Adena and Hopewell Cultures

European settlers moving into the Ohio Valley found tens of thousands of earthworks, some enormous and geometrically exact. Thomas Jefferson had already cut a trench through a burial mound near his home in Virginia, and recorded in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) the layers of bones inside it, laid down at different times. In 1848 Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis published Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, the first book of the new Smithsonian Institution, with careful survey drawings of the Ohio works. Through the nineteenth century some writers claimed the mounds had been raised by a vanished people from overseas. In 1894 Cyrus Thomas, whose teams had surveyed thousands of mounds for the Smithsonian, published his report: the mounds had been built by the ancestors of the American Indians.

At Newark, Ohio, the earthworks enclose an area that could hold four Roman Colosseums. The Octagon there is aligned to the northernmost rising of the moon in its 18.6-year cycle. Building that alignment required watching moonrise for a generation and recording it accurately enough to build on. The Newark works are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and for most of the twentieth century part of the Octagon was a golf course.

Hopewell burials contain obsidian from the Yellowstone region, copper from Lake Superior, mica from the southern Appalachians, silver from Ontario, shark teeth and whelk shells from the Gulf coast, and grizzly bear teeth from the Rockies. There were no wheels, no draft animals and no money. A hand cut from a sheet of mica in Ohio was made of stone that had travelled six hundred miles.

The Adena (about 1000 BC to AD 200) and the Hopewell (about 200 BC to AD 500) lived in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. They built earthworks — mounds, walls and enclosures made of earth. Americans have been measuring, drawing and digging into these earthworks since Thomas Jefferson, and the record they made explains who built them.

Who built the mounds?

European settlers moving into the Ohio Valley found tens of thousands of earthworks. Some were enormous and geometrically exact. Thomas Jefferson had already cut a trench through a burial mound near his home in Virginia. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) he recorded the layers of bones inside it, laid down at different times.

In 1848 Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis published Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, the first book of the new Smithsonian Institution. It contained careful survey drawings of the Ohio works. Thousands of mounds were ploughed flat in the nineteenth century, and for many of them these drawings are all that remain.

Through the nineteenth century some writers claimed the mounds had been raised by a vanished people from overseas. Cyrus Thomas and his teams surveyed thousands of mounds for the Smithsonian. In 1894 he published his report: the mounds had been built by the ancestors of the American Indians.

Newark and the moon

At Newark, Ohio, the earthworks enclose an area that could hold four Roman Colosseums. The Octagon there is lined up with the northernmost rising of the moon in its 18.6-year cycle. To build that alignment, people had to watch moonrise for a generation and record it accurately enough to build on. The Newark works are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. For most of the twentieth century, part of the Octagon was a golf course.

The Great Serpent Mound in Ohio is about 411 metres long, shaped like a snake with a coiled tail and an open mouth. Its head points toward the summer solstice sunset — the sunset on the longest day of the year.

Goods from far away

Hopewell burials contain obsidian (volcanic glass) from the Yellowstone region, copper from Lake Superior, mica from the southern Appalachians, silver from Ontario, shark teeth and whelk shells from the Gulf coast, and grizzly bear teeth from the Rockies. There were no wheels, no draft animals to pull loads, and no money. A hand cut from a sheet of mica in Ohio was made of stone that had travelled six hundred miles.

Hopewell copper was cold-hammered, not smelted. It was beaten into sheets and cut into earspools, panpipes and falcon figures without any furnace.

Not an empire

The Adena and Hopewell were not empires with one ruler. The names describe shared styles of burial, earthwork and craft across many communities.

Long ago, in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, people built great hills of earth called mounds. The Adena came first, and the Hopewell came after them. Many of their mounds are still standing today.

People in the village

• Mound builders dug earth and carried it, basket by basket, to raise mounds and long earth walls.
• Hunters and fishers brought home deer, other animals and fish from the rivers.
• Gardeners grew plants such as squash and sunflowers.
• Potters shaped clay into pots.
• Craftworkers hammered copper into thin sheets and cut shiny mica into shapes, such as a human hand.
• Traders passed along special things from far away: copper from Lake Superior, shells and shark teeth from the Gulf of Mexico, and black glassy obsidian from the Yellowstone region.
• Sky-watchers watched the moon and sun. At Newark, Ohio, one earthwork lines up with the moon at a special point in its long 18.6-year cycle.

Animals

• Snakes — the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio is shaped like a snake with a curled tail.
• Falcons — craftworkers cut falcon shapes out of copper.
• Grizzly bears — their teeth came all the way from the Rocky Mountains.
• Sharks — their teeth came from the Gulf coast.

Things they made

• Burial mounds — round hills of earth where people were buried with special objects.
• Earthworks — huge walls of earth in perfect circles, squares and even an eight-sided octagon.
• Great Serpent Mound — longer than four football fields. Its head points toward where the sun sets on the longest day of summer.
• Copper ear spools and panpipes — copper was hammered cold, without any furnace.
• Mica hands — cut from a clear, shiny stone that travelled about six hundred miles to Ohio.

Long afterwards, Thomas Jefferson dug a trench through a mound in Virginia and wrote down the layers he saw inside. People have been studying the mounds ever since.