At Hopewell Mound Group, earthen walls enclosed a 130-acre field and came up the slope to about this point. Archaeologists have found no evidence of long-term habitation, so the enclosed area was not a city but likely a gathering place. For hundreds of years, people made pilgrimages there to memorialize the dead and may have held religious ceremonies and taken part in social, economic, and political events. During that long period, they built structures for ceremonies and later covered those locations with earthen materials to create the mounds seen today. The Hopewell were a woodland people who lived in small family groups in dense old-growth forests, and many families likely worked together to build the earthworks and mounds and gathered within the walls for religious and mortuary ceremonies and to renew friendships and alliances.