In the eighteenth century, the European invaders began to spread westward from their coastal colonies and across the Appalachia Mountains. Here they found monumental earthworks and ancient burial mounds. Following the pattern that they had established since their initial invasion of New England, the Europeans looted the graves, taking from them the finely made grave goods which they found.
While the Europeans found the grave goods to be both exotic and aesthetically pleasing, the existence of thousands of well-engineered earthworks clashed with their stereotypical view of American Indians. Although the early Europeans in North America survived because of American Indian agricultural surpluses and the adoption of some Native American crops, they insisted that American Indians were wild, savage, hunting and gathering people with no real ownership of the land. While it seems obvious to us today that Indians would have built these great works, this would have implied a level of Indian civilization which many Euro-Americans could not accept. In an article in American Archaeology, Kenneth Feder puts it this way:
“…many Americans of European descent refused to believe that America’s aboriginal inhabitants possessed such capabilities. Consequently, it was thought that some other group was responsible.”
In his 1930 book The Mound-Builders, Henry Clyde Shetrone writes of some of the theories proposed:
“From the ancient Chinese, Phoenicians, and Egyptians at one end to the Welsh and the Irish at the other is but a suggestion of the range of supposed sources of origin. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel seem to have been an alluring subject of consideration for those who saw an opportunity of clearing up two major mysteries in the simplest possible manner.”
In his entry on the mound builders in The Encyclopedia of North American Indians, James Brown writes:
“Most travelers, missionaries, and settlers were quick to conclude that these constructions were the legacy of a race of people unrelated to the region’s current Native American inhabitants. They were confirmed in their ideas by the then prevalent white attitude that Native Americans were too indifferent to labor to have been capable of devoting the effort required in the mounds’ construction and would not have had the engineering knowledge to plan and execute the most demanding examples.”
The first major study of the mound building traditions was done in 1848 by Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis. It was published by the Smithsonian Institution and indicated a Mexican connection with the mound builders. From 1881 to 1893, Cyrus Thomas led a study of the mounds for the newly created Bureau of Ethnology. This study found cultural continuity between the mound building traditions and indigenous tribal practices. James Brown reports:
“The theory of a distinct race of Mound Builders was declared without substance from both an archaeological and an ethnohistorical standpoint.”
In general, today’s archaeologists describe four major moundbuilding traditions in North America: (1) Poverty Point which dates from 1500 BCE to 700 BCE; (2) Adena which dates from 500 BCE to 100 BCE; (3) Hopewell which dates from about 200 BCE (300 BCE in some sources) to about 400 CE (300 CE in some sources); and (4) Mississippian which dates from 700 CE to 1731 CE.
Near Chillicothe, Ohio, the Hopewell site attracted the attention of early archaeologists and gave its name to a much broader cultural tradition. At the Hopewell site, there were thirty-eight earthen mounds within a rectangular earthen enclosure which enclosed 110 acres. In her book America Before the European Invasions, Alice Beck Kehoe writes:
“Overall, Hopewell is the earliest civilization to impress Euroamerican archaeologists with displays of wealth objects reminiscent of European concepts of wealth and status displays.”
Around the world, archaeologists have found monumental architecture—massive structures which required thousands of hours of communal labor to construct—in association with urban civilizations. Hopewell, on the other hand, is an example of a civilization without cities. The Hopewellians lived in small, dispersed villages.
In his book The First North Americans: An Archaeological Journey, Brian Fagan writes:
“Hopewell is a ‘great tradition’ or an ideology in the spiritual sense, a set of understandings, as it were, shared by numerous small regional societies over much of the Midwest, accompanied by distinctive artifacts and mortuary rituals.”
Briefly described below are some of the features of the Hopewell Moundbuilding Culture.
The Earthworks
One of the outstanding characteristics of the Hopewell culture is the earthen mounds. Typical Hopewell mounds are 12 meters high and about 30 meters across at the base. Earthworks (berms of earth), which sometimes exceed 500 meters in diameter, were constructed in circular, square, rectangular, and octagonal shapes. Anthropologist Peter Nabokov, in his book Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places, reports:
“Most spectacular of the ten thousand mounds produced by Hopewell people are sites that pair circles and squares, a configuration which is repeated in some dozens of locations.”
In his entry on Hopewell in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, William Dancey reports:
“Ceremonial centers commonly combined earthworks in geometric shapes such as circles, squares, semicircles, arcs, and parallel walls. The orientation of some of these figures has suggested that Hopewellians recognized the cycles of the moon, sun, and Venus.”
The Hopewell earthworks, particularly the circles and squares, appear to be oriented toward some fairly precise lunar observations and suggest that the Hopewell people were accomplished astronomers. In at least one instance, the orientation of the earthworks corresponds with the 18.6-year lunar cycle and suggests that the Hopewell astronomers made and recorded observations over fairly long periods of time.
The size and complexity of the mounds provide insights into Hopewell planning, engineering skills, and social organization. The mounds and other archeological evidence show that Hopewell people had a highly developed social organization that included class structure and a division of labor, with specialists like metal workers, artists, and traders. In addition, they had leaders of hereditary rank and privileges, a strong religious system, and control over cooperative labor.
The Hopewell mounds appear to have been ceremonial centers, places where people were buried. In addition to mortuary ceremonies, they were probably also used for other ceremonies. These ceremonies provided an opportunity for the people living in scattered villages to come together.
The Great Hopewell Road, which runs for about 60 miles roughly parallel to the Scioto River, links a number of prominent mound sites. Archaeologists have also found “alleys” or “avenues” created by earthen walls which may have marked processional routes from outlying communities into the ceremonial centers.
Hopewell Social Organization
The mounds and other features show that the Hopewellians had a highly developed social organization. This probably included a class structure and a division of labor, with specialists like metal workers, artists, and traders; leaders of hereditary rank and privileges; a strong religious system; and direction over cooperative labor. William Dancey summarizes Hopewell social structure this way:
“Some archaeologists argue that Hopewell must have had a chiefdom type of society in which a single lineage dominated the social order, aggregating and redistributing resources through negotiation. Others have envisioned a more egalitarian system in which leaders emerged through achievement, as among modern tribal societies, and the structure was not institutionalized.”
In his book An Introduction to Native North America, Mark Sutton writes:
“Hopewell social and political systems were very complex with a class structure and at least a tribal level political organization, perhaps even a chiefdom level. It appears that ‘commoners’ were cremated, while the elite were buried in graves with lavish offerings.”
Hopewell Art
In addition to earthen mounds, one of the major characteristics of Hopewell was the flowering of artistic creation. William Dancey reports:
“Hopewell people chipped ceremonial daggers from obsidian acquired in the Rockies and cold-hammer copper from Lake Superior sources to make bracelets, broaches, necklaces, headdresses, and ornamental cutouts. Mica from southern Appalachia was cut into various forms and attached to clothing (skin and woven cloth). Buscyon shells from the Gulf coast were used as containers. Pipestone from local sources was carved to form effigy platform pipes, the bowls of which often depicted the region’s common birds and mammals.”
The Hopewell people not only made many useful items, but they made artifacts that were beautiful. They decorated their pottery with both dentate-stamping and rocker-stamping. Their pottery often had cross-hatched rim decorations and zoned decorations. Regarding Hopewell pottery, Christian Feest, in his book Native Arts of North America, writes:
“Stylized bird motifs are outlined by deep, incised lines, and the background is textured with a toothed rocker or roulette.”
While it is common to characterize Indian people prior to the arrival of the Europeans as “stone age” people, the Hopewell artists made many different artifacts from copper. Their copper artifacts included musical instruments such as panpipes; cutting tools such as copper celts; copper needles; and beads made from both copper and from meteoric iron. In addition to working with copper, the Hopewell artists also made some objects from gold and silver.
In addition to pots, the Hopewell people also made pottery figurines, usually depicting humans. All of the Hopewell figurines have strong realistic tendencies. The figures include both seated and standing males and females.
Another characteristic Hopewell artifact was their platform smoking pipes. These pipes were sometimes carved with animal and bird effigies. In his chapter on Hopewell in North American Archaeology, William Dancey writes:
“The birds and mammals carved on some Hopewellian platform pipes are nearly exact replicas of their subjects, complete with a sense of movement. Conversely, some Hopewell art shows animals and animal parts, including human, in silhouette fashion in copper and mica cutouts.”
For personal decoration, the Hopewell people made pottery rings, ear spools from both copper and stone, and copper headpieces. They often used antlers to indicate chiefly or leadership status.
Another interesting Hopewell artifact is the Hopewell Hand: a hand which was carved from mica and buried in a mound in Ohio.
Trade
Like other Indian cultures, the Hopewell were not isolated from the rest of North America. The Hopewell trading network spread west to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, north to Ontario, Canada, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. Trade goods included copper from the Lake Superior area, mica from the southern Appalachians, obsidian and grizzly bear teeth from Wyoming and Montana, and marine shells from both the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. It is clear from the distribution of these goods that some network, either social or religious, must have existed for this exchange to take place.
As evidence of this wide trading network, Hopewell graves contain such items as conch shells from the Gulf Coast, shark teeth from the ocean, and pipes with alligator effigies.
Subsistence
While the Hopewell did raise some corn (maize), this was not their most important food source. In her book North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, Alice Beck Kehoe writes:
“A warmer phase in climate probably encouraged cultivation of maize, although this imported plant did not displace the already-domesticated indigenous seed plants as the basis of the Hopewell diet.”
The Hopewell farmers raised a number of indigenous crops, such as sunflowers, marsh elder, squash, little barley, erect knotweed, maygrass, and stumpweed. In farming, they used hoes made from stone and from the shoulder blades of bison and deer.
They also got much of their food from gathering wild plants, including hickory nuts, acorns, walnuts, grapes, and wild plums. They hunted deer, turkeys, and other small game. For fishing, they made fishhooks from both copper and bone.
Hopewell villages tended to be in areas which were good for growing native crops. Usually, their settlements were dispersed along stream and river valley corridors. Their villages generally did not appear to have any overall community plan. In his book Prehistory of the Americas, Stuart Fiedel writes:
“…the largest villages cold not have held more than a few hundred people. They were generally located at the foot of a bluff, near the river and about 20 km (12½ miles) away from the next large village.”
Decline
The Hopewellian centers began to decline about 300 CE and by 550 CE they disappeared completely. In his chapter on the Hopewell phenomenon in The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology, Douglas Charles writes:
“…the end of Hopewell was not a collapse, but rather a diminishing and disappearance of ritual and exchange practices as the floodplain environments and demographic influx stabilized, again varying regionally.”
On the other hand, in his book The First North Americans: An Archaeological Journey, Brian Fagan sees the decline as fairly rapid—325 to 350 CE—and describes it this way:
“Charnel-house building slowed, earthen enclosures were no longer constructed. Ceremonial activity declined dramatically. An explanation for this sudden change eludes us.”
Several reasons for the Hopewell decline have been suggested by archaeologists. Mark Sutton writes:
“A number of hypotheses propose to explain this decline, including overpopulation, climate change, an increase in warfare, and/or an increase in hunting efficiency (and thus the decimation of game) due to the introduction of the bow and arrow.”
One potential reason is, of course, climate change as the Hopewell decline corresponds to a period in which the weather became too cold and moist for tropical flint corn. This three-century cooling period would have impacted other foods as well. In her book North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, Alice Beck Kehoe writes:
“Cultivated grain harvests would have been subject to destructive frosts much more often in this cooler period than during the Hopewell climax, and many supplementary foods, such as hickory nuts, would also have become less plentiful.”
Some scholars, however, disagree with this suggestion. In her book Native Americans Before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centers of the Eastern Woodlands, Lynda Shaffer writes:
“The peoples of this epoch were not dependent upon corn for their food supply.”
Brian Fagan writes:
“Climatic cooling did not play a significant role in triggering change.”
The Hopewell decline may have been brought about by a decline in the exchange of northern copper for southern coastal shells. At the end of the Hopewellian era, the Indian peoples in the Southeast began to exploit local copper deposits. Once the Southeastern people developed their own copperworking traditions, the need to exchange shells for northern copper objects disappeared. Once the exchange was gone, there was no reason to continue the ceremonies associated with the culture. Lynda Shaffer writes:
“This southern shift from northern to local sources of copper certainly is significant, but it is difficult to say whether it caused the collapse of the Hopewellian network or was a result of its collapse.”
The Hopewellian decline may have been brought about by warfare which accompanied the introduction of the bow and arrow. By the end of the Hopewell period, their sites tended to be located on hilltops where they could be easily defended. At some of these sites, there are indications of fires and massacres. Lynda Shaffer reports:
“The introduction of the bow and arrow could have temporarily altered the balance of power and contributed to an increase in the frequency and intensity of warfare.”
Hopewell Influence
Hopewell influence stretched from Minnesota in the north to Mississippi in the south, from Nebraska in the west to Virginia in the east. This does not mean that Hopewell was an empire, or even a political confederation of tribes. Rather, Hopewell as probably one of the first Pan-Indian religious movements whose artistic style and ideas influenced many other cultures stretching from Mississippi to Minnesota, from Nebraska to Virginia.
In his book Prehistory of the Americas, Stuart Fiedel describes the geographic spread of Hopewell influence this way:
“From southern Illinois, Hopewell culture traits appear to have spread, by diffusion and/or migration, northward into Wisconsin (Trempealeau culture) and Michigan (Goodall culture); westward into Missouri (Kansas City and Cooper cultures), and southward, through western Tennessee (Copena culture), to Louisiana (Marksville), Mississippi (Miller), Alabama (Porter), and Florida (Santa Rose and Swift Creek cultures).”
Stuart Fiedel also writes:
“The spread of Hopewell artifacts may denote acceptance of an ideology that stressed elaborate funerary rites.”
In his chapter on Hopewell in North American Archaeology, William Dancey asks:
“Does Hopewell art represent art for art’s sake, or is it a material manifestation of a worldview or cosmology?”
In her book North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, Alice Beck Kehoe writes:
“Above all, Hopewell was the integration of thousands of villages throughout the East into a system in which material goods were moved in the service of political leaders marked by well-defined status symbols.”
In looking at the influence of Hopewell on other cultures, it seems logical to also explore possible influences from other cultures on Hopewell. One logical candidate is Mexico as influences from cultures such as the Maya are found in other parts of North America, including the Southeast. Alice Beck Kehoe writes:
“Though some occasional contacts between Hopewell and Mexico must have occurred, Hopewell has strong indigenous roots in the Late Archaic of the central Midwest.”
While there are no clear connections between Hopewell and contemporary Indian tribes, many of the cultural traditions of the Iroquois tribes seem to be linked to Hopewell. The Iroquois, like the Hopewell, used antlers as the metaphor for chiefly office. Similarly, both groups use a weeping-eye motif in their art.
Ancient America
This series focuses on the thousands of years of American Indian history prior to the European invasion. More from this series:
Ancient America: Avonlea, the early bow hunters
Ancient America: Effigy Mounds
Ancient America: Astronomy
Ancient America: Solar Calendars
Ancient America: Mammoths
Ancient America: The Richey-Roberts Clovis site (museum diary)
Ancient America: American Indians at Rancho La Brea
Ancient America: Columbia River Rock Art (Photo Diary)
