Hopewell Culture Administrative History

CHAPTER ONE
A Brief History of the Hopewell Culture (continued)

Modern American Archeology and Hopewell Culture

Archeology began moving from an antiquarian footing to a professional discipline in the late nineteenth century. The discipline eagerly embraced Darwinian evolution. In the U.S., Moundbuilder studies were eclipsed by the impressive Southwestern ruins. Denied a glorious prehistoric past, American enthusiasm waned with the perception that innately primitive and therefore inferior native peoples had not advanced beyond the Stone Age and were culturally static. [17] Reflecting other professional organizations, the Archaeological Institute of America, founded in 1879, had an obligatory North American bent on the Southwest and Mexico, but devoted considerable fiscal resources on ancient civilizations, particularly in Greece. Eastern North America was treated like a backwater. [18] U.S. archeology embraced this practice, domestically concentrating on the Southwest, and regarded the East like a neglected stepchild, a trend that continued through much of the twentieth century. [19]

Figure 8: Capt. Mordecai C. Hopewell. (Collection of the Ross County Historical Society)

With the myth of the Moundbuilders solved, at least in the minds of archeologists and scientists, new nomenclature became necessary. Modern archeology adopted the name "Hopewell" when a rich lode of artifacts Warren K. Moorehead excavated from twenty-eight mounds on Capt. Mordecai C. Hopewell's farm near Chillicothe were prepared for Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Because the anthropology exhibit focused on the Hopewell farm artifacts, related earthworks and their cultural materials were referred to as Hopewellian beginning in 1902. In that year, the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society's (OSA&HA) William C. Mills first made distinctions between Adena, Hopewell and Fort Ancient, and applied the term "culture" to each. [20]

In the aftermath of Mills's work, U.S. archeology embraced a culture-historical ideology following 1910 as more practitioners entered the field and shared professional methods and values. Data revealed temporal changes, particularly with increasing Paleo-Indian discoveries and the reality that native peoples had inhabited North America far longer than previously believed. Prehistorical cultural groups were defined in geographical terms. [21]

Professional archeological societies and organizations became widespread in the early twentieth century, sponsoring fieldwork and publications on archeological materials and problems within state boundaries. Ohio possessed the best of these early state archeological histories. The nation's university programs also mushroomed so that by 1935, twenty-one such institutions supported research in eastern U.S. archeology. [22] American archeology was in transition from a speculative-descriptive period to one stressing classification-chronology. Archeologists concentrated on stratigraphy, seriation, and typologies as well as culture classifications. [23] Still hampering archeologists was the belief that earthworks represented the only historically recorded attainment of past societies. They remained pessimistic with the assumption that understanding of earlier eras could only be through written records or credible oral tradition. This erroneous assumption would only be shed in the mid-twentieth century as archeology matured. [24]

Among other significant excavations the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society (OHS), founded in 1885, undertook investigations at Mound City Group from 1920 to 1921. William C. Mills, assisted by Henry C. Shetrone, announced at the end of the first field season five important findings: The mounds represented communal burial places of the Hopewell; the "altars" described by Squier and Davis were not for sacrifices, but rather for cremations; the Hopewell migrated southward along the Scioto to the Tremper Mound area around Portsmouth, Ohio; the Hopewell had progressed from individualism to communalism; and the culture traded with Indians from the Carolinas and Lake Superior region. The archeologists found examples of ancient riveting and dowel pins amid a wealth of ornaments fashioned from stone or copper among which were an otter with a fish in its mouth, a bared-teeth bear, a raccoon digging in the ground, a heron eating a fish, a baying dog, frogs, and toads. Other copper items included headdresses of deer and bear, large ornamental plates, hands, turtles, beads, ear ornaments, pendants, and arrow points. Also found were large plates of mica used for mirrors, woven cloth and mats made from bark, engraved discs of mastodon tusks, obsidian spears and knives, and pipes. [25]

Another field season came in 1921. Mills and Shetrone saw their work as a valuable addition to archeology and the Mound City Group as the best example of Hopewell culture in Ohio. Mills published the findings and an impressive array of artifacts were displayed in the society's museum in Columbus. [26] Fourteen of the twenty-four mounds recounted by Squier and Davis were examined using modern archeological techniques. The effort reignited public interest in Hopewellian studies and launched a drive to preserve its remnants.

Ohio archeologists explored other Hopewell sites during the 1920s, but with economic hardship in the 1930s, Hopewellian studies slowed to a snail's pace. Unlike other states, Ohio failed to take advantage of federal relief programs to fund archeology projects, a decision that further paralyzed Ohio Hopewellian studies during and after the Great Depression. Much of the data collected by OSA&HS proved to be "disorganized and defective.... In method, theory, and scope of research [Ohio Hopewellian study] stagnated." [27] Only one publication of note appeared during World War II, and the long hiatus progressed through the 1950s. Quite the opposite was the case in Illinois, where Hopewellian study flourished and resulted in a classification of pottery that included forty types. [28]

Discovery of a sealed stratum at Folsom, New Mexico, in 1926, resulted in building a chronology of early North American human existence, but the exact placement of prehistoric peoples like the Hopewell remained in dispute. [29] Part of the problem was the lack of temporal data to understand how the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian cultural complexes fit. At the Midwestern Archaeological Conference held in Indianapolis in 1935, temporally independent taxonomic categories were assigned to Hopewellian artifacts. By 1939, the categories were officially referred to as the "Midwestern Taxonomic Method" or the "McKernian Classification." A conference at Andover Academy in 1941 evaluated the interface between Adena and Hopewell. Material from both conferences resulted in regional sequences found in the 1952 volume, Archeology of Eastern United States, edited by James Griffin. [30] By examining ethnological and archeological evidence in concert, it became apparent that the cultures overlapped. [31]

On the eve of World War II, most archeologists held that the Hopewell dated from A.D. 1200 to 1400, and by 1949, some thought the dates could stretch from A.D. 500 to 800 or 900. [32] In 1950, chemist W. F. Libbey developed absolute dating from organic material containing carbon, giving archeology the powerful new method of radiocarbon dating. For archeology, radiocarbon and other geochronometric techniques allowed application of a universally accepted chronology that permitted the duration as well as relative order of subsurface archeological materials. [33] Most importantly, the new scientific tool began to energize the field as radiocarbon dating for the Ohio Hopewell finally categorized the culture at roughly 1500 to 2000 years ago. [34]

In reaction to the seemingly mindless classifications and obsession with culture history, archeologists Gordon R. Willey and Philip Phillips, in their 1958 monograph Methods and Theory in American Archaeology, proposed a three-pronged approach to research: observation/fieldwork, description, and explanation (or processual interpretation). Among others, their argument helped spawn in the 1960s a fundamental shift of the discipline led by younger archeologists, including Lewis Binford, away from culture history to science-based archeology. Hopewellian studies also reflected the larger discipline's shift to the "New Archeology." [35] Basing research on the scientific method, archeologists no longer focused exclusively on classificatory exercises, making the Midwest Taxonomic System seem suddenly archaic and obsolete. Instead, a whole new world of empirical data from other science-based disciplines became available for scrutiny and use.

At the onset of this intellectual debate, Olaf H. Prufer reluctantly undertook a Hopewellian topic for his doctoral dissertation during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In seeking professional courtesies from the Ohio Historical Society, Prufer's initial inquiry met an icy rebuke. The German-born, Harvard-educated scholar, an unwelcome interloper, had encountered the exclusive "Ohio gang" of archeologists. Nonetheless, by examining both the body of literature and museum collections, Prufer produced a reevaluation or new synthesis of the Ohio Hopewell that shattered the subdiscipline's professional complacency and lethargy. [36]

Prufer offered different views on several topics. While preferring "Hopewell Complex" to "Hopewell Culture," Prufer said the evidence suggested that the Hopewell originated in Illinois and spread through southern Indiana to Ohio where it "found its purest expression and its most intense apotheosis." [37] Prufer concurred with cultural chronologies based on seriation of artifacts, principally pottery, and confirmed by radiocarbon dating. Evidence also suggested an overlap of Adena and Hopewell cultures, and Prufer offered his own chronological ordering of Hopewellian sites, with defensive hilltop enclosures appearing in the Late Hopewell period during its terminal phase. [38] Prufer likened the classic Mesoamerican settlement pattern to the Hopewell, i.e., vacant ceremonial centers with shifting semi-permanent small settlements on the periphery, and speculated on contact between the two cultures. [39] Concurring with Prufer regarding Southwestern contact, anthropologist Edward McMichael postulated in 1961 that this Mexican diffusion originated in Veracruz and stimulated Hopewellian lifeways through the Crystal River Complex on Florida's Gulf Coast. [40]

It was through study of the well-known Hopewell trade network that archeologist Joseph Caldwell developed the concept of interaction spheres in the early 1960s. The innovative concept had universal application throughout the discipline. Interaction spheres exist when independent societies, or peer polities, exchange material products as well as information in the form of symbols, ideas, values, inventions, and goals. Within Ohio Hopewell society, the far ranging interaction sphere created an overall semblance of cultural unity while enveloping other societies and cultures within its mortuary-ceremonial or religious beliefs. [41]

Invigorated by the New Archeology, a revival of Hopewellian scholarship took place in the 1970s, culminating with the 1979 monograph, Hopewell Archaeology: The Chillicothe Conference, edited by David Brose and N'omi Greber. Fifty-four submissions covered the gambit of Ohio prehistory, including trade, domesticated plants, and settlement patterns. The conference and its regionally diverse submissions demonstrated that this branch of archeology was no longer moribund. [42]

Within Hopewellian studies, few archeologists avoided the so-called "maize debate" that emerged in the post-World War II era concerning the role of maize in the Eastern Woodlands. With the introduction of stable carbon isotope analysis in the late twentieth century, determining maize content in the prehistoric diet became possible. Such data suggested that limited maize consumption became a pattern only after A.D. 900-1000. Using the accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) to refine the radiocarbon age of maize kernels, coprolites, and archeobotanical sequences, maize did find itself in eastern North America as early as A.D. 200-300, during the Hopewell culture, but only as a minor crop. However, Bruce Smith argued that these premaize so-called hunter-gatherer people were limited agriculturalists who cultivated, stored, and processed a variety of other crops. Smith argued that archeobotanical assemblages dating from the time of Christ demonstrated the significance of seed crops for Middle Woodland/Hopewellian people. [43] Other scholars continued to disagree, asserting that hunting-gathering-fishing intensified, with small-scale horticulture augmenting that primary subsistence activity only in the late Middle Woodland. The Hopewell were thinly dispersed and seasonally mobile, and in no way tied to the land other than with their mortuary-ceremonial complexes. [44]

Papers presented at a 1992 symposium entitled "Testing the Prufer Model of Ohio Hopewell Settlement Pattern," resulted in a 1995 monograph edited by William S. Dancey and Paul J. Pacheco called Ohio Hopewell Community Organization. Presenters found that few archeologists had tested Prufer's contention concerning Hopewell habitation sites, and it became their goal to do just that. [45] The editors concurred that existing data supported the "Prufer model," but more fieldwork could yield as many as four alternate hypotheses, namely:

1. Communities are nucleated and the major settlements are villages located adjacent to the earthworks (Nucleated Sedentary).

2. Communities inhabit nucleated settlements adjacent to earthworks for part of the year but disperse seasonally to outlying camps (Semi-permanent Sedentary).

3. Communities are residentially stable, but high-ranking households (chiefdoms?) reside in the shadows of the earthworks (Central Place).

4. The households making up a community are seasonally mobile throughout the year (Seasonal Mobility). [46]

Using microwear analysis to test artifacts found in close proximity to the Newark Earthworks, Bradley Lepper and Richard Yerkes cast doubt on Prufer's hypothesis of uninhabited ceremonial centers because of the immediate presence of seasonally occupied camps. [47] Other site evidence supported their position. [48] Archeologist James B. Griffin determined that the notion of dispersed hamlets was overdrawn, and the incidents of residential debris near the earthworks could not be ignored. Griffin concluded that Ohio Hopewell settlement systems "included permanent settlements, perhaps of great size, near the Hopewell centers." [49]

Following up on the 1979 Chillicothe conference, a similar effort came in 1993, which three years later resulted in an edited book by Paul Pacheco called A View from the Core: A Synthesis of Ohio Hopewell Archaeology. True to its subtitle, it represented the most comprehensive overview of the Ohio Hopewell/Middle Woodland period. [50] While it provided new information supporting and opposing Prufer's settlement model, one of the more unusual papers examined geometric or mathematical distinctions of Ohio's earthworks. James A. Marshall, an Illinois civil engineer with an avid interest in prehistoric geometry, surveyed and analyzed Hopewell earthworks through the Midwest. He called them the "closest to a written record of a prehistoric people yet discovered north of the Rio Grande." These sophisticated people did not construct the mounds at random. Rather, Marshall established that planning and a precise knowledge of geometric principles were used along with a standard measuring unit. The mounds appear to have been built in an orderly alignment. [51]

As contemporary knowledge about the Hopewell continues to grow, the need to locate and examine habitation sites becomes more apparent. Until the late twentieth century, most work accomplished concentrated on burial sites. However, enough is known to categorize the Hopewell as the pinnacle of all mound-building cultures, and the most advanced of any north of Mexico. Robert Silverberg in The Mound Builders described the Hopewells as the "Egyptians of the United States, packing their earthen 'pyramids' with a dazzling array." Silverberg further observed,

There is a stunning vigor about Ohio Hopewell. By comparison, the grave deposits of the Adena folk look sparse and poor. Hopewell displays a love of excess that shows itself not only in the intricate geometrical enclosures and in the massive mounds, but in the gaudy displays in the tombs. To wrap a corpse from head to foot in pearls, to weigh it down in many pounds of copper, to surround it with masterpieces of sculpture and pottery, and then to bury everything under tons of earth--that is the kind of wastefulness that only an amazingly energetic culture would indulge in. [52]

In moving from myth to scientific study over the course of two centuries, Hopewellian studies have contributed to and benefitted from the maturation of American archeology. This remains true as the larger discipline experiences its current post-processualism phase, maintaining its feet in science, but also revisiting culture history. [53] Like most research, conclusions presented herein are still undergoing scrutiny as many more secrets of the Hopewell culture remain to be uncovered.

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