CHILLICOTHE - To the lay person, it may look like nothing more than a well cut hole in the ground at the Hopeton Earthworks.

To those with the National Park Service and others who study the Hopewell Culture, what the hole signifies is a significant step forward in the understanding of that culture. For the community at large, it means the strengthening of the argument for World Heritage Site status and the expected surge of visitors to accompany it.

The hole in question was excavated earlier this summer as part of an ongoing project begun around 2014 when World Heritage Site designation was emerging as a real possibility. Since that time, National Park Service employees locally have been working with scientists, several visiting from overseas, to get a better idea of what's just under the surface at some of the area's earthworks sites.

"For 200 years, people have been looking at these earthworks, and for 150 years, there's been excavations at these earthwork centers, but all of that archaeology has been focused on the mounds themselves, on the visible, above-ground architecture," said Bret Ruby, archaeologist and chief resources manager for Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. "The exciting thing is now we've got these new technologies that are letting us look at all these vast spaces in between those monuments, and it's revolutionizing our understanding of how these places were used.

"They weren't just static piles of earth, these were active places and there was a lot of wooden architecture associated with them — shrine buildings, wooden post circles. There was a lot of architecture out there to support a wide variety of ceremonies and rituals, so these would have been very active places that were used over generations."

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The technology Ruby references involves the use of magnetometer arrays that can be pulled across the properties to create a magnetic scan image of what may lie under the soil. In addition to providing a visual representation of where structures and mounds once sat on the property, the technology also helps scientists to pick out specific features to excavate. That's what led to this summer's discovery that had officials posting on their Facebook page that they'd hit "archaeological gold."

The magnetic imaging completed at the Hopeton Earthworks revealed previously unseen holes around the outer edge of a very large circular formation on the property. The array was similar to one discovered in the magnetic survey of the Hopewell Mound Group site.

The holes appear to have served as holders of very large, likely ceremonial wooden posts. Because of the fact they run completely around the sizable circular formation at each of the two sites, Ruby and archaeological technician Timothy Everhart see the find as very significant.

"It turns out to be North America's largest woodhenge is what we think we've discovered," Ruby said.

What makes the latest find even more significant in terms of understanding the Hopewell culture is that the excavated hole had nothing but charcoal in it, suggesting that it had once been used to hold a post but that the post had been removed and the hole filled in for other purposes. That adds to the belief that the Hopewell culture was a more complex society than originally thought.

"We were starting to see a pattern that these wooden post circles are a common element of Hopewell architecture that we just had no way of detecting until we had this new technology," Ruby said.

The discovery, Ruby said, should only further enhance the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks' application for World Heritage Site designation. Such a designation, which is being eyed now as being a possibility sometime around 2020, is expected to spark a significant boost in tourism to the local area.

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"One of the things you need to demonstrate to become a World Heritage Site, you need to demonstrate the site has integrity and that the archaeological record is intact," he said. "This builds our case that even though these places may be plow-damaged, the archaeological record beneath the surface is intact, it's rich, it's complex, and we're learning that what we know about it is just the tip of the iceberg.

"The second thing it's showing us is it speaks to the creative genius of these people who built these places. These places are more complex than we ever thought."