A national TV series will feature Ohio’s Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks to describe the math involved in their creation.
The series is called "Doodles and Digits: How It’s Math," which started broadcasting its second season on PBS this month. The show aims to expose third through fifth graders to the ways math is applied in different careers and places.
The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are a series of eight monumental earthen enclosures found in Southern and Central Ohio. They were built about 2,000 years ago, and served as ceremonial centers for Native Americans from the Hopewell culture.
An upcoming episode, which will air on Sept. 22, will include a segment focusing on the geometric and astronomical features of the earthworks.
Many of them form shapes such as circles, octagons or squares, as well as recurring size dimensions.
Some, like the Octagon Earthworks, even follow the alignments of the 18.6-year lunar cycle — the time it takes for the moon to reach the maximum and minimum limits of its setting and rising positions on the sky’s horizon.
Many of these features helped make the earthworks distinct enough to be added to the UNESCO World Heritage Site list in 2023.
Brad Lepper is senior archaeologist for Ohio History Connection’s World Heritage program. OHC maintains three of the eight sites that make up the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.
Lepper, who’s studied the earthworks for nearly 30 years, believes it must’ve taken more than a century for the builders to figure out the lunar cycle is recurring.
“That is a testament to the fact that they must have had some kind of written records. They must have had astronomer priests that were devoted to determining what this cycle was and learning about it, and then architects that could incorporate those alignments into this monumental architecture,” Lepper said. “So it's an extraordinary civilization that I think we know far too little about.”
It’s likely the moon was revered as sacred to the Hopewell people, according to Lepper.
He said he never got excited about math until he learned about the geometry of the earthworks.
“So there's math in how we encounter the past and how we learn about the past, but there's also math in the past that we're now rediscovering,” Lepper said.
Caroline Farkas is the founder and CEO of Doodles and Digits, an educational math video resource. She’s also local to Central Ohio. She likes that the episode also provides education on Native American history that Ohio fourth graders are learning about at this time.
“So the fact that it had math standards and it had those history standards that all teachers really need to be sharing and knowing, I was like ‘yes, this has to be on the show,’” Farkas said.
While many segments explore how math shows up in other careers, Farkas said this segment touches on how math can be found in the world around you.
“Even if it's not a career, it might be a place, it might be in a job, like being an archeologist, or it could just be in the history that we're learning about,” Farkas explained.
“It's really important that students are seeing that math is not just a subject, but something that's integrated in really almost every aspect in our life,” she said.
The upcoming episode will premiere on PBS on Sept. 22. Visit ThinkTV or your local PBS channel for local air times. Other episodes from the series can be found here.
