Trade route
From about 100 BCE to 500 CE communities across eastern North America passed exotic materials along river routes. Lake Superior copper, Yellowstone obsidian, Gulf Coast shells and Appalachian mica reached the earthwork centres of southern Ohio, where craftsmen worked them into objects buried with the dead.
The Hopewell tradition, also called the Hopewell culture and Hopewellian exchange, describes a network of precontact Native American cultures that flourished in settlements along rivers in the northeastern and midwestern Eastern Woodlands from 100 BCE to 500 CE, in the Middle Woodland period. The Hopewell tradition was not a single culture or society but a widely dispersed set of populations connected by a common network of trade routes.
At its greatest extent, the Hopewell exchange system ran from the northern shores of Lake Ontario south to the Crystal River Indian Mounds in modern-day Florida. Within this area, societies exchanged goods and ideas, with the highest amount of activity along waterways, which were the main transportation routes. Peoples within the Hopewell exchange system received materials from all over the territory of what now comprises the mainland United States. Most of the items traded were exotic materials; they were delivered to peoples living in the major trading and manufacturing areas. These people converted raw materials into products and exported them through local and regional exchange networks. Hopewell communities traded finished goods, such as steatite platform pipes, far and wide; they have been found among grave goods in many burials outside the Midwest.
Although the origins of the Hopewell are still under discussion, the Hopewell culture can also be considered a cultural climax.
Hopewell populations originated in western New York and moved south into Ohio, where they built upon the local Adena mortuary tradition. Or, Hopewell was said to have originated in western Illinois and spread by diffusion... to southern Ohio. Similarly, the Havana Hopewell tradition was thought to have spread up the Illinois River and into southwestern Michigan, spawning Goodall Hopewell. (Dancey 114)
American archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead popularized the term Hopewell after his 1891 and 1892 explorations of the Hopewell Mound Group in Ross County, Ohio. The mound group was named after Mordecai Hopewell, whose family then owned the property where the earthworks are sited. What any of the various peoples now classified as Hopewellian called themselves is unknown; indeed, what language families they spoke is unknown. Archaeologists applied the term "Hopewell" to a broad range of cultures. Many Hopewell communities were temporary settlements of one to three households near rivers. They practiced a mixture of hunting, gathering, and horticulture.
The Hopewell inherited from their Adena forebears an incipient social stratification. This increased social stability and reinforced sedentism, specialized use of resources, and probably population growth. Hopewell societies cremated most of their deceased and reserved burial for only the most important people. In some sites, hunters apparently were given a higher status in the community: their graves were more elaborate and contained more status goods.
The Hopewellian peoples had leaders, but they did not command the kind of centralized power to order armies of slaves or soldiers. These cultures likely accorded certain families a special place of privilege. Some scholars suggest that these societies were marked by the emergence of "big-men", leaders whose influence depended on their skill at persuasion in important matters such as trade and religion. They also perhaps augmented their influence by cultivating reciprocal obligations with other important community members. The emergence of "big-men" was a step toward the development of these societies into highly structured and stratified chiefdoms.
The Hopewell settlements were linked by extensive and complex trading routes; these operated also as communication networks, and were a means to bring people together for important ceremonies.
Today, the best-surviving features of the Hopewell tradition era are earthwork mounds. Researchers have speculated about their purposes and debate continues. Great geometric earthworks are some of the most impressive Native American monuments throughout American prehistory, and were built by cultures following the Hopewell. Eastern Woodlands mounds typically have various geometric shapes and rise to impressive heights. Some of the gigantic sculpted earthworks, described as effigy mounds, were constructed in the shape of animals, birds, or writhing serpents.
Several scientists, including Bradley T. Lepper, hypothesize that the Octagon, in the Newark Earthworks at Newark, Ohio, was a lunar observatory. He believes that it is oriented to the 18.6-year cycle of minimum and maximum lunar risings and settings on the local horizon. The Octagon covers more than 50 acres (20 ha), the size of 100 football pitches. John Eddy completed an unpublished survey in 1978, and proposed a lunar major alignment for the Octagon. Ray Hively and Robert Horn of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, were the first researchers to analyze numerous lunar sightlines at the Newark Earthworks (1982) and the High Banks Works (1984) in Chillicothe, Ohio.
Christopher Turner noted that the Fairground Circle in Newark, Ohio aligns to the sunrise on May 4, i.e. that it marks the May cross-quarter sunrise. In 1983, Turner demonstrated that the Hopeton earthworks encode various sunrise and moonrise patterns, including the winter and summer solstices, the equinoxes, the cross-quarter days, the lunar maximum events, and the lunar minimum events, due to their precise straight and parallel lines.
William F. Romain has written a book on the subject of "astronomers, geometers, and magicians" at the earthworks.
Many of the mounds also contain various types of human burials, some containing precious grave goods such as ornaments of copper, mica and obsidian imported from hundreds of miles away. Stone and ceramics were also fashioned into intricate shapes.
The Hopewell created some of the finest craftwork and artwork of the Americas. Most of their works had some religious significance, and their graves were filled with necklaces, ornate carvings made from bone or wood, decorated ceremonial pottery, ear covers, and pendants. Some graves were lined with woven mats, mica (a mineral consisting of thin glassy sheets), or stones. The Hopewell produced artwork in a greater variety and with more exotic materials than their predecessors the Adena. Grizzly bear teeth, fresh water pearls, sea shells, sharks' teeth, copper, and small quantities of silver were crafted as elegant pieces. The Hopewell artisans were expert carvers of pipestone, and many of the mortuary mounds are full of exquisitely carved statues and pipes.
Excavation of the Mound of Pipes at Mound City found more than 200 stone smoking pipes; these depicted animals and birds in well-realized three-dimensional form. More than 130 such artifacts were excavated from the Tremper site in Scioto County. Some artwork was made from carved human bones. A rare mask found at Mound City was created using a human skull as a face plate. Hopewell artists created both abstract and realistic portrayals of the human form. One tubular pipe is so accurate in form that the model was identified by researchers as an achondroplastic (chondrodystropic) dwarf. Many other figurines are highly detailed in dress, ornamentation, and hairstyles. An example of the abstract human forms is the "Mica Hand" from the Hopewell Site in Ross County, Ohio. Delicately cut from a piece of mica 11 in × 6 in (280 mm × 150 mm), the hand carving was likely worn or carried for public viewing. They also made beaded work.
In addition to the noted Ohio Hopewell, a number of other Middle Woodland period cultures are known to have been involved in the Hopewell tradition and participated in the Hopewell exchange network.
The Armstrong culture was a Hopewell group in the Big Sandy River Valley of northeastern Kentucky and western West Virginia from 1 to 500 CE. They are thought to have been a regional variant of the Hopewell tradition or a Hopewell-influenced Middle Woodland group who had peacefully mingled with the local Adena peoples. Archaeologist Edward McMichael characterized them as an intrusive Hopewell-like trade culture or a vanguard of Hopewellian tradition that had probably peacefully absorbed the local Adena in the Kanawha River Valley. Their culture and very Late Adena (46PU2) is thought to have slowly evolved into the later Buck Garden people.
The Copena culture was a Hopewellian culture in northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, as well as in other sections of the surrounding region including Kentucky. Researchers developed the Copena name based on the first three letters of copper and the last three letters of the mineral galena, as copper and galena artifacts have often been found with Copena burials.
During the Middle Woodland period, the Crab Orchard culture population increased from a dispersed and sparsely settled Early Woodland pattern to one consisting of small and large base camps. These were concentrated on terrace and floodplain landforms associated with the Ohio River channel in southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and northwestern and western Kentucky. In the far western limits of Crab Orchard culture is the O'byams Fort site. This large earthwork, shaped like a tuning fork, is reminiscent of Ohio Hopewell enclosures. Examples of a type of pottery decoration found at the Mann site are also known from Hopewell sites in Ohio (such as Seip earthworks, Rockhold, Harness, and Turner), as well as from Southeastern sites with Hopewellian assemblages, such as the Miner's Creek site, Leake Mounds, 9HY98, and Mandeville site in Georgia, and the Yearwood site in southern Tennessee.
The Goodall focus culture occupied Michigan and northern Indiana from around 200 BCE to 500 CE. The Goodall pattern stretched from the southern tip of Lake Michigan, east across northern Indiana, to the Ohio border, then northward, covering central Michigan, almost reaching to Saginaw Bay on the east and Grand Traverse Bay to the north. The culture is named for the Goodall site in northwest Indiana.
The Havana Hopewell culture was a Hopewellian people in the Illinois and Mississippi river valleys in Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. They are considered ancestral to the groups who eventually formed the Mississippian culture that built Cahokia (in present-day southwestern Illinois) and influenced the hinterlands of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, including into the Appalachian Mountains.
The Toolesboro site is a group of seven burial mounds on a bluff overlooking the Iowa River near its confluence with the Mississippi River. The conical mounds were constructed between 100 BCE and 200 CE. At one time, as many as 12 mounds may have existed. Mound 2, the largest remaining, measures 100 ft (30 m) in diameter and 8 ft (2.4 m) in height. This mound was possibly the largest Hopewell mound in Iowa.
At the western edge of the Hopewell interaction sphere is the Kansas City Hopewell. The Renner Village archeological site in Riverside, Missouri, is one of several sites near the junction of Line Creek and the Missouri River. The site contains Hopewell and succeeding Middle Mississippian remains. The Trowbridge archeological site near Kansas City is close to the western limit of the Hopewell. "Hopewell-style" pottery and stone tools, typical of the Illinois and Ohio River valleys, are abundant at the Trowbridge site. Decorated Hopewell-style pottery rarely appears further west.
The Cloverdale site is situated at the mouth of a small valley that opens into the Missouri River Valley, near present-day Saint Joseph, Missouri. It is a multi-component site with evidence of Kansas City Hopewell (around 100 to 500 CE) and Steed-Kisker (around 1200 CE) occupation.
The Laurel complex was a Native American culture in what is now southern Quebec, southern and northwestern Ontario, and east-central Manitoba in Canada; and northern Michigan, northwestern Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota in the United States. They were the first pottery-using people of Ontario north of the Trent-Severn Waterway. The complex is named after the former unincorporated community of Laurel, Minnesota.
The Marksville culture was a Hopewellian culture in the Lower Mississippi valley, Yazoo valley, and Tensas valley areas of present-day Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Arkansas. It evolved into the Baytown culture and later the Coles Creek and Plum Bayou cultures. It is named for the Marksville Prehistoric Indian Site in Marksville, Louisiana.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Hopewell tradition”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.