Backstory: The Mound Builders

This is a story that ran in our February 1983 issue. Small updates to align with AP style and to correct errors in the original story have been made to this version of the article 

The Canadians were, after all, enthusiasts. A mixed group of professionals and keen amateurs, they were undeterred by the long ride from London, Ontario, to Chillicothe, Ohio. It would be worth it to see classic Hopewell [mounds]. Last October, their bus rolled past the neighboring state prison and swung into the parking lot of Mound City National Monument. Forty-three members of the Ontario Archaeological Society-London Chapter climbed down to explore a very rare sight in New World archaeology — a big piece of prehistoric America above ground. 

North America was not blank before Europeans “found” it and the human record goes back tens of thousands of years. Reading it is usually an unglamorous business of grubbing around in apparently ordinary fields and woods, sieving dirt in hopes of recovering fragments of the past. The Ontario society members had seen their share of muddy digs, but Mound City offered them a ready spectacle, a large grass-covered compound that had been a great necropolis for a people known to archaeologists as the Hopewell but to many Ohioans as, simply, the Mound Builders. 

The Hopewell flourished in the heartland of North America for 600 years, spreading their influence as far north as Ontario, where the Canadian archaeologists knew it from local excavations. The great Hopewell home territory had been the Ohio Valley and its tributaries. Here on the floodplain and the hills around Chillicothe was the summit of the distinctive Hopewell culture and way of death. 

“Hopewell is so visual,” explains Paul Lennox, one of the organizers of the four-day tour. “We get some offshoots of hopewell up in Ontario, but it’s nice to see it in Ohio in its classic form.” It was also nice to see it without digging.

“But I would imagine that people down there,” Lennox says, ”would stop to see one or two mounds and think they’re all the same. They’re not. Every one is different.” 

Most Ohioans probably don’t think about their state’s prehistoric burial mounds at all. Yet the mounds loomed large in the minds of our forefathers. It is hard today to imagine the passions the Mound Builders first excited in them or how the identify of a prehistoric people could raise an unspeakable challenge to the legitimacy of American settlement. From the moments of their ”discovery,” the mounds were a dilemma and a delight to the newcomers. 

The mounds were thickly covered by a thousand years of forest, but were an unmistakable sign that a ”high” civilization had once existed in what the settlers had regarded as virgin territory. The delight was in finding a usable past. Until the discovery of the mounds, North America was sadly deficient in romantic ruins. The cliff dwellers of the Southwest were still unknown and the Aztecs were too far south. Suddenly, the Ohio Valley offered up suitable subjects for poetic rapture and historical speculation. 

The dilemma was the connection between the extinct Mound Builders and the living Indians who were occupying the coveted Ohio territory. the American “right” of settlement was grounded in the belief that the Indians were a “savage” race who had to give way before white civilization. If long ago the “savage” Miami, Shawnee and Wyandot had moved into Ohio and destroyed “civilized” Mound Builders, then the whites were merely evening the score. But if the living Indians were the backward but legitimate racial descendants of a once grand civilization, then the Indian race could no longer be written off as inherently savage. The very notion was nearly unthinkable, so many early men of “science” simply divorced the living Indians from the vanished Mound Builders. The mounds, they declared, were the work of a lost race — Vikings, Phoenicians, the Lord Himself — anyone but Indians. 

Self-appointed experts ransacked the Old Testament for evidence of the Mound Builders’ true identity. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel were prime candidates. “They wrote vociferously about the Hebrew migration to the Americas,” says author Robert Silverberg, “giving the dates of arrival, the routes taken by specific tribes and the mounds erected by each. The fantasies grew more detailed with each retelling and their authors, generally rural clergyman, won transient but dazzling fame.”

One of these was the Rev. Landen West of Pleasant Hill, Ohio, who decided that the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County represented nothing less than the site of the Garden of Eden and that the gigantic effigy was raised by the hand of God to mark the spot where Eve succumbed to the snake’s temptation.

While the clergy was seeking their origins in scripture, thousands of mounds and earthworks in the Ohio Valley and its tributaries were being rapidly destroyed. Farmers plowed them under. Treasure hunters looted them. City builders pulled them down to make way for streets. In a few towns, such as Marietta, the ancient earthworks were set aside by the first colonists. In most towns, they were not. The only vestiges today in many Ohio towns are the Mound Streets without mounds.

The picture was not totally bleak. The myth spinners helped fan an insatiable public curiosity about the Mound Builders that gave more scientific investigators a wide audience. The first comprehensive study of the mounds was the work of Ephram Squier and Edwin Davis, a Chillicothe newspaper editor and physician, respectively, who personally surveyed hundreds of mounds and drew on the reports of others for their massive Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley in 1848. Later experts quarreled with the accuracy of some of their surveying, yet Ancient Monuments put that Ohio Mound Builders on the map of international scientific interest. Today dozens of destroyed mound sites in Ohio are known only from Squier and Davis. 

Modern scientific archaeology gradually undermined the “lost race” myth. In dozens of dry, academic excavation reports, the archaeologists documented the many links between the prehistoric and historic Indians. By the turn of the century, it was clear that the Mound Builders were most definitely Indian. By then their hapless descendants had long been expelled from Ohio. 

Archaeologists also began to see variations in the ways of the ancient Mound Builders, the variations that could only be explained by two separate mound-building peoples.

Today we call the Ohio Mound Builders Hopewell and Adena, names of our choosing because the names they called themselves are forever lost. Whatever clues archaeologists may tease out in the future, they will never retrieve the names. To name the Mound Builders, archaeologists followed the tradition of labeling a prehistoric people by the excavation site where their culture was first defined. For the Hopewell that was the farm near Chillicothe of Captain M.C. Hopewell. For the Adena it was the Chillicothe estate of Thomas Worthington, an early Ohio governor, who chose an ancient Greek work for his home.

While scientific knowledge of the Mound Builders has grown, reverence for their sites has not. Highways, factories and housing still gobble them up. Yet, out of of destruction, archaeologists have salvaged much of our knowledge about the workings of the mound-building cultures. 

During World War I, the Army built the sprawling Camp Sherman basic-training base near Chillicothe directly on top of one of the most elaborate of all Hopewell cemetery complexes. Archaeologists from the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society descended after the Armistice on the absolute Camp Sherman to study what was left. It is a tribute to the Hopewell that even the U.S. Army could not obliterate their great work completely. While many of the mounds were badly damaged, the archaeologists were able to scrape down to what had been the surface in Hopewell times and, in posthole patterns, human remains and ashes, read the record. The reconstructed mounds and enclosure became the federal Mound City National Monument in 1923. 

The mounds marked the locations of temporary charnel houses. With great ceremony, the bodies of the Hopewell elite had been carefully dismembered inside, cremated and then laid out with lavish grave goods, skillfully wrought from exotic raw materials. The Hopewell were intrepid traders who brought mica from the Carolinas, grizzly-bear canine teeth from the Rockies, turtle shells from the Gulf Coasts, copper from Lake Superior and obsidian from the Yellowstone region. Their most revered leaders were buried in the flesh with even more sumptuous decoration. After a number of internments, the charnel house was removed and a massive mound raised over honored dead. 

The Ohio Hopewell thought big. Besides mounds, they also built immense geometric earthen enclosures — great circles and squares sometimes joined by wide, graded pathways. The original earthworks at Newark, for example, covered nearly 4 square miles. The sheer volume of treasure extracted from Hopewell burials is incredible. Intricately carved effigy pipes, mica cutouts, pearl necklaces and even scraps of boldly printed textiles are hoarded in museums and private collections around the world.

The Hopewell obsession with a well-stocked afterlife led Robert Silverberg to call them, “the Egyptians of the United States, packing their earthen ‘pyramids’  with a dazzling array.” He wrote, ”There is a stunning vigor about Ohio Hopewell, a flamboyant fondness for excess, that manifests itself not only in the intricate geometrical enclosures and the massive mounds but in these gaudy displays of conspicuous consumption. To envelop a corpse from head to foot in pearls, to weight 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 — this betokens a kind of cultural energy that numbs and awes those who follow after.”

Hopewell reached its “classic” form in Ohio, but their influence spread across the heartland of prehistoric America. Traces of the Hopewell way of death have been found in sites as far east as New York State, as far south as Florida, as far west as Missouri and as far north as Ontario. Their reach has led some modern archaeologists to question whether Hopewell was really a tribe or even a culture. They talk of a “Hopewellian interaction sphere” as a more accurate description of their vast religious and trading network emanating from southern Ohio. 

The Adena, on the other hand, were a more modest but more ancient people. The Adena came on the Ohio scene around 800 B.C. at a time when minor Pharoahs ruled in Egypt and Homer was first singing tales of the Trojan War. The Hopewell did not emerge for another 700 years. The early Hopewell probably borrowed some Adena crafts and burial customs much as ancient Rome had its cultural underpinnings from ancient Greece. This is a hotly contested view in modern archaeology, but groups practicing the orthodox Adena tradition undoubtedly coexisted with the flamboyant Hopewell right through their great age. Hopewell abruptly ended around 500 A.D. The Adena persisted in isolated bands 200 years longer. 

The Adena were the first Ohio Mound Builders, but their most renowned creation has yet been found to contain a single bone. The Great Serpent Mound is the largest effigy of its kind in the world, 1,254 feet long and still 4 feet high after centuries atop a bluff in Adams County. The Great Serpent is “conjecturally” identified as Adena because it contains no cultural artifacts that can be typed. However, nearby mounds are clearly Adena. 

Because of its isolated location, the Serpent was not widely known until late in the 19th century. When professor F.W. Putnam of Harvard’s Peabody Museum visited it in the summer of 1883, it was still a tranquil location with the serpent’s coils winding through uncleared woods. The land was owned by farmer John J. Lovett, who let it be. When Putnam returned in 1886, the road was rutted by visitors. The mound, badly cut up by pot hunters and grazing cattle, was eroding. Lovett said he wanted out and Putnam hastily bought a year’s option.

He returned home to appeal for rescue funds. In the Boston Sunday Herald, Putnam wrote, “To me it seems a greater loss than would be the destruction of our own monument on Bunker Hill, and yet what indignation would be aroused should some dynamite fiend topple that to the ground!” A group of wealthy Boston matrons put up $5,880. In June 1887, the Great Serpent Mound became the property of Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts. Ohio pride finally asserted itself and in 1900 the Great Serpent Mound was deeded the Ohio Historical Society, which has managed it ever since. 

In our time, the mounds have lost much of their glamor. The fantasies that thrilled our ancestors, such as the tribes of Israel being transported to the New World in Phoenician galleys, have all been exposed. Modern research into the Mound Builders studies such arcane subjects as cultural interaction spheres, bone pathology and similarities of pottery types. Today’s digging is mostly away from the ceremonial mounds. Archaeologists now concentrate on domestic sites, looking for traces of the highly perishable materials of daily Hopewell and Adena home life.

For the average Ohioan, the mounds have receded into the landscape. The Ohio Historical Society and the National Parks Service try to bring them into focus again with interpretive museums at major sites, but after seeing a few carefully mowed and managed mounds, the public tends to think they are all there same.

There is one site that offers visitors a whiff of the early mystery, largely because it is so hard to comprehend quickly. Fort Hill is a hilltop enclosure “fort” under the care of the Ohio Historical Society in Highland County. A steep hiking trail takes the visitor up the heavily wooded slope where the Hopewell piled dirt and rocks 50 feet deep in places to raise a rampart around the summit. Fort Hill is “conjecturally” Hopewell as it contains no burials, living sites nor any evidence that it was used as a fortress. Recent excavations in the bottomland in the south turned up the remains of a large ceremonial arbor and a “factory” of Hopewell ritual goods. Archaeologists now think the arbor was a preparation base for ceremonies on the hill. That too is conjecture. 

Compared to other well-groomed and level Hopewell sites, Fort Hill is half lost in the forest. Only when you walk along the rampart, which is over a mile and a half around, can you start to imagine the effort that went into its making. Thousands of baskets were lugged up the slope by the Hopewell, an epic labor animated and directed by a cult or culture that is still at the every limits of our understanding.

You can sit in the momentary quiet, listening to the wind through the trees and imagine this as the pioneers first found it. You can think of Squier and Davis running their survey lines through these woods. Point by point, a massive monument emerged, an earthwork of such size and permanence that it could survive a thousands years to put us in our place as only the latest, not the last, people to shape Ohio.

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