Ohio’s Woodland peoples and the mounds of the Hopewell

More than 600 Hopewell earthworks once stood in Ohio, some with walls 10 to 12 feet high enclosing as many as forty mounds. This National Park Service reading, tied to Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, explains who built them and how life changed around them.

How we know

Humans have lived between Lake Erie and the Ohio River for more than 14,000 years. Historic tribes including the Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa and Seneca called the region home before and after pioneers arrived in the late 1600s. Earlier inhabitants are visible in the preserved and reconstructed mounds at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.

Archeologists learn how people lived from material culture, or artifacts: broken pottery, stone tools such as arrowheads, food remains such as seeds and nuts, and decorations such as jewelry. Working across the Eastern Woodlands, they divide Ohio’s long history into four periods, Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland and Late Prehistoric. The reading focuses on the Woodland period, especially the middle part.

The Woodland Period in the Ohio Valley is divided into early, middle and late, based on ceremonial and material culture. NPS.

The Woodland period in Ohio is defined by people settling into communities, the start of agriculture and the building of massive mounds and earthworks. Mounds are usually conical and single; earthworks combine mounds and walls into geometric shapes and complexes covering acres. Native Americans built thousands of them. Mounds were often used for burials, and the large geometric sites were probably places for community ceremonies. A handful can still be seen.

Early Woodland: the Adena

The Adena lived in large, semi-permanent habitation sites near waterways, in shelters of wood covered with mud, clay and grass. They hunted and gathered like their ancestors but also planted native plants, among them goosefoot, knotweed, sunflower, sumpweed, maygrass, tobacco and squash, making them the first gardeners in the region. Their pottery, still basic, was more decorated and durable than before and held stored plants.

They raised cone-shaped mounds up to 63 feet high, mostly for burials, ringed by low earthen walls that served as monuments, ceremonial centers and boundary markers. Burials held shell beads, copper antlers, copper bracelets and tubular pipes.

Adena point. NPS illustration.

Middle Woodland: the Scioto Hopewell

The Ohio Hopewell took mound building further. The reading calls the people of present-day Ohio the Scioto Hopewell. They built conical burial mounds and sacred circles, and also geometric earthworks hundreds of acres wide shaped as circles, squares and octagons. More than a dozen of the largest are in Ross County. Not all hold burials: Hopeton, at the national historical park, and the Newark Earthworks have none but show strong lunar and solar alignments, so that on certain days the rising or setting sun passes straight through a passage. The Scioto Hopewell seem to have held ceremonies tied to the movements of sun, moon and stars.

The size of the earthworks and the goods buried with the dead show that many groups built them together. In many cultures such projects were run by a class of elite rulers who passed their status to their children, but little evidence of a ruling class has been found among the Hopewell.

These materials were carved and molded into birds, mammals, reptiles, humans and other forms, which suggests the natural environment played a significant role in Hopewell religion and art.

Copper bird effigy. NPS illustration.

Away from the gatherings, the Hopewell hunted, gathered and farmed in scattered settlements of a few log-and-bark or daub houses. They sowed plots each spring with goosefoot, sunflower, knotweed, little barley, sumpweed, tobacco and may-grass, and studies of their middens, the trash piles, show reliance on starchy and oily seeds and nuts. They hunted deer, rabbits and raccoon with a spear and atlatl. They also made bladelets, thin flint blades like razor blades; some obsidian ones are sharper than modern surgical steel.

By A.D. 400 the Hopewell used their earthwork centers less, and exotic materials in ceremonies declined. It is unclear why, but social changes, population changes or climate may be behind it. The same people stayed in the area.

Late Woodland

The end of mound building marks the Late Woodland period. People moved around more and kept smaller, less permanent base camps. They kept growing native crops in small gardens and added maize. They used the bow and arrow, so stone tools shifted from large spear heads to small arrowheads, made of lower-quality chert than the Hopewell’s material. Their pottery was thinner and tempered with shell, sand or grit to resist heat.

The dead were buried with less ceremony, in middens or storage pits, sometimes in stone mounds. Some groups, called the Intrusive Mound culture, buried their dead in the tops of Hopewell mounds, perhaps to connect with those who came before. Their artifacts differ, including Jack’s Reef Corner Notched arrowheads and a beaver tool and antler that possibly came from New York.

Sources

• National Park Service, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, “Ohio’s Prehistoric Past”; the source gives overlapping date ranges for the periods, so none are repeated here; rewritten in hubnx's own words.