Cultural Exchange:: What Remains: A Contemporary Interpretation of Native American Earthworks in The Ohio Valley

In 2023, UNESCO designated World Heritage Site status to a group of four Hopewell sites in Ohio, adding them to the ranks of the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge, and Machu Picchu as places of “outstanding value to humanity.” This extraordinary group of Hopewell earthworks represents a tiny portion of the approximately 10,000 Adena, Hopewell, and Fort Ancient Earthworks that dotted the Ohio Valley at the end of the 18th century. Today, fewer than 1,000 earthworks remain. In the 250 years since European-American settlers made their unrelenting push into the Ohio Valley woodlands, many of the tall conical mounds, long ridges, and geometric hilltop enclosures that somehow escaped destruction have been appropriated and incorporated—at times inexplicably—into cemeteries, a country club, subdivisions, parks, farms, a strip mall, and even an amusement park.

Steve Plattner’s photographs and their corresponding backstories explore these marvels of Indigenous astronomy, science, and society constructed by skillful ‘mound builders’ across the Ohio Valley between 500 BCE and 1750 CE, as well as the cultural appropriation and ethnocide which led to their widespread destruction.