The TRAVELER'S JOURNAL: November third, exploring the mystery of the Mounds.

The Aztec and Mayan ruins of Mexico and Central America are majestic, but North America has some impressive pre-Columbian structures to be explored as well. When George Washington surveyed the Ohio River Basin in the 1750s, he discribed dozens of huge, mysterious, earthen mounds. When the French built Fort Duquesne at the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers come together to form the Ohio, they erected it atop of one such mound. Though that artificial hill was carted away as the city of Pittsburgh grew up around it, many other mounds still exist throughout the Ohio and Mississippi Basin.

Earthworks State Park in Newark, Ohio, northeast of Columbus, has three mounds. One forms a circle 15 feet high and more than a mile in circumference. Nearby are a large octagon and a square. All three were constructed thousands of years ago by people who didn't even have metal shovels with which to work. No one's sure why the mounds were built, but a line through the centers of the square and octagon does point directly to the farthest north rising-point of the moon.

No matter their purpose, these immense mounds offer irrefutable evidence of deep convictions, bureaucratic organization and strong leadership, traits of civilized nations and peoples, rather than small tribes of nomadic hunters, as early Americans are generally portrayed.

The area has seven other mound-related parks; displays at the Ohio Historical Museum in Columbus provide background. The mounds offer insights on the people who inhabited this land long before the arrival of that Italian explorer for whom the city of Columbus is named.

To find out more about the mound-builders, call the Ohio Historical Society at 614-297-2300 or on-line at www.ohiohistory.org

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