This collection of essays addresses important questions, like these and others, by examining the cultural and social nature of the well-known Ohio Hopewell monumental earthworks. Scholars discuss the purpose, meaning, and role of earthworks and other artifacts, theorizing on how they may have reflected political, social, and practical ecological organization.
The great earthen mounds of southern Ohio have attracted archaelogical attention since the first half of the nineteenth century. Until now, little has been known of the social organization of the Native Americans who constructed these spectacular ceremonial monuments. In the early 1960s, Olaf Prufer argued that the Ohio Hopewell societies who built the mounds that characterize the Middle Woodland Period (200 B.C. to A.D. 400) lived in a small, scattered hamlets. Prufer's thesis was evaluated at the symposium "Testing the Prufer Model of Ohio Hopewell Settlement Pattern" at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Pittsburgh, April 10, 1992. Several of those essays and others, including two by Professor Prufer, are included in Ohio Hopewell Community Organization. Within the last decade, more than 100 instances of Middle Woodland domestic sites have been documented. The authors examine plant and animal remains, ceramic and stone fragments, and traces of structures and facilities recovered through survey and excavation. The essays illustrate many of the controversies revolving around scientific study of the Hopewellian lifeway. In an Afterword, James B. Griffin shows that the problem of Hopewellian settlement pattern has deep intellectual roots, and its solution will be significant not only for the Ohio Valley but for world prehistory as well. While the volume holds obvious interest for professional archaeologists, it will also appeal to amateur archaeologists and visitors to prehistoric sites and museums.
This volume address important questions about the ancient societies of the Middle Ohio Valley by examining the cultural and social nature of the Ohio Hopewell monumental earthworks.
"This religious, symbolic, social, and ecological interpretation of one of the most fascinating archaeological records of the prehistoric world of Native Americans cannot help but stimulate discussion and debate."--Jacket.
Documents and explains the varied settlement and subsistence practices found in the prehistoric mid-Ohio Valley during the Woodland Period (ca 1000 BC - AD 1000). It focuses on settlement and subsistence relationships underlying the prehistoric societies of the region.
Nearly 2000 years ago, people living in the river valleys of southern Ohio built earthen monuments on a scale that is unmatched in the archaeological record for small-scale societies. The period from c. 200 BC to c. AD 500 (Early to Middle Woodland) witnessed the construction of mounds, earthen walls, ditches, borrow pits and other earthen and stone features covering dozen of hectares at many sites and hundreds of hectares at some. The development of the vast Hopewell Culture geometric earthwork complexes such as those at Mound City, Chilicothe; Hopewell; and the Newark earthworks was accompanied by the establishment of wide-ranging cultural contacts reflected in the movement of exotic and strikingly beautiful artefacts such as elaborate tobacco pipes, obsidian and chert arrowheads, copper axes and regalia, animal figurines and delicately carved sheets of mica. These phenomena, coupled with complex burial rituals, indicate the emergence of a political economy based on a powerful ideology of individual power and prestige, and the creation of a vast cultural landscape within which the monument complexes were central to a ritual cycle encompassing a substantial geographical area. The labour needed to build these vast cultural landscapes exceeds population estimates for the region, and suggests that people from near (and possibly far) travelled to the Scioto and other river valleys to help with construction of these monumental earthen complexes. Here, Mark Lynott draws on more than a decade of research and extensive new datasets to re-examine the spectacular and massive scale Ohio Hopewell landscapes and to explore the society that created them.
Among the most socially and personally vocal archaeological remains on the North American continent are the massive and often complexly designed earthen architecture of Hopewellian peoples of two thousand years ago, their elaborately embellished works of art made of glistening metals and stones from faraway places, and their highly formalized mortuaries. In this book, twenty-one researchers in interwoven efforts immerse themselves and the reader in this vibrant archaeological record in order to richly reconstruct the societies, rituals, and ritual interactions of Hopewellian peoples. By finding the faces, actions, and motivations of Hopewellian peoples as individuals who constructed knowable social roles, the authors explore, in a personalized and locally contextualized manner, the details of Hopewellian life: leadership, its sacred and secular power bases, recruitment, and formalization over time; systems of social ranking and prestige; animal-totemic clan organization, kinship structures, and sodalities; gender roles, prestige, work load, and health; community organization in its tri-scalar residential, symbolic, and demographic forms; intercommunity alliances and changes in their strategies and expanses over time; and interregional travels for power questing, pilgrimage, healing, tutelage, and acquiring ritual knowledge. This book is useful to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in the workings and development of social complexity at local and interregional scales, recent theoretical developments in the anthropology of the topics listed above, the prehistory of eastern North America, its history of intellectual development, and Native American ritual, symbolism, and belief.
