About 3,000 years ago, the native people living in the Ohio River valley began building earthen mounds. Archaeologists would later call these people Adena, or more accurately, the Adena Complex. Archaeologists define this cultural complex by its burial mounds, its public structures, and the development of long-distance trade. Adena mounds are found in Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Archaeologists have documented more than 500 Adena sites in a geographic area from Ohio to the Atlantic coast.
In his book The First North Americans: An Archaeological Journey, Brian Fagan writes:
“Adena was a series of mortuary rituals and spiritual beliefs that have come down to us in the form of hundreds of burial mounds in its Ohio heartland alone.”
Adena is often defined by its treatment of the dead. In an article in National Geographic, archaeologist George Stuart notes:
“The Adena seem to have had an almost obsessive preoccupation with honoring the dead.”
In his entry on Adena in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, William Dancey writes:
“As currently defined, Adena consists of a pattern of burial in which the individual is placed in a shallow sealed grave or log tomb, or is simply laid out on the surface and then covered with earth.”
Burial practices provide archaeologists with important information about ancient societies. For example, grave goods—the items buried with the dead—can show social stratification (class distinctions), gender differences, trade networks, and so on. Burials also show changes in religious beliefs and practices over time. The human remains (usually skeletons), provide information about diet and disease, migrations, warfare, life expectancy, and so on.
In general, the Adena people disposed of dead bodies in several ways. The simplest was to dig a shallow, elliptical pit which would then be lined with bark. The body would be placed in the pit, the pit covered with bark, and a mound of dirt heaped on top of it. Over time, more bodies and more dirt would be added resulting in a fairly large burial mound. Burial mounds rarely exceeded 17 feet (5 meters) in height, and most are less than 10 feet (3 meters). There are two mounds—Grave Creek Mound in West Virginia and the Miamisburg Mound in Ohio—which reached 65 feet in height (20 meters) and were used over generations.
In some cases, instead of putting the entire corpse in the pit, the mourners would place a bundle of bones in the pit. This practice suggests that the body had been exposed on an open platform until the flesh decayed. The bones would then be removed and buried. In his book Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent, Brian Fagan reports:
“In some cases, only a few parts of the body were buried in the mound, as if the corpse had been dissected before burial.”
When most Adena people died, their remains were cremated, and the cremains buried in the floor of a house. Some people, however, were buried in log tombs. The log tombs appear to have evolved during the Late Adena Period. In his book The First North Americans: An Archaeological Journey, Brian Fagan writes:
“The most impressive tombs, however, were built with large logs lining the sides and floor, and making up the roof. The mourners often sprinkled the dead with powdered red ocher, sometimes with yellow ocher, graphite, or manganese dioxide in small amounts.”
About the formation of the burial mounds, William Webb and Charles Snow, in their 1945 book The Adena People, write:
“Log tomb burials and deposit of cremated remains frequently took place on the floor of a house. On the house floor a small earth mound was built over the burial; the house was then burned and a larger mound erected over it.”
William Webb and Charles Snow also write:
“Adena burials show abundant evidence that the individuals accorded log tomb burial in mounds constituted a selected minority of the population, with the remainder, the majority, probably being cremated. The basis of selection is unknown, but such evidence suggests a complex society wherein those selected for log tomb burial represent an honored group, perhaps members of the ruling or chieftain class.”
It should be noted that Adena burial practices varied both geographically and temporally. Over time, new practices, such as the log tombs, emerged. During the first half of the twentieth century archaeologists did not have accurate dating methods--such as radiocarbon analysis-- available, so determining temporal patterns were based on things like stratigraphy. As the archaeological record expanded and with more accurate dating, the interpretation of Adena burials has changed. More recent works do not see Adena society as stratified or as having social classes. Regarding the social organization of the Adena people, William Dancey writes:
“Most likely there was no permanent social hierarchy; leaders may have come forth when needed, but their role did not become institutionalized.”
In his book Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent, Brian Fagan writes:
“There are few signs of any social distinction between individuals, as if society was still basically egalitarian.”
The log tombs were not necessarily the final resting place for all eternity. William Dancey reports:
“The initial graves in the earliest of Adena burial mounds were sealed subsurface pits. This practice gave way to above-ground, reusable tombs that housed the dead until someone else came along, at which time the previous occupant was bundled up and reinterred in another part of the mound area.”
In Adena, some bodies were cremated while others were not. In his 1953 report Exploration of an Adena Mound at Natrium, West Virginia, Ralph Solecki offers one possible explanation:
“The cremated remains may represent communal deposits of the dead while the other burials may have been accorded the honor of separate internment.”
Adena graves, like graves in other parts of the world, contained grave goods and for this reason many graves have been looted to obtain objects for personal collections or to sell to others. Adena graves often contained stone tools and other stone artifacts, stone smoking pipes, and metal, usually copper, artifacts. In the 1948 excavation of the Natrium Mound (46 Mr-2) in West Virginia, the archaeologists uncovered 51 polished stone artifacts, 66 rough stone artifacts, 263 chipped stone artifacts, and 709 copper artifacts. Analysis of the copper beads from the Natrium Mound found that the beads had been worked using a hot method, disproving the common assumption that American Indians had only worked copper cold.
Concerning Adena grave goods, Stuart Fiedel, in his book Prehistory of the Americas, reports:
“Late Adena grave goods sometimes included stone tablets, engraved with highly stylized representations of buzzards and other birds of prey. These tablets may have been used to prepare red ochre for ceremonial use, or to sharpen bone awls, perhaps for tattooing.”
In many graves, the bodies appear to have been covered with a red ochre powder. Ralph Solecki writes:
“The importance of red ochre to the cultural complex is attested by the finding of recoverable quantities of this mineral in a little less than one-third of the features.”
In his book Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent, Brian Fagan writes:
“At first Adena mourners buried the dead with mostly utilitarian objects, artifacts such as flint blades, drills, scrapers, stone axes and adzes, also simple bone tools. These appear to have been the personal possessions of the deceased. The dead wore strings of small copper beads, shells, including some large marine gastropods, and occasionally bone.”
Brian Fagan also reports:
“The most distinctive grave artifacts were tubular pipes, fabricated from clay-stone, or very fine-grained silicate in a straight or cigar-shaped tube with a blocked end.”
While the Adena people made a distinguishable pottery, James Griffin, in his chapter in The Adena People, writes:
“The Adena people, with a very few possible exceptions, did not place pottery vessels with their dead.”
Overall, what do the Adena burials tell us? First, the continual enlargement of the burial mounds show that funerary rites were an important part of Adena culture. While the Adena people did have some agriculture, they did not have cities or large settlements that are associated with this type of monumental architecture in other parts of the world. Stuart Fiedel writes:
“The Adena mound-builders apparently gathered periodically for funeral ceremonies and construction, but for most of the year the population was widely dispersed in small temporary villages.”
During the Adena era, flourishing from about 500 BCE to about 100 BCE, there were similar burial practices over a relatively large area. There is no evidence of Adena being a single politically unified people, but the burial mounds show that they shared some common religious practices and beliefs.
One possible interpretation of the Adena burial mounds, and it is only a hypothesis at this point, is that one of the unifying practices was a form of ancestor veneration or worship.
More Ancient America
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Ancient America: Avonlea, the early bow hunters
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Ancient America: Astronomy
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