DarkSky Ohio Learning Series: The Last Ancient Wilderness

From May 2026

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The Last Ancient Wilderness Transcript

Philip Hutchison: Our program today is called The Last Ancient Wilderness. I want to talk a little about that phrase before we get started.

When we talk about wilderness, I come from ODNR, from a background working in recreation, outdoors, and natural areas. We usually mean concrete places: forests, rivers, mountain ranges. But there is another form of wilderness that exists everywhere, above all of these things, available to everyone regardless of where they live: the sky, both daytime and night, and for most of human history this wilderness was simply there. It was unavoidable, overwhelmingly vast. It structured our daily lives, our seasonal lives, our spiritual lives. It was likely the first thing humans looked to when considering our position in this vastness around us.

Now, for the first time in the history of our species, access to this wilderness is disappearing rapidly, not in some remote rainforest, but particularly where people live. Where people most need to access this resource is the place where it is becoming least accessible.

We’re going to talk about what that means. We’ll touch on the ecological implications, discuss history and culture, and explore what this means in the context of the nature of being human.

Our talk today has a two-part structure. Act one covers what was there in the past: history, some of what we know, and why I situate the night sky in the realm of historical and cultural resources. Act two will be about what we’re losing, how we’re losing it, and what we really lose as people.

We’ll talk about the Hopewell culture and how their experience, very rooted in Ohio, connects to a broader global context. Then we’ll move on to the hard numbers: the science of light pollution. I’m sure there are people on this call with a deeper understanding of any individual topic than I have, and I’ll be excited to hear what you bring to the discussion in Q&A.

If you want an expert on the Hopewell cultural landscape, the expert is right here in Ohio: Brad Lepper. He works with the Hopewell culture sites through Ohio History Connection as an archaeologist and has done a lot of writing that I’ve referenced in my own research.

Act One: Ohio & the Hopewell

Carl Sagan, in his 1994 work Pale Blue Dot, wrote: “Before we invented civilization, our ancestors lived mainly in the open, out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment, we watched the stars.”

Today, we live in an age where we’ve taken more steps toward environmental restoration. We’ve reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone, cleaned up rivers that caught on fire, protected forests from development. These are genuine victories on the ecological front. But the night sky doesn’t really work like that. You don’t need to restore it the way you do a wetland. It’s simply there or it’s blocked by artificial light pollution.

This is what makes it unique among all natural things. It has always been universally available. Every human being who has ever lived for, 300,000 years, has seen essentially the same sky. Whether a Paleolithic hunter stalking prey, a Hopewell elder 2,000 years ago, your great-grandmother on her front porch, or your children in the future, this is the same sky. It connects us all the way back through the deep history of humanity in a way that nothing else can. Most people in history saw different waters, walked in different forests, heard the cries of different wolves, but they all saw the same stars.

In a way, the night sky was a shared text that everyone learned to read before language was even created. And up until the past hundred-odd years, it was virtually unchanged. A few stars burn out, a few new ones appear, but it has remained essentially the same. Now, in the span of a lifetime or two, we are rapidly losing our access to this resource that connects us to our ancestors.

Why does this matter specifically in Ohio? What does Ohio have that positions us to champion the preservation and restoration of truly dark skies?

The Hopewell culture is central to this. Nearly all peoples since the dawn of humanity have probably been stargazers in some way, for spiritual purposes, agricultural purposes, or simply because they lived under the sky. But when we in Ohio think about early astronomers, we default to the Hopewell.

Between roughly 200-100 BC and 500 AD, the Hopewell culture flourished in the Ohio River Valley and surrounding areas in the Midwest, with Ohio as the center of Hopewell archaeology. The term “Hopewell” does not describe a single nation, tribe, or uniform entity; it describes a broad archaeological cultural tradition shared across a wide region.

They were an extraordinary people in many ways. They maintained vast trade networks stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. In their burial goods, you find obsidian from Wyoming, copper from Lake Superior, shark teeth from Florida, trade goods crossing a vast network across North America, potentially even reaching into Central America.

What sets them apart from other cultures of their time is their vast earthworks, and specifically the precision of the geometry and astronomical alignments within those earthworks. It is so precise that you can’t rule out entirely that some of it arose by coincidence, but the extreme precision and the connections between one site and another make it very difficult to believe this was not entirely intentional, the product of a very advanced scientific and mathematical culture.

A number of Hopewell sites appear to track the lunar standstill cycle, something relatively unique to their sites. You can find similar things in Chaco Canyon and possibly Stonehenge, but the Newark Earthworks and the Sun Dagger at Chaco Canyon are the gold standard for archaeoastronomy of the lunar cycle.

Tracking an 18.6-year standstill cycle requires precise observations spanning generations. You need a culture that values scientific knowledge enough to record it and pass it down, whether through some form of written communication we no longer have access to, or through oral tradition. Oral traditions are often underestimated in our modern perspective, but they are highly efficient in indigenous cultures at transmitting information, particularly before heavy colonial disruption broke up the family cycles and cultural roles that sustained them.

To build monuments like this, they also needed access to a very undiluted, dark sky, observable night after night, week after week, month after month, year after year. None of this would have been possible under conditions like what we see today. Without modern astronomical instruments, purely with the naked eye, you simply would not have the ability to accurately track night-sky cycles well enough to achieve the precision they did.

Key Sites

Newark Earthworks & High Banks Works

Both are aligned to the 18.6-year lunar standstill cycle, as well as to solstices, equinoxes, and solar cycles, though the most precise alignments are lunar. The Newark Earthworks are the largest geometric earthwork complex in the world and are the flagship of the UNESCO World Heritage project for Hopewell sites in Ohio. The High Banks Works, about 60 miles southwest, are almost identical in shape and proportion; the same circle and octagon in the same general proportions, aligned in the same ways, very precisely linked to one another and to these celestial phenomena.

There is also speculative evidence that they may have been linked by a ceremonial road, possibly two ends of a connected spiritual/religious site, perhaps a pilgrimage route. It is hard to be certain that a full route existed, but there is a definite geometric connection between the two sites, and there may have been a very tangible physical connection at the time.

Fort Ancient

Though it bears the name, Fort Ancient was originally constructed by the Hopewell people and predates the Fort Ancient culture. It has one of the longest recorded periods of habitation of any site in the Midwest, occupied by the Hopewell, the Fort Ancient culture, and more modern Eastern Woodlands tribes. The gateway structures align very precisely with the solstices, and there are other geometric and astronomical alignments throughout the site. If you haven’t visited, it’s absolutely worth it. They have wonderful interpreters and would love to talk to you about what the night sky means in this context.

It’s also worth noting: With all these different peoples occupying, abandoning, and reoccupying this site repeatedly, there is clearly something about this place that called indigenous people back, whether spiritual, ancestral, agricultural, or topographical.

Serpent Mound

Most likely built by the Adena culture, with some Fort Ancient connections. It is a quarter-mile serpent on a ridgeline and one of the most visually stunning earthworks in the world. At midsummer sunset, the sun sets between the open jaws of the serpent. Early drawings suggest that before shifts in the land, there may have been a spherical shape attached to the serpent’s mouth; some believe it was swallowing an egg, others the sun. The tail also appears aligned with the winter solstice sunrise, and the head with the summer solstice sunset. Again, it would be quite a coincidence for alignments this precise to occur by chance.

Hopewell Cosmology

I want to warn you upfront that this section crosses into deep speculation based on our knowledge of later cultures with ancestral ties to the Hopewell, Adena, and Fort Ancient peoples.

Clearly, these earthworks were not built by people who simply found the sky interesting. You don’t spend countless resources building things this precisely aligned to obscure astronomical phenomena without profound meaning behind it. Many archaeologists, and many people who know far more about this than I do, believe the Hopewell saw the night sky as a place where the rules governing their existence originated.

If you look at later cultures in the Eastern Woodlands, a recurring theme in their cosmologies is a three-tiered universe: an upper world, this world, and a lower world. The archaeology and architecture of the Hopewell earthworks seem to suggest this was likely part of their worldview, that the earthworks were perhaps a threshold connecting these different tiers, and that at moments of celestial alignment, the parts of their cosmos were being brought together in a very concrete way.

There is also remarkable burial evidence. Hopewell mounds contain valuable items: obsidian, copper, mica, much as we see in Egyptian and Scythian cultures, where people were buried with provisions for a traveling soul in the afterlife. It’s not too far a reach to imagine the Hopewell saw the Milky Way, which would have been extraordinarily bright and visible to them, as a road of souls. This concept appears in various other indigenous North American traditions, in ancient Greek writings, in West African oral traditions, and in ancient Egyptian cosmology.

Then there’s sacred geometry: circles and octagons repeated with near-perfect precision across Hopewell earthworks. Even sides that didn’t structurally need to be perfect are essentially perfect. This would tend to indicate that the form itself had religious significance.

When you combine the astronomical connections, the burial goods, the sacred geometry, and the speculation about the Milky Way, you arrive at a potential cosmological picture: a people who saw these earthworks as gateways between the worlds they believed existed: places where the transfer of souls into the afterlife was facilitated. That is speculative, but I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of reasonable speculation.

These were not just calendars. They could have done something much simpler if that were the goal. These sites were clearly significant in a way that connected to how they understood themselves as humans within the vastness around them.

The Sky as Sacred Space: Global Context

The sky has been important: sacred, a key part of survival, spiritual identity, throughout world history:

• Navigation: Polynesian wayfinders navigating the open ocean, where a mistake meant death; people following the North Star along the Underground Railroad.
• Calendar: Before written word, the sky was the only reliable way to mark time, predict seasonal changes, know when to plant, when to harvest, when ceremonies were coming.
• Spirituality & Identity: Virtually every culture in history created constellations, not the same ones, but clearly expressing something about themselves and their place in the cosmos.

Some highlights: Aboriginal Australians have over 65,000 years of orally transmitted astronomical tradition, including “dark constellations” formed by the dark spaces between stars rather than connecting the stars themselves, truly remarkable. The Maya tracked Venus to within less than one day of accuracy over 500 years, without telescopes, with astronomical tables roughly as accurate as modern computerized calculations. The Babylonians created some of the first formal star catalogs, forming the foundation of Western astronomy. The Egyptians tracked the heliacal rising of Sirius to within a day or two every year, the key signal for predicting the Nile floods that made Egyptian civilization possible.

And here in Ohio, the Hopewell were doing astronomy and earthwork construction of equal sophistication to many of these cultures. What the Egyptians accomplished building the pyramids is not a particularly more incredible feat than the earthmoving projects of the Hopewell. If you go to Newark and imagine it at full size, then consider that they dug all of this with hand tools, carrying it in woven baskets; it is genuinely mind-boggling.

Act Two: Where We Are Today

Most of Ohio falls at 6, 7, or 8 on the Bortle Scale, meaning most Ohioans never truly see the Milky Way unless they travel specifically to see it. Sky brightness appears to be roughly doubling every decade. In Ohio, less than 1% of our land has skies dark enough to qualify as truly dark, Bortle 3 or 4, in some remote areas.

This vanishing sky is driven by commercial signage, parking lot lighting, and residential outdoor lighting. There was a significant spike when LED lighting was widely adopted, in large part because LEDs are so much cheaper to operate that they go up everywhere and stay on around the clock. A lot of lighting is also poorly shielded, allowing light to scatter upward into the sky rather than illuminating what’s below.

All of this has happened in just over a century:

• 1879: Edison creates the light bulb.
• 1910s: Electric street lights become common; downtown night skies begin to dim for the first time.
• 1940s: Rapid suburban and urban expansion; neon advertising arrives; the first generation grows up in suburbs where the Milky Way is already a novelty.
• 1970s: Studies begin documenting what astronomers have been experiencing; the Milky Way is simply gone from urban and suburban America.
• 2010s: The LED revolution, marketed as an environmental win, and in some ways it was, but with devastating effects on night sky access. The answer isn’t to eliminate LEDs; it’s to use the technology more wisely.
• 2023: The Newark sites and Hopewell earthworks receive UNESCO World Heritage designation, a call to action for Ohioans to now protect not just the sites, but what they mean.

The Hopewell observed the sky for 600-700 years and built monuments that still align 2,000 years later. In the last 125-150 years, we have largely undone our access to the sky those monuments point toward.

What Disappears in the Dark

Light pollution doesn’t just dim the stars. It removes entire dimensions of our human experience.

• Ecologically: Fireflies, migrating birds, moths, bats, owls all depend on natural darkness to exist.
  
• Psychologically: There are psychologists who specifically study awe, the emotion triggered by encountering something vast and beyond comprehension. Research shows that experiencing awe regularly has a measurable effect on human well-being: it reduces self-focus, increases pro-social behavior, and generates a sense of shared meaning in communities. A truly dark sky is one of the most reliable triggers of awe available to humanity; it works for almost everyone. Nighttime light exposure also suppresses melatonin, degrades sleep quality, and undermines physical health.
  
• Culturally: This is what connects most directly to my work. Light pollution is not just an ecological crisis, it is a cultural crisis. It is a form of cultural destruction, much like the centuries of plowing that damaged the earthworks themselves, much like the burning of ancient libraries, or the loss of a language when its last speaker dies.

When the Newark Earthworks were built, they were inseparable from the sky above them. The geometry only really makes sense when you know what it was pointing at. We know that today, but we are in genuine danger of that becoming a purely written fact. Something we can read about in books but never experience again.

This is not just about the Hopewell. It affects all indigenous communities: the Shawnee, the Miami, the Delaware, who call Ohio home and share ancestral connections to these sites and to the sky above them. They are losing connections to their ancestors in a very concrete way, as we lose one of the only things we can experience that our distant ancestors also experienced. We will never see the same tree someone saw 20,000 years ago. We’ll never see the same wolf or bear or deer. But we can see the same stars, if we go to the right places.

When I think about the Sistine Chapel being destroyed, or the Parthenon being demolished, we would be outraged at the loss of such vast cultural treasure. Until recently, we have not thought of the night sky in the same way, when it is truly one of the most important cultural connections in all of human history.

In 2023, Aparna Venkatesan and John C. Barentine coined the term “noctalgia,” sky grief, in a letter to a science journal. They wrote:

“This represents far more than the mere loss of environment. We are witnessing the loss of heritage, place-based language, identity, storytelling, millennia-old sky traditions, and our ability to conduct traditional practices grounded in the ecological integrity of what we call home.”

And I’ll close with a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1867 poem, “On the Beach at Night Alone”:

“A vast similitude interlocks all — all spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, all distances of place however wide, all distances of time, all inanimate forms, all souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different or in different worlds, all gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, all nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, all identities that have existed or may exist on this globe or any globe, all lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future. This vast similitude spans them all, and has and always has spanned, and shall forever span them, and compactly hold them and enclose them.”

In describing the stars this way, I think Emerson brings home the point: a truly dark night sky is a cultural resource that, while often overlooked, simply cannot be overstated in its value to our understanding of, and connection to, our past and our future.

Thank you all so much for joining me today.

Q&A

Q: How do we get younger people more interested in the night sky, especially those who grew up under urban skies and have never experienced a truly dark sky?

The best way is always to get them out to see a genuinely dark sky; it doesn’t have to be Great Sand Dunes dark. I live in southeastern Ohio, on the border of Athens and Hocking County, and I’ve noticed it isn’t as dark as it was when I was a child. I remember my dad pulling a wagon out into a field behind one of our barns, setting up sleeping bags so we stayed up off the damp ground, and you could very clearly see the Milky Way 25 to 30 years ago in that part of Ohio. You can still see it now, but it’s a dim Milky Way, nothing like what you see at Great Sand Dunes or White Sands.

But the darker sky you can get a child into, just having them lie down and look up; that experience of awe is such a driving human factor. If you want people to be more interested, get them out to see it. Planetariums can help. Talking about astronauts captures kids’ imaginations, and Ohio has a great heritage there with John Glenn and the moon landing. NASA has excellent educational resources; the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland is amazing, with what they’re doing in virtual and augmented reality, and that’s where they build and test wheels for lunar and Mars rovers.

Developing a love for space makes people think about the stars. That’s something we can build on.

Q: You said Newark and High Banks are very similar to each other. Is one older, or were they built at the same time? What would be the purpose of similar places, and are there thoughts that other very similar sites might have existed?

That’s a great question, and I’d really direct you to Brad Lepper; he’s very accessible and is genuinely the person to ask. My instinct is that Newark is probably older given its grandeur, and that High Banks is more of a reproduction of Newark than the reverse. They were probably built in close proximity in time, though. The Hopewell seemed to be building many of these things simultaneously, and they were huge projects that would have taken a long time.

As for why they are so similar: I believe they may represent a concrete representation of a soul’s journey. If an earthwork is a portal to the afterlife or to a spiritual plane in Hopewell cosmology, and if these two portals were connected by a road, then a pilgrimage along that road would be an earthly version of the soul road, perhaps mirroring the Milky Way, mirroring the journey of a soul. That is very much speculation, but it’s where my mind goes.