Some two thousand years ago the Mound City Group contained the highest density of mounds of any of the Hopewell earthworks, with twenty-four in a thirteen-acre area; today twenty-two can be counted. One of the missing mounds, Mound 15, survives only in outline, marked by the postholes of a ceremonial building that predates the mound, while the other was excavated more than a century ago and its precise location is unknown. The Hopewell name for the site is unknown, but they used it purposefully for social, religious, and burial purposes. Before each mound was built, a ceremonial building was erected on the site, where ceremonial leaders performed complex rituals, including cremating the bodies of the deceased. A sacred burial process may have included placing copper ornaments and pearl and shell beads with the remains, covering the remains with a small mound of clay, dismantling the building, and then organizing men, women, and children to build an earthen mound atop the building remains with sharpened sticks, antler picks, stone tools, and shell hoes, hauling earth basket by basket and shaping the mound layer by layer before covering it with a final layer of gravel.