A 2,000-year-old Hopewell earthwork in Butler County narrowly escaped potential destruction a few years ago. Now, Fortified Hill is being preserved and the site is offering a limited run of guided tours.
Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum won the property at auction in 2019 after a community effort to save the earthwork. The previous owner died without specifying what should happen to the land, and it seemed destined to be headed for development.
Fortified Hill is a hilltop enclosure-style earthwork, one of just four known in southwest Ohio, including Fort Ancient, which was recently added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Unlike Fort Ancient, which features solar and lunar alignments, it's unclear why early Indigenous peoples built Fortified Hill.
"We can guess, based on the ways that other structures were used, how they probably used Fortified Hill as well. But we're still researching, still trying to learn as much as we can," says Delaney French, marketing and sales manager at Pyramid Hill. "It's believed that it was a gathering space that could have been used for many different celebrations or ceremonies that they wanted to hold. It was just a nice meeting and gathering place."
Today, "Hopewell" is understood as an American Indian religious movement that swept over half the continent from about 1 CE to 400 CE.* Many different communities all across eastern North America were linked together by common ideas about the cosmos and their relationships to one another in the cosmos, according to researchers.
The earthworks they designed and built indicate these early peoples had a clear understanding of geometry, architecture, and solar and lunar patterns and alignments.
French says researchers haven't found any indication the Fortified Hill mounds were built with a specific pattern or alignment. "We wouldn't be surprised if there was, [but] we personally haven't found anything yet."
According to the Ohio History Connection, Fortified Hill is one of six Hopewell Culture earthworks on a six-mile stretch of the Great Miami River included on a map in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1848. The site was first documented in an 1836 survey by former Hamilton Mayor James McBride.
It encloses nearly 17 acres, with two of its three gateways still well preserved. Erosion, plowing, looting, and desecration have caused some of the mounds to shrink or be removed all together over the decades.
A North Mound just outside the enclosure was used as a burial mound. Human remains and other items like jewelry have been found within it. It would have been 10 to 12 feet tall at one time, though erosion and human intervention have reduced it to about 5 feet tall.
"There has been some kind of amateur excavation done in the past. Of course, that's not something that we're doing today," French notes.
Pyramid Hill hosted a few test tours in 2024 and determined there was enough demand to build out the program. Early maps and LIDAR data have been used to help understand the topography of the enclosure, and where various features — vernal ponds, mounds, walls, etc. — would have once been that may have been lost to time.
The enclosure walls themselves weren't very high, according to French.
"The walls were actually built on a slope down, so they're not super visible from [inside the enclosure]. That's one of the reasons that we know that Fortified Hill wasn't used as a defensive structure, because the walls were not very tall."
Pyramid Hill has plans to continue building out the property around Fortified Hill by adding a parking area and some kind of structure with facilities like bathrooms. The park also intends to add things like interpretive grass mowing to help visitors better understand how the site would have once appeared, and doing more clearing around the walls to make them more visible.
Public, ticketed tours will run on the first weekend of each month from June through November, with an additional tour on Indigenous Peoples Day on October 13.
"Fortified Hill was made around the same time that a lot of the ancient sculptures that are in our museum were made, just on different areas of the world," French says. [At] Pyramid Hill, one of the things that we kind of lovingly say to ourselves is that we're a second life to a lot of sculptures and artwork, so we're just trying to give a new life to Fortified Hill and carry on the legacy and the history that is here."
*Previous reporting by WVXU stated Hopewell Culture extended for a longer period of time, about 200 BCE to 500 CE. As more research has been conducted — specifically as Ohio and the United States applied for and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List — scientists have narrowed and refined the scope of the Hopewell era to 1 CE to 400 CE.
READ MORE:
