NPS / TOM ENGBERG
Summer Travel
The Mound City Group is one of five sites that make up Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.
Our national parks and monuments are full of archaeological wonders. Here are several to visit this summer. By Tamara Stewart
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his year is the National Park Service’s centennial, and in honor of that occasion we’ve selected five parks that feature the vestiges of fascinating ancient cultures. Ocmulgee National Monument in Georgia was recently voted the best archaeological site in America by the readers of USA Today. It features earthen mounds built by the Mississippian culture beginning around a.d. 900. Near Pipestone, Minnesota, Pipestone National Monument preserves ancient ceremonial rock quarries of great importance to Plains tribes. Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Ohio is one
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of North America’s largest native ceremonial sites, containing 24 earthworks created by ancient Hopewell peoples. Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument in central New Mexico includes the remains of four rare, massive Spanish Colonial mission churches and the Pueblos they administered. Pu’uhonua o Honaunau in Hawaii preserves the highly sacred Refuge Site and Royal Grounds that formed one of the main religious and political centers of the traditional Kona district. These five remarkable places are well worth seeing.
summer • 2016
