Squircles

Squircles. . , The earthwork builders used this rounded square shape at many scales., SQUARES WITH ROUNDED CORNERS show up everywhere in Hopewell art and architecture, most famously at Mound City where the monumental enclosure takes this form. There, the building foundations that lie beneath most of the two dozen mounds have the same shape, as do the clay crematory basins on their floors. As a shape for earthworks, these "squircles" are actually more common than we used to think: maps from the 1800s show that early surveyors often interpreted them as circles; magnetometry has shown that many were actually squircles instead.Hopewell Artistry. Within these "squircle" buildings and around these altars, ceremonies generally focused on the preparation of the dead for cremation and burial. At Mound City and the nearby Hopewell Mound Group, these rituals involved the laying down of many precious objects made from exotic materials. Sometimes the artifacts were, like the deceased, deliberately dismembered or burned setting them on the same path to the world of the dead.