Notes from my Knapsack 10-5-23

Notes from my Knapsack 10-5-23
[EMBARGO UNTIL CONFIRMED on 9-19-23]
Jeff Gill

Spanning centuries, let alone millennia
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Back in the 1990s, Dick Shiels, now emeritus history professor at Ohio State's Newark Campus and longtime resident of Granville, wondered why Cahokia, and not the much older Newark Earthworks or Chillicothe's Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, was in the front of all the US history intro textbooks he reviewed for his classes.

Dick visited Cahokia, across the Mississippi from St. Louis, and they told him "World Heritage List status from UNESCO made all the difference."

He came back to Licking County with that realization, and went to work starting the Newark Earthworks Center, which was a pioneering effort in its own right. The center helped put on the Octagon Moonrise events in 2005, when the geometry of the octagonal enclosure last aligned with the Observatory Circle and towering platform mound to point at the northernmost rise of the moon on an 18.6 year astronomical cycle.

Once those programs around the lunar alignment were completed, he picked up on the relationships made with the Ohio History Connection, and began pushing for a World Heritage List inscription in 2006.

Seventeen years later, here we are. The effort was not only across two decades, but encompassed myriad institutions and many individuals, crossing boundaries once thought to divide us, such as between archaeologists and today's Native American tribal nations. Now, the leaders of those sovereign governmental units, with historic roots in Ohio before the period of "Indian Removal" in the 1830s, are often traveling back here, and finding a welcome, even bringing busloads of children to Newark, where they can learn about the accomplishments of their ancestors.

Those ancient builders deserve credit, and in the years since, so many people have dreamed and drafted and written and delivered the work which resulted in the declaration and inscription of September 19, 2023, placing the Newark Earthworks on the World Heritage List of UNESCO, now the 25th US listing, along with Independence Hall and the Grand Canyon, Monticello and Mammoth Cave.

Dick Shiels saw an opportunity, over twenty years ago, to add the Newark Earthworks to a roster that globally includes the Great Pyramid of Egypt, Stonehenge in England, and added just a few days before the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks was inscribed on the World Heritage List, the ancient city of Jericho on the Jordan River. It was a dream to most who first heard it, to see "our local mounds" in such august company.

Brad Lepper had a chance to help add "The Earthworks of Newark, Ohio" to "The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World" as the century turned, and slowly, steadily, more and more people saw that dream as a simple statement of fact: Ohio's ancient earthen enclosures qualify under the UNESCO phrase as having "outstanding universal value." The world has been coming to see them, in fact, for some time.

More will come. Let's be ready to welcome the world, and invite it to stay a few nights and see the rest of Licking County. And another northernmost moonrise in that generational cycle is just around the corner . . .


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to seeing you at one of the Octagon Open House events on Oct. 15th. He's hearing from the world these days at knapsack77@gmail.com, and on Threads @Knapsack77.