Going straight in a sacred landscape: the Great Hopewell Road

The Hopewell culture built a series of geometric earthworks, among which the Newark Earthworks stand out as the most complex. It has long been suspected that a ceremonial, double-walled straight road connected Newark with the Hopewell Heartland, located in modern Chillicothe, 90 km southwest. In recent years, evidence for this Great Hopewell Road increased, as well as the awareness that the whole area was a sacred landscape; however, up to now, existing traces of the road have been found only at a few kilometers south-west of Newark. In the present paper, a new, comprehensive analysis of this topic is presented, using LiDAR and satellite imagery combined with the methods of scientific Archaeoastronomy. In this way we are able to propose in a definitive way that the road really connected the two centers, and to approach its symbolic significance. A coherent picture emerges which strongly points to a unitary project, aimed at making Newark a Hopewell “cosmic” pilgrimage center.