Notes from my Knapsack 10-26-23

Notes from my Knapsack 10-26-23 

Jeff Gill

We are in good company

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With the formal declaration of World Heritage List status for the Newark Earthworks, in company with the Chillicothe and Lebanon, Ohio area earthworks together as the "Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks" nomination, it's a good time to look around at the company we are now numbered with by UNESCO.

In this same session of the World Heritage Committee, other new nominations from around the world included the ancient city of Jericho, on the Jordan River, and World War I memorial sites in another group nomination, which includes the Menin Gate and Vimy Ridge monument.

Listening online in the early hours of September 19th, in that morning session there were six nominations from around the world considered including the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, and two of them were turned aside. It's not a small or simple matter to become a World Heritage Site. They have the opportunity to revise and resubmit in a future cycle, but there are relatively few nominations allowed every two years to a country.

There are both cultural and natural sites; the Newark Earthworks are part of what became the 25th for the United States, among about a thousand around the world.

U.S. cultural sites in alphabetical order, with the year they were inscribed on the World Heritage List in parentheses, are: Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site (1982), Chaco Culture (1987), Independence Hall (1979), La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site in Puerto Rico (1983), Mesa Verde National Park (1978), Monticello and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (1987), Monumental Earthworks of Poverty Point (2014), San Antonio Missions (2015), Statue of Liberty (1984), Taos Pueblo (1992), and The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (2019). Now, with Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks (2023), six of the twelve mark Native American achievements and architecture, but only Poverty Point is older in construction. Taos Pueblo is a living site, still occupied, and well worth visiting in northern New Mexico, about six hundred years old at the foundation level; the Newark Earthworks are nearly two thousand years old.

We share company with the natural sites on the World Heritage List: Carlsbad Caverns National Park (1995), Everglades National Park (1979), Grand Canyon National Park (1979), Great Smoky Mountains National Park (1983), Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (1987), Kluane / Wrangell-St. Elias / Glacier Bay / Tatshenshini-Alsek (1979, 1992, 1994), Mammoth Cave National Park (1981), Olympic National Park (1981), Redwood National and State Parks (1980), Waterton Glacier International Peace Park (1995), Yellowstone National Park (1978), and Yosemite National Park (1984). Along with those twelve, there is one mixed cultural & natural site, in the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii: Papahānaumokuākea (2010).

It's been one of the small pleasures of working with the World Heritage effort that if I'm looking at it in print, I now know how to say "Papahānaumokuākea"!

I've also had the pleasure over the years to visit 13 of the 25 United States World Heritage Sites. Like many, I'm now reviewing those I've missed and revising my "bucket list": time to go visit a few more and learn about their "outstanding universal value" to the world!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been both to the San Antonio Missions, and the Alamo, which are not quite the same things. Tell him what other WHL sites you'd like to visit at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.