Early and Middle Woodland: Adena and Hopewell

1
Early and Middle Woodland Adena and Hopewell
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Early Woodland Period (1000 B.C.-A.D. 100)

• The Early Woodland period is an elaboration of
  Archaic trends.
• A greatly increased use of earthen burial mounds
  and pottery making make Early Woodland sites more
  visible to the archaeologist than most Archaic
  sites.

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Late Archaic-Woodland trends include

• More intensive exploitation of diverse food
  sources in highly localized environments (part
  of'primary forest efficiency').
• More sedentary living, with more clearly
  recognizable territorial boundaries.
• More intensive exchange of scarce materials.
• More complex social orders.
• Increasing cultivation of native and foreign
  plants.
• Larger populations living in more geographically
  and socially circumscribed territories.

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Container Revolution

• The widespread appearance of pottery is thought
  to be related to a "container revolution"associate
  d with an increased exploitation of wild and
  domesticated seed crops.
• Many native and foreign plants were cultivated by
  the Early Woodland period (with some appearing in
  the Middle Archaic period).

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Early Woodland Pottery
http//www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/pre
/htmls/woodland.html
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Indigenous cultigens

• Indigenous cultigens include sunflower, Jerusalem
  artichoke, sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed,
  maygrass, and little barley.
• Cultivated plants remained a supplementary food
  in the Eastern Woodlands until after AD 800.

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Technology

• Used flint blades, drills, scrapers, stone axes
  and adzes, bone tools, atlatl weights, projectile
  points .

Yadkin points
http//www.cr.nps.gov/seac/outline/042Dwoodland/
early
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Early Woodland Points
Dickson
Waubesa
Kramer
http//www.uwlax.edu/mvac/_private/PointGuideOld/P
oints.htmWood
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Burial and Trade

• Two Early Woodland characteristics that separate
  it from the Archaic are an elaboration of
  archaeologically visible burial customs and an
  intensification of local and inter-regional
  exchange.
• Burial of high status in earthen mounds.
• High status trade goods.

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Burial Mounds
http//www.uiowa.edu/osa/learn/prehistoric/ancien
tmounds.htm
11
Trade

• Widespread trading contacts
• Ohio pipestone from the lower Scioto Valley to
  Lake Huron and the upper St Lawrence Valley
• Copper from Lake Superior
• Sea shells from the Gulf Coast
• Intensified local and inter-regional trade

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Social Organization, Population Settlement

• Probably clans and lineages controlled the
  resources.
• Social standing was extremely important,
  especially for burial.
• Population size and growth
• villages held as many as 40 people
• had very localized population density
• Settlement pattern
• Early Woodland settlement distribution
  resemblesthe Late Archaic communities
• Adena lived by basically every major Ohio
  Rivertributary

13
Ideology

• Religious beliefs and rituals
• Burial mounds
• death was extremely symbolic
• contained tools, exotic ornaments, bracelets,
  rings
• Adena
• painted corpses (red ochre)

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Early Woodland Models for Behavior

• Population growth led to better defined and more
  circumscribed local territories.
• Stylistic boundary markers" (e.g., projectile
  point and pottery styles),
• More formal exchange mechanisms that structured
  the bartering of essentials and prestigious
  luxuries from one area to another in a web of
  reciprocal obligations and formal gift giving.

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Early Woodland Behavior
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Adena complex (c. 1000 BC-AD 100)

• The Adena complex was a mortuary-ceremonial
  complex centered in the central Ohio Valley that
  was shared by many local cultures.
• Earlier Adena burial centers are marked by a
  basically egalitarian burial program, utilitarian
  grave goods, and smaller earthen burial mounds.

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Grave Creek Mound, WV

• Construction of the mound took place in
  successive stages from about 250-150 B.C., as
  indicated by the multiple burials at different
  levels within the structures.
• In 1838, road engineers measured its height at 69
  feet and its at the base as 295 feet.
• Originally a moat of about 40 feet in width and
  five feet in depth with one causeway encircled
  it.

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Grave Creek Mound
http//www.wvculture.org/sites/gravecreek.html
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Miamisburg Mound, OH

• Archaeological investigations of the surrounding
  area suggest that it was constructed ca. 800 BC -
  AD 100.
• Built on a 100-foot-high bluff, the mound
  measures 877 feet in circumference.
• It was originally more than 70 feet high.

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Miamisburg Mound
http//www.ohiohistory.org/places/miamisbg/
21
Shrum Mound, Oh

• Shrum Mound is one of the last remaining conical
  burial mounds in the city of Columbus.
• The 20-foot-high and 100-foot-diameter mound is
  located in the one-acre Campbell roadside park.
• The mound is grass-covered and steps lead to its
  summit.
• It was probably constructed about 2000 years ago
  by the prehistoric Adena people.

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Shrum Mound, Oh
http//www.ohiohistory.org/places/shrum/
23
Story Mound, Ohio

• Story Mound consists of a large, rounded earthen
  mound located on slightly less than an acre of
  ground in Chillicothe.
• This mound stands 19.5 feet high, with a basal
  diameter of 95 feet.
• Dating to ca. 800 BC-AD 100 it was excavated in
  1897 by Clarence Loveberry.
• It yielded the first documented example of a
  circular Adena timber building, a structural type
  now known as the norm in Adena ceremonial and
  domestic architecture.

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Story Mound, Ohio
http//www.ohiohistory.org/places/story/
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Mound construction
http//www.adena.com/adena/ad/ad01.htm
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Adena Artifacts

• 800 B.C. - A.D. 100
• This carved pipe was found in the Adena mound in
  Chillicothe.
• It shows us an Adena man wearing typical clothing
  and jewelry.

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Other Artifacts
http//www.civilization.ca/cmc/archeo/cvh/maritim/
v65-13.htm
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Ohio, Adena CultureStone Tablet
http//iml.umkc.edu/art/faculty/wahlman/quizzes/Na
tAmNorthAmAdenaStoneTabletB.htm
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Birdstones Saddleback Popeyed Birdstone
http//welcome.to/Birdstone
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the Hopewell (200 BC-400 Ad)

• Traits
• Artifacts
• Sites

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Middle Woodland

• The middle period or stage of the Woodland
  tradition in eastern North America.
• Many trends that began thousands of years earlier
  in the Archaic reach their climax in the Middle
  Woodland in some resource rich regions.

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Middle Woodland Traits

• an increasing efficiency in harvesting a wide
  variety of productive and nutritious wild food
  resources
• an increasing emphasis on the gathering and
  gardening of seed-bearing plants
• an intensification of food procurement
• smaller, better defined, and more circumscribed
  group territories
• more sedentary lifeways

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Traits Continued

• "packing" in resource rich environments caused by
  increasing population sizes, group fissioning,
  and inward migration
• a sense of corporate, or "ethnic," identity
• increasingly conspicuous group boundary markers
  to legitimize a corporate right to local
  resources
• more elaborate burial rites
• more complex intra- and intercommunity social
  arrangements and
• increasingly formal inter-group exchange
  mechanisms.

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Hopewell

• Hopewell ceremonial sites are in the Sciota
  Valley near Chillicothe, Ohio.
• These religious and political centers typically
  contain a burial mound and geometric earthwork
  complex that covers 10 to hundreds of acres and
  sparse evidence of large resident populations is
  lacking. Larger mounds can be up to 12 m high,
  150 m long, and 55 m wide.
• Multiple mortuary structures under the mounds
  were often log tombs that contained the remains
  of skeletons that had been cremated, bundled, or
  interred in some other manner.

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Hopewell Artifacts

• Exotic raw materials and "art" objects, the
  diagnostic artifacts of the Hopewell Interaction
  Sphere, accompanied some of the burials.
• Included were
• Lake Superior copper,
• galena,
• obsidian from Wyoming,
• Knife River flint from North Dakota,
• And also pipestone, silver, meteoric iron, mica,
  chlorite, quartz crystal, petrified wood, foreign
  nodular flints,
• From the gulf and atlantic coasts large and
  small marine shell, ocean turtle shells,
  alligator and shark teeth, barracuda jaws
• clay figurines, platform effigy pipes, and
  two-dimensional representational art cut from
  sheets of copper or mica, among other items.

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Trade
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Copper artifacts

• Sources
• Lake Superior area
• Kewanaw Peninsula
• Isle Royale
• Essential two ways of making cold copper objects
  
• Beaten
• Cutouts

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Copper artifact types

• Ear spools
• Artificial noses
• Beads
• Gorgets
• Panpipes
• Relief drawings
• Breastplates
• Fake deer antlers
• Coverings for wooden artifacts (e.g., covering
  for a wooden representation of a hallucinogenic
  or poisonous mushroomthe famous "Shaman's
  baton")
• Ax heads

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Copper Artifacts
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Mica artifacts

• Source
• southwest North Carolina
• Mica is a sometimes almost perfectly transparent
  laminated mineral that can be carefully separated
  into clear sheets that can then be cut into
  shapes
• Serpents
• Animal claws
• Human heads
• Human hands
• Geometric forms
• As many as 3,000 sheets of worked mica have been
  recovered from one mound (at the original
  Hopewell Site)

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Mica Artifacts
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Obsidian and Ground Stone artifacts

• Source
• appears to be Yellowstone, Wyoming
• Technology employed
• developed pressure flaking
• Artifact types
• Knives
• Projectile points
• Ritual, non-utilitarian forms of the above (too
  big and too brittle to have been used
  practically)
• Ground-stone artifacts
• Probably the most famous Hopewell artifact is the
  platform pipe
• Platform pipes depict a wide range of animals
  forming the tobacco bowloften in rather
  whimsical forms

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Flaked and Ground Stone artifacts
Ground Stone Shaman
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Bone and Wood Artifacts

• Bone artifacts
• Wolf's upper palette with upper fangs still
  intact (may have been a mouth mask that was held
  in the teeth of a shaman)
• Wooden artifacts
• Preservation of wood is often poor in the Eastern
  Woodlands, but luckily some of these had been
  covered with thin sheets of copper
• Copper acids inhibit biological activity, thus
  sometimes preserving organic material adjacent to
  it
• Copper sometimes remains long after wood has
  disappeared (requiring careful excavation
  techniques!)

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Textile fragment from Hopewell Mound
46
Other artifacts

• Freshwater mollusks
• Freshwater clamshell to make beads
• Freshwater pearl for beads, etc.
• Ceramics
• Vessels
• Utilitarian
• Luxury/funerary
• Figurines
• Distinct from those of the Southwest and
  Mesoamerica

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Hopewell Interaction Sphere

• Smaller amounts of Hopewell Interaction Sphere
  items are found in Havana graves in Illinois and
  in other Hopewellian complexes.
• Differences in regional burial practices,
  ceramics, settlement pattern, and other aspects
  of the archaeological record suggest that these
  items and presumably their associated ritual
  practices were grafted onto local cultures.

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Hopewell Phenomenon

• Just what the Hopewell phenomenon represents
  remains a focus of investigation.
• Some researchers view the increase in burial
  mound and earthwork construction, the elaboration
  of burial ceremonialism, and the presence of
  "powerful" exotic substances and manufactured
  items as the archaeologically visible
  manifestation of a climactic expression of a
  cosmology whose roots extend deep into the
  Archaic.
• According to this view, the spirit world had to
  be propitiated to ensure an abundance of food, a
  successful raid on a traditional enemy, and so
  on, and these items functioned within that
  process of communication.

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Other Interpretations

• Others regard the florescence as evidence of the
  emergence of regional social ranking.
• In this view, heads of high ranking lineages
  legitimized their positions in part by obtaining
  interaction sphere symbols of power from other
  high ranking lineage heads in distant
  communities.
• Still another interpretation considers the
  aspirations of "Big Men" as responsible for
  moving interaction sphere items through an
  extensive intertribal network.
• Here, a potential "Big Man" would attempt to
  build his own reputation and a political blee
  within the segmented tribal organization by
  exchanging locally available items for
  interaction sphere raw materials and ritual
  items.
• Presumably, aspects of all three interpretations
  were important to varying degrees in different
  Middle Woodland complexes.

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Forms of Hopewell Earthworks

• Enclosures
• Circular
• Rectangular
• Octagonal
• Processionals
• Parallel connecting mounds connecting enclosures
• Internal moats and borrow pits were also part of
  such complexes
• Effigy Mounds
• Not to be confused with the Effigy Mound Culture
  of Northeastern Iowa, which is late, but which
  also has Hopewellian affiliations

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Functions of Hopewell Earthworks

• Many mounds were burial mounds (sometimes
  containing hundreds of burials)
• Some mound complexes may reflect
  archaeoastronomic orientations
• Definitely not used as temple bases (such as
  later Mississippian and Mesoamerican forms)

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Mound City, Ohio Aerial photo
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Mound City Layout
54
(No Transcript)
55
Seip Mound, Ohio
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Seip Mound Enclosure
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Hopewell Mound Group
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Burial Practices

• The dead were buried in many different ways,
  depending upon social status. The majority of the
  scientifically studied burials are cremations,
  only the elites being buried intact. Both burial
  crypts and charnel houses were used.
• Crypts
• Large boxes constructed for the storage of the
  dead and their grave goods
• Simple structures sunk into the ground and
  covered with heavy roofs
• Often built on isolated high-spots clear of the
  settlement
• May have served as lineage and/or clan facilities
  for a single community
• Generally maintenance free

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Charnel Houses

• Structures with thatched roofs and substantial
  post frames - used both to shelter the dead
  (cremated and /or entire corpses) and the burial
  activities associated with them
• Bodies often subjected to considerable
  preparation
• Elites buried in log-lined tombs within the
  charnel house and were accompanied by extremely
  rich grave offerings
• Once house had fulfilled its role, was burned to
  the ground and an earthen mound erected over it
• A single mound might be used for later burials
  which were placed immediately adjacent to, or
  partially into, the exisiting burial mound.
• Over time a single burial mound would assume
  gigantic proportions some as large as 90-100
  feet in diameter and 15 feet tall and contain as
  many as 200 burials.
• May have served as lineage and /or clan
  facilities for a single community.

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Effigy Mounds

• Serpent Mound, Ohio
• One of the few effigy mounds in Ohio, Serpent
  Mound is the largest and finest serpent effigy in
  the United States.
• Nearly a quarter of a mile long, Serpent Mound
  apparently represents an uncoiling serpent.
  Serpent Mound lies on a plateau overlooking the
  valley of Brush Creek.
• New dating suggests it was built at the end of
  the Hopewell period.

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Serpent Mound
The most famous of all such (effigy) mounds is
the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, 1,330
feet in length along its coils and averaging
three feet in height.
http//www.ohiohistory.org/places/serpent/
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Sources

• http//www.comp-archaeology.org/USWoodlandHopewell
  Earthworks.htm
• http//www.ohiohistorycentral.org/ohc/archaeol/p_i
  ndian/artifact/face.shtml
• http//campus.northpark.edu/history/WebChron/North
  America/Adena.html
• http//www.geocities.com/moore_brandon_54601/Early
  WoodlandandAdena.html
• http//www.ohiohistorycentral.org/ohc/archaeol/p_i
  ndian/tradit/adena.shtml