Ohio Hopewell Mound Builders Earthwork Found In South Carolina

Ohio Hopewell Mound Builders Earthwork Found In South Carolina  

Evidence Links the Cherokee with the Ohio Mound Builders

Henge complex at Camden South Carolina.   The position of this site offers more evidence that the Cherokee Indians were part of the Hopewell Mound Builders Confederacy.

American Antiquarian, 1891

     We are ready to acknowledge the resemblance between these circles in the Kanawha Valley and those on the Wateree River in South Carolina, and especially the similar significance of the circle with the mound in its center, which seems always to be a sign of sun-worship. Squire and Davis have called attention to the general similarity between the southern mounds and the Ohio mounds, especially to the fact that there were spiral paths around the outside of them. They speak of the council or oblong mound in the circle on the Wateree River, with a circumference of 550 feet at the base and 225 feet at the top, and 30 feet high. They say, however, that while this region was occupied by the Cherokee at one time and by the Ocmulgee at another, still the country was, many ages preceding the Cherokees, inhabited by one nation, who were ruled by the same system of laws, customs, and language, but so ancient that the Cherokees or the Creeks could give no account of them or the purposes for which they erected the monuments. High pyramidal mounds, with spacious avenues leading to artificial lakes, and cubical yards, with sunken area and rotundas, are the characteristic works of the south-works which the Cherokee adopted and used, but which, it is said, they did not build. The contrast between the two classes is marked, as the water cult is plain in one and the sun-worship in the other, and yet, the connecting link may be found in the circles we are describing.