Middle Woodland and the Hopewell (2200-1600 B.P.)

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Middle Woodland and the Hopewell (2200-1600 B.P.)

• Traits
• Artifacts
• Sites

2
Timeline
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Middle Woodland

• The middle period or stage of the Woodland
  tradition in eastern North America.
• Many trends that began thousands of years earlier
  in the Archaic reach their climax in the Middle
  Woodland in some resource rich regions.

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Middle Woodland Traits

• an increasing efficiency in harvesting a wide
  variety of productive and nutritious wild food
  resources
• an increasing emphasis on the gathering and
  gardening of seed-bearing plants
• an intensification of food procurement
• smaller, better defined, and more circumscribed
  group territories
• more sedentary lifeways

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Traits Continued

• "packing" in resource rich environments caused by
  increasing population sizes, group fissioning,
  and inward migration
• a sense of corporate, or "ethnic," identity
• increasingly conspicuous group boundary markers
  to legitimize a corporate right to local
  resources
• more elaborate burial rites
• more complex intra- and intercommunity social
  arrangements and
• increasingly formal inter-group exchange
  mechanisms.

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Middle Woodland archaeological complexes include

• Ohio Hopewell in southern Ohio
• Havana Hopewell in the Illinois Valley and
  adjacent Mississippi Valley
• Crab Orchard in southern Illinois
• Kansas City Hopewell
• Swift Creek, Copena, Deptford, Miller, and
  Marksville in the Southeast
• Laurel in the western Upper Great Lakes and
  Point Peninsula in the Northeast.
• Most of these complexes participated to varying
  degrees in what has been called the Hopewell
  Interaction Sphere some in mostly spatially
  peripheral areas did not participate at all.

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Middle Woodland

• Dates for the Middle Woodland time period vary
  widely across the Eastern Woodlands, for
  archaeologists do not agree on which traits are
  diagnostic of the period or stage.
• In addition, some events, such as the appearance
  of new ceramic forms, occurred at different times
  in different areas.
• For some archaeologists, the "Middle Woodland" is
  that period between 200 B.C. and A.D. 400 when
  most of the Eastern Woodlands was dominated by
  the Hopewell culture.
• For others, it is defined by the presence of
  "Middle Woodland" ceramic complexes, which,
  according to some interpretations, ranges from
  about 300 B.C. to A.D. 300 in the Illinois
  Valley, ca. A.D. 1-600 in the Southeast, and ca.
  A.D. 1--900 in the Northeast.

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Middle Woodland

• In the southeastern Deptford and Swift Creek
  complexes, pottery was check, complicated, and
  simple stamped.
• Classic Ohio Hopewell and Illinois Havana
  Hopewell decorated pottery had rocker-and dentate
  stamp and incised designs arranged largely in
  zonal patterns.
• In general, Middle Woodland ' ceramic vessels
  tended to have more complex and sophisticated
  shapes and designs than Early Woodland pottery.
  They also had thinner walls that were more
  resistant to breakage when heated.

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Hopewell

• The most spectacular archaeological evidence of
  this climax is associated with the Hopewell
  phenomenon in the heartland of the culture area.
  The most spectacular Hopewell ceremonial sites
  are in the Sciota Valley near Chillicothe, Ohio.
• These religious and political centers typically
  contain a burial mound and geometric earthwork
  complex that covers 10 to hundreds of acres and
  sparse evidence of large resident populations is
  lacking. Larger mounds can be up to 12 m high,
  150 m long, and 55 m wide.
• Multiple mortuary structures under the mounds
  were often log tombs that contained the remains
  of skeletons that had been cremated, bundled, or
  interred in some other manner.

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Hopewell Area
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Hopewell Artifacts

• Exotic raw materials and "art" objects, the
  diagnostic artifacts of the Hopewell Interaction
  Sphere, accompanied some of the burials.
• Included were Lake Superior copper, galena,
  obsidian from Wyoming, Knife River nint from
  North Dakota, pipestone, silver, meteoric iron,
  mica, chlorite, quartz crystal, petrified wood,
  foreign nodular flints, both large and small
  marine shell (Cassis, Busycon, Farrciolaria,
  Marginella, Oliva, OliveNa), ocean turtle shells,
  alligator and shark teeth, barracuda jaws, clay
  figurines, platform effigy pipes, and
  two-dimensional representational art cut from
  sheets of copper or mica, among other items.
• Small villages where people hunted and gathered
  wild food resources and tended small gardens
  presumably surrounded these large centers.
  However, the intense focus on the larger centers
  and their exotic contents has detracted until
  recently from investigations of year-round
  subsistence-settlement patterns.

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Trade
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Copper artifacts

• Sources
• Lake Superior area
• Kewanaw Peninsula
• Isle Royale
• Essential two ways of making cold copper objects
  
• Beaten
• Cutouts

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Copper artifact types

• Ear spools
• Artificial noses
• Beads
• Gorgets
• Panpipes
• Relief drawings
• Breastplates
• Fake deer antlers
• Coverings for wooden artifacts (e.g., covering
  for a wooden representation of a hallucinogenic
  or poisonous mushroomthe famous "Shaman's
  baton")
• Ax heads

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Copper Artifacts
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Mica artifacts

• Source
• southwest North Carolina
• Mica is a sometimes almost perfectly transparent
  laminated mineral that can be carefully separated
  into clear sheets that can then be cut into
  shapes
• Serpents
• Animal claws
• Human heads
• Human hands
• Geometric forms
• As many as 3,000 sheets of worked mica have been
  recovered from one mound (at the original
  Hopewell Site)

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Mica Artifacts
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Obsidian and Ground Stone artifacts

• Source
• appears to be Yellowstone, Wyoming
• Technology employed
• developed pressure flaking
• Artifact types
• Knives
• Projectile points
• Ritual, non-utilitarian forms of the above (too
  big and too brittle to have been used
  practically)
• Ground-stone artifacts
• Probably the most famous Hopewell artifact is the
  platform pipe
• Platform pipes depict a wide range of animals
  forming the tobacco bowloften in rather
  whimsical forms

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Flaked and Ground Stone artifacts
Ground Stone Shaman
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Bone and Wood Artifacts

• Bone artifacts
• Wolf's upper palette with upper fangs still
  intact (may have been a mouth mask that was held
  in the teeth of a shaman)
• Wooden artifacts
• Preservation of wood is often poor in the Eastern
  Woodlands, but luckily some of these had been
  covered with thin sheets of copper
• Copper acids inhibit biological activity, thus
  sometimes preserving organic material adjacent to
  it
• Copper sometimes remains long after wood has
  disappeared (requiring careful excavation
  techniques!)

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Textile fragment from Hopewell Mound
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Other artifacts

• Freshwater mollusks
• Freshwater clamshell to make beads
• Freshwater pearl for beads, etc.
• Ceramics
• Vessels
• Utilitarian
• Luxury/funerary
• Figurines
• Distinct from those of the Southwest and
  Mesoamerica

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Hopewell Interaction Sphere

• Smaller amounts of Hopewell Interaction Sphere
  items are found in Havana graves in Illinois and
  in other Hopewellian complexes.
• Differences in regional burial practices,
  ceramics, settlement pattern, and other aspects
  of the archaeological record suggest that these
  items and presumably their associated ritual
  practices were grafted onto local cultures.

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Hopewell Phenomenon

• Just what the Hopewell phenomenon represents
  remains a focus of investigation.
• Some researchers view the increase in burial
  mound and earthwork construction, the elaboration
  of burial ceremonialism, and the presence of
  "powerful" exotic substances and manufactured
  items as the archaeologically visible
  manifestation of a climactic expression of a
  cosmology whose roots extend deep into the
  Archaic.
• According to this view, the spirit world had to
  be propitiated to ensure an abundance of food, a
  successful raid on a traditional enemy, and so
  on, and these items functioned within that
  process of communication.

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Other Interpretations

• Others regard the florescence as evidence of the
  emergence of regional social ranking.
• In this view, heads of high ranking lineages
  legitimized their positions in part by obtaining
  interaction sphere symbols of power from other
  high ranking lineage heads in distant
  communities.
• Still another interpretation considers the
  aspirations of "Big Men" as responsible for
  moving interaction sphere items through an
  extensive intertribal network.
• Here, a potential "Big Man" would attempt to
  build his own reputation and a political blee
  within the segmented tribal organization by
  exchanging locally available items for
  interaction sphere raw materials and ritual
  items.
• Presumably, aspects of all three interpretations
  were important to varying degrees in different
  Middle Woodland complexes.
• What seems apparent, however, is the value of
  viewing the Hopewell phenomenon from a social
  rather than a strictly material perspective.

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Forms of Hopewell Earthworks

• Enclosures
• Circular
• Rectangular
• Octagonal
• Processionals
• Parallel connecting mounds connecting enclosures
• Internal moats and borrow pits were also part of
  such complexes
• Effigy Mounds
• Not to be confused with the Effigy Mound Culture
  of Northeastern Iowa, which is late, but which
  also has Hopewellian affiliations

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Functions of Hopewell Earthworks

• Many mounds were burial mounds (sometimes
  containing hundreds of burials)
• Some mound complexes may reflect
  archaeoastronomic orientations
• Definitely not used as temple bases (such as
  later Mississippian and Mesoamerican forms)

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Mound City, Ohio Aerial photo
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Mound City Layout
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(No Transcript)
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Seip Mound, Ohio
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Seip Mound Enclosure
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Seip, top of long mound
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Newark Earthworks

• http//www.comp-archaeology.org/Newark20Octagon2
  0Earthworks_files/frame.htm

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Hopewell Mound Group
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Burial Practices

• The dead were buried in many different ways,
  depending upon social status. The majority of the
  scientifically studied burials are cremations,
  only the elites being buried intact. Both burial
  crypts and charnel houses were used.
• Crypts
• Large boxes constructed for the storage of the
  dead and their grave goods
• Simple structures sunk into the ground and
  covered with heavy roofs
• Often built on isolated high-spots clear of the
  settlement
• May have served as lineage and/or clan facilities
  for a single community
• Generally maintenance free

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Charnel Houses

• Structures with thatched roofs and substantial
  post frames - used both to shelter the dead
  (cremated and /or entire corpses) and the burial
  activities associated with them
• Bodies often subjected to considerable
  preparation
• Elites buried in log-lined tombs within the
  charnel house and were accompanied by extremely
  rich grave offerings
• Once house had fulfilled its role, was burned to
  the ground and an earthen mound erected over it
• A single mound might be used for later burials
  which were placed immediately adjacent to, or
  partially into, the exisiting burial mound. Over
  time a single burial mound would assume gigantic
  proportions some as large as 90-100 feet in
  diameter and 15 feet tall and contain as many as
  200 burials.
• May have served as lineage and /or clan
  facilities for a single community

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Sources

• http//www.comp-archaeology.org/USWoodlandHopewell
  Earthworks.htm
• http//www.ohiohistorycentral.org/ohc/archaeol/p_i
  ndian/artifact/face.shtml