Multimedia: The Great Hopewell Mystery	Volume 52 Number 6, November/December 1999
by Ronald Hicks

TThe Maya and the Anasazi built roads that we believe were used for sacred purposes. Did the Hopewell, an earlier prehistoric American culture in the Ohio Valley, do the same? Searching for the Great Hopewell Road, a balanced and informative video available from the Ohio Historical Society, provides the answer--a qualified yes. The video focuses on the Historical Society's own Bradley Lepper, who hypothesizes that a set of parallel earthen banks visible from the Octagon Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, marks the northern end of a ceremonial roadway that may have once led 60 miles south to Chillicothe (see "Tracking Ohio's Great Hopewell Road," November/December 1995). Why such a road may have existed, and whether it existed at all, consumes most of the hour-long narrative.

Searching for the Great Hopewell Road
Thomas M. Law, producer
Pangea Productions Ltd. for American Public Television
first broadcast: April 16, 1999
$19.95;1-800-949-8670

Ronald Hicks is professor of anthropology at Ball State University.

© 1999 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/9911/abstracts/multimedia.html