Earthworks
Aerial view of Serpent Mound, Adams County. Image courtesy of Timothy E. Black.

Serpent Mound Nomination

Built several hundred years after the Hopewell-era sites, Serpent Mound is the largest documented surviving example of an ancient effigy mound in the world.
Aerial view of Serpent Mound, Adams County. Drawn in 1848 in the Smithsonian Institution's publication "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley ".

Serpent Mound is part of the tradition of effigy building among some American Indian cultures in what is now the eastern United States, and is the greatest masterpiece of that tradition both here and elsewhere in the world.

The sinuous, artistically-striking monumental sculpture is more than 1,200 feet long. It embodies fundamental spiritual and cosmological principles that still resonate with many Tribal Nations today, including astronomical alignments that mark the seasons.

Two nominations in Ohio are among 20 currently on the “United States' Tentative List” from which nominees will be drawn to go forward for inscription in the coming years. Efforts are now well underway to celebrate our Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks inscription; while preparations to nominate Serpent Mound and the Dayton Aviation Sites are upcoming.

News and events

Ohio’s First Humanists: Native Americans from Mound Building to Modern Voices

This online exhibit traces Indigenous Americans’ material and cultural contributions to Ohio from their early creation of large earthworks to modern representations and reflections on the past. Learn about First Nations’ roles in shaping place names and get interpretive glimpses in to early Ohio’s history of Native American-white contact, which included collaboration, conflict, and removal.
October 13, 2023
Chadwick Allen

Wombed Hollows, Sacred Trees: Burial Mounds and Processual Indigenous Subjectivity and Earthworks Tour

Drawing from his new book Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts, Chadwick Allen analyzes works by contemporary Native writers and artists that demonstrate Indigenous conceptions of interment within mounded earth. These provocative “earth”-works unsettle dominant narratives by reactivating Indigenous understandings of burial mounds as active sites of renewal and regeneration.
April 14, 2022
Reference and Special Collections Librarian John Crissinger holding up a raised map of the Newark Earthworks that is part of the Ohio Native Heritage Archives. Image courtesy of Timothy E. Black.

Ancient Ohio Trail Landscape Exhibit

Traveling exhibit of Ohio earthworks produced in conjunction with The Ancient Ohio Trail with Reference and Special Collections Librarian John Crissinger.
February 7, 2017