Several different types of structures were built during the Hopewell period -- village, defensive, burial. Some were used for other purposes, such as religious ceremonies, games, and commercial or political transactions. Historic tribes often gathered for feasts, ceremonies, and contests of skill, while individuals conducted their own private business on the periphery. The largest prehistoric earthworks may have been formal meeting places used this way.

Earthworks like Newark were built to grand proportions, reflecting the importance of the activities held within them. The original Newark earthwork complex once covered 10.2 square kilometers (four square miles). Including several large compounds connected by causeways, it is only one of about 100 Hopewell earthwork complexes once found in Ohio. Other prehistoric sites include Seip Mound, Serpent Mound, Fort Ancient, Miamisburg Mound, Flint Ridge and Fort Hill.

Some artifacts on view in the museum at Mound City may have been used to establish trade and diplomatic ties between distant peoples. As more research is done, it becomes more apparent that the term Hopewellian describes a broad, interregional network of contacts between different Indian groups during a period of seven hundred years or more, from 200 B.C. to A.D. 500. The territory we now call southern Ohio was the principal center of this network, extending from Michigan to southern Florida and from Kansas to the east coast.

As we now know them, the Hopewell era peoples included skilled artisans; they fished and hunted, gathered wild foods, and grew a few crops. They lived along river valleys, in permanent or semi-permanent villages near the mounds and earthworks they built.

Compared to a technologically-oriented culture, the peoples of the Hopewell era had simple tools. The poles used in building, for example, were cut and prepared with chipped or pecked stone axes and hunters us stone knives and projectile points.

Some plants such as squash, gourd, and corn were cultivated in garden plots, but most of the food was provided by hunting wild game, fishing, and collecting wild foods such as nuts, seeds, berries, and roots. The hunting and gathering pattern of life was already several thousand years old by the time Mound City was built, but burial customs indicate that, by about 1000 B.C. in the eastern woodlands, society had begun to change.

Remarkably little in known about the structure of society among the many peoples of the Hopewell era, still less about the details of their social interactions. Like medieval Europe or aboriginal Hawaii, individuals and families were ranked in relation to each other, as distinctions of cremation, extended or flexed burial, and types and amounts of grave goods show.

The significance of burial mounds such as those of Mound City was that they established and perpetuated a system of rank distinctions, serving as a visible reminder and demonstration of the power of individuals and families. The labor required to create the mounds and earthworks was a cumulative group investment in maintaining their social order, with planning and work continuing over a period of weeks and months, or even years.

These peoples created and sustained a visible social order with emblems of status made of exotic materials. Besides the copper brought from near the Great Lakes were chunks of obsidian (volcanic glass) from a site in Yellowstone National Park, shark teeth perhaps brought from the Chesapeake Bay, mica from the Smokies, seashells from the Gulf Coast, and silver from Ontario. At regional centers, craftsmen fashioned these and other raw materials into tine objects, which were then distributed to leaders of distant peoples. Food also may have been traded, following the patterns of trade already established.

Hopewell objects represent the widespread Hopewellian system of religious beliefs. However, distinctive cultures flourished, since there was no single dominant person or group capable of controlling more than a local territory.

By about A.D. 500, the great Hopewell enterprise had come to an end. Perhaps this was due to social changes, a breakdown in old patterns of trade, or warfare. Whatever the cause, within a few hundred years a fully agricultural and politically more structured society archeologists call Mississippian had emerged in the Mississippi River Valley and along some of its tributaries.

From today's perspective, it seems that the Hopewell era peoples enjoyed a long period of relative prosperity and stability, for the evidence demonstrates that warfare was far more common after 700 A.D.