ABSTRACT
Around two thousand years ago, extraordinary constructions appeared on the landscapes of the Ohio Valley. Precisely engineered geometric figures so immense that one encloses a full-size golf course, four-square-mile sets of huge geometric embankments, figures linked by orientation and sight lines over thirty miles-the scale of Ohio Valley Middle Woodland building is truly stupendous. Nowhere else in the world are there so many, such exact and cosmically huge geometric constructions of no apparent practical use. There’s no mystery about the Egyptian pharaohs’ pyramid tombs, and little mystery about Stonehenge’s solstice-aligned temple enclosure, yet of America’s Hopewell earthworks we know only that they had sophisticated builders and, one must suppose, symbolic significance.
