson 1984] This is used in architecture, the idea that viewing and navigating a built environment can have measurable perceptual results. While cumulative viewshed models are global and polygonal, social space theories are local and relational, a spatial network. Also, they were developed for built space, not landscape. The problem is how to transform a global (cumulative viewshed) model into a relational space syntax (network) model within an open landscape. [Quinn 2022] Viewsheds are termed 'isovists' in space syntax, and the properties of sets of isovists are then used to create a 'visibility graph'. [Turner et al. 2001]

"... human landscapes cannot be approached as a collection of objects, a candy box filled with features neatly separated from each other, but rather as a continuum of physical and perceptual variations. We need to evaluate the degree of meaningfulness of such variations, i.e. the likelihood that certain regularities would become recognised as specific landscape entities. It is only through such integrated approach, attentive to both the salience of topographic features and cultural practices of landscape inhabitation, that landscape archaeologists may address the semiotics of space, i.e. cultural/social strategies of geographical meaning‐making ..." [Čučković 2025, p. 2]

In January of 2025, a paper by Zoran Čučković entitled: Landscape Chambers: Towards an Archaeology of the Cognitive Landscape tries to make this transformation in an attempt to understand the Bronze Age landscape of the Parisian Basin. [Čučković 2025] The idea is that visual regions form what are called 'chambers', visual regions that relate the view of an observer with points of interest along the edges of that view, what to the observer would be a horizon line. This creates what the author calls a 'visibility network', [Čučković 2025, p. 4] and thus gives a quantitative measure of how open spaces are conceived.

Conclusion

Whether completely built with walls or not, my bet is on the GHR ran directly from Newark to Chillicothe in as straight a line as possible. For the current built part, I think an important question is: How high were the walls? Were they built to delineate a path or to manage or hide a landscape? There is no guarantee that the wall will stay the same height. The walls of the Great Circle are such that the horizon inside looks constant, but the walls vary in height to hide an upward slope. I believe that there is enough insight within the current landscape to answer many questions of the past.

The landscape along a road has many features. A series of chambers, each bounded by low connectedness in a visibility network. An edge or horizon. Important viewpoints become vistas as they are the best views of important landmarks. Encampments allow travelers to rest. River crossings must be forded. For whoever built High Banks, the original trek north to build once again, this massive machine. To become a pilgrimage, the land itself must hold stories. [Todd 2024]

The map below shows the approximate study area or 'region of interest' and the start of a set of many features that I deem important, both physical and built.

12-mile visibility region for the proposed Great Hopewell Road, Rotated 31 degrees counter-clockwise of North. [Fig. 2 (geoPackage)]

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The list below contains links to QGIS geoPackages of two of the included maps.

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• Adney, Edwin Tappan, and Howard Irving Chapelle. 1964. The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. United States National Museum.
  

• Anderson, Jerrel C, and Ashwood Drive. 2011. The Circleville Earthwork and Hopewell. 61 (1).
  

• Atwater, Caleb. 1820. Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States. American Antiquarian Society.
  

• Aultman, Jennifer, Trevor Danehy, Meghan Federer, et al. 2022. Newark Earthwork Web Map. Virtual World Heritage Ohio. https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=166fa2f04d1f43b4ad3e92444b76f1f7.
  

• Berlin, Brent. 1992. Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Princeton University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7ztq5q.
  

• Bonar, Daniel D., and Anthony J. Lisska. 1991. “The Big Swamp the Licking Summit Reservoir Buckeye Lake.” Granville Historical Society.
  

• Bownocker, J. A. 1923. Zane’s Trace along with Canals and the National Road in Ohio. Ohio Geographical Survey.
  

• Brose, David S., and Isaac Greber. 1982. “The Ringler Archaic Dugout from Savannah Lake, Ashland County, Ohio: With Speculations on Trade and Transmission in the Prehistory of the Eastern United States.” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 7 (2): 245–82.
  

• Chemero, Anthony. 2003. “An Outline of a Theory of Affordances.” Ecological Psychology 15 (2): 181–95. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326969ECO1502_5.
  

• Čučković, Zoran. 2025. “Landscape Chambers: Towards an Archaeology of the Cognitive Landscape.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 32 (1): 20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-024-09687-0.
  

• Davis, Jamie. 2023. “3D Archaeology Facebook Page.” July 30. https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=298677192537706&set=pb.100071862822720.-2207520000.
  

• Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Taylor & Francis Group. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-ecological-approach-to-visual-perception_james-j-gibson/374774/item/18176084
  

• Gillings, Mark. 2012. “Landscape Phenomenology, GIS and the Role of Affordance.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 19 (4): 601–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9137-4.
  

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