Hopewell Culture
The Hopewell Culture refers to a significant prehistoric tradition that thrived in eastern North America from approximately 200 B.C.E. to 700 C.E. This cultural phenomenon is characterized by complex village societies and a network known as the Hopewell Interaction Sphere, which facilitated extensive trade in a wide variety of exotic materials across a vast geographical area. Centered in the Scioto Valley of southern Ohio, Hopewell sites feature prominent burial mounds and monumental earthworks, with the Mound City and Newark sites being among the most notable.
Artifacts uncovered from these sites illustrate a rich material culture, including elaborate burial goods made from copper, mica, and obsidian, as well as intricately carved stone pipes and ceramic vessels. The Hopewell peoples practiced a mixed subsistence strategy, relying on wild resources and some horticulture, with maize cultivation becoming more prominent later. Although the Hopewell tradition displayed remarkable complexity, it was not a unified society but rather a network of diverse communities sharing common cultural traits. The decline of Hopewell culture around 400 C.E. is still not fully understood, but factors like agricultural competition and intercommunity conflicts may have played a role. In 2023, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, reflecting their outstanding cultural significance.
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Hopewell Culture
The Hopewell cultural tradition is associated with a major florescence of complex village societies in the eastern portion of North America between 200 B.C.E. and 700 C.E.
CATEGORY: Prehistoric tradition
DATE: 200 B.C.E.-700 C.E.
LOCATION: Eastern United States
CULTURE AFFECTED: Hopewell
The cultural system that connected societies of the Hopewell tradition is known as the Hopewell Interaction Sphere. Centered at sites in the Scioto Valley of southern Ohio, this network was marked by trade in a wide variety of exotic raw materials used in the manufacture of special craft items. These included goods such as copper from sources in Michigan and Georgia, obsidian and grizzly bear teeth from Wyoming, fine-grained stone from Minnesota and North Dakota, marine shell and shark teeth from the Gulf of Mexico, silver from Ontario, mica and quartz crystals from the southern Appalachians, and galena from Illinois and Wisconsin.
Among the most characteristic features of Hopewell sites are burial mounds and monumental earthworks. The Hopewell site near Chillicothe, Ohio, for which the tradition is named, covered an area of 110 acres and had thirty-eight burial mounds. The largest of these was 33 feet high and 500 feet long, and it contained the burials of more than 250 individuals. One of these wore an elaborate headdress of wooden deer antlers sheathed in copper. Another was buried with a copper axe weighing 38 pounds. The central portion of this site was surrounded by a ditch and low embankment. Mound City, Ohio, has at least twenty-eight burial mounds, also within an earthwork enclosure. Elite burials here were lined with massive quantities of mica. At Newark, Ohio, the state’s most extensive complex of geometric earthworks includes a circle, an octagon, and other features that have been preserved as part of a municipal golf course.
Burials in Hopewell mounds have been found to contain a wide variety of exotic artifacts. Heavy breastplates, ear spools, beads, animal cutouts, and musical instruments were made from hammered copper sheets, often decorated with embossed designs. Lumps of native copper were worked into celts, axes, adzes, and punches. Thick sheets of translucent mica were cut into the shapes of human heads and hands, bird talons, snakes, and swastikas. Obsidian and fine chert were flaked into beautiful ceremonial knives, some measuring 18 inches long. Crystals of quartz and galena were used for pendants or included in medicine bags. Among the most spectacular manufactured items, also widely traded, were carved stone platform pipes bearing appealing carvings of birds, bears, beavers, frogs, felines, and humans. Ceramic technology flourished, with a wide variety of vessel shapes decorated primarily through plastic manipulation of the surface.
Sites of the Hopewell tradition have been found over a wide geographical region, ranging from the Great Lakes in the north to the lower Mississippi Valley and the central Gulf Coast. To the east, they are known from West Virginia and western Pennsylvania, while their westernmost extent is in the vicinity of Kansas City, Missouri.
Despite its apparent complexity, Hopewell culture appears to have been based on the intensive exploitation of wild resources of woodland regions, supplemented by some cultivation of sunflowers, squash, and marsh elder. Maize was probably cultivated later by Hopewell peoples, but it remained a minor part of the diet until later periods.
The Hopewell tradition does not represent a single society, but rather a broad phenomenon characterized by extensive networks for the exchange of raw materials and worked goods, the sharing of common notions about artifact manufacture and decoration, the use of mounds for burial grounds, and the emergence of social differentiation as indicated by fine craft objects and individual variation in the quality of grave goods. The apparent decline of the Hopewell tradition after 400 C.E. remains poorly understood, although it has been linked to the consequences of increased competition for farmland as maize became a more important component of the diet. These consequences included a higher frequency of intercommunity conflicts, which may have led to the disruption of existing networks for the exchange of raw materials and ideas.
In 2023, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks were designated a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site. World Heritage sites are cultural or natural sites deemed to have "outstanding universal value" to humankind. The site encompasses earthworks found in Chillicothe, Mound City, Hopeton, Newark, and Oregonia, among other locations in southern Ohio. It was the twenty-fifth UNESCO World Heritage listing in the US. At that time, an earthsworks location in Newark was owned and maintained by the Moundbuilders Country Club, which also maintained a golf course alongside the mounds. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the Ohio History Connection could reclaim the lease for the site from the country club in order to turn the location into a public park; by May 2024, an agreement about how much the site was valued had not been reached.
Bibliography
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