America

1
Americas Adena Moundbuilders

• And Their Burial Tablets

By Ida Jane Gallagher
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• Imagine the amazement of early
  Colonial explorers when they crossed
• the Appalachian Mountains and discovered
  hundreds of conical mounds
• and geometric earthworks in the
  upper Ohio River and Kanawha River
• valleys. Who built these mounds? Why?

Criel Mound, South Charleston, West Virginia
3
The Adena Moundbuilders
The Adena people built conical mounds for
the burial of their honored dead. The Ohio River
and its tributaries were the main areas they
occupied between 1000 B. C. and 400 A. D. The
later Hopewell and Mississippian people also
built mounds for their dead and for sun worship.
The Adena were named for the Chillicothe,
Ohio, estate of Governor Thomas Worthington where
archaeologists excavated a mound in 1901. The
Adena mound contained an elite burial and
distinctive artifacts that identify the Adena.
The Adena pipe (above (left) shows a squat
male figure with a goitered neck and stylized
hair. He wears ear spools and a loin cloth that
is feathered in back. A replica of an Adena
shaman wearing a wolf headdress (right) holds the
Adena pipe. Some archaeologists speculated that
the Adena may have migrated from Mexico because
they carved similar designs on tablets and both
groups erected mounds over burial tombs. Other
archaeologists maintain that Adena burial
practices evolved from earlier native people
living in the Midwest or Northeast. Burials of
Adena elite people contained decorative objects,
copper bracelets, mica, pipes, seed pearls, and
tablets incised with cultural symbols and a few
tablets with ancient writing.
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The Gaithskill Tablet (left) is an example of
a figural tablet. Hands, serpents, birds, and sun
circles were some of the symbols carved on
tablets. Dating of mound burials can be estimated
by the sophistication of tablet designs.
The turtle tablet (right) represents an Adena
cultural symbol.
5
Grave Creek Mound, Moundsville, West Virginia
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The Grave Creek Mound is on a plateau above
the Ohio River. Early explorers said that earthen
circles, squares, octagons, and walls accompanied
the mounds. Mounds and earthworks extended 10-12
miles along the Ohio River in the Grave Creek
Mound vicinity. Their construction was an
enormous project, and workers carried dirt one
bucket at a time to build them. What motivated
them to do this? This so called Mammoth
Mound was located on the Tomlinson farm. In 1838
owner Jesse Tomlinson permitted the mound
excavation. His nephew, Abelard Tomlinson,
assisted by Abelards brother-in-law, Thomas
Biggs, was in charge of the excavation. Local
residents helped.
7
Grave Creek Mound Excavation
Tomlinson and his crew started by digging a
tunnel into the mound starting about four feet
above ground level and then sinking a shaft from
the top of the mound intended to intersect with
the tunnel. The tunnel ended when
the men struck an 8 x 12 foot log tomb. The grave
had been dug seven to eight feet below the floor
of the house of the deceased. The house was
burned down after one male and one female were
buried beneath its floor.
The men abandoned digging down from the top
of the mound fearful that the shaft would
collapse. They probed upward from the lower tomb
until they struck stone and guessed it was an
upper tomb. This proved to be true when they dug
a second tunnel 34 feet above ground level and
struck an 18 x 8 foot log tomb filled with
rotten wood, stones, earth, one large and badly
decayed skeleton, and many artifacts.
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Artifacts Found in the Upper Tomb

• Excavator Peter B. Catlett reported that
  the skeleton measured 74 when the bones were
  wired together. He stated, I took the lower
  jawbone and put it over my chin, and it did not
  touch my face, and I was at that time a man who
  weighed 181. Some Adena people were very
  large. They had round heads that were flattened
  in back. The Hopewell moundbuilders had long
  heads and slender bodies indicating that they
  were a different physical type.

The upper tomb burial was dated at about
100 B. C. The grave goods consisted of 1,700
disk shell beads, 500 marginella shell beads
strung in a necklace(source Florida or West
Indes), a gorget, five copper bracelets (source
Lake Superior copper), mica, and a small
inscribed sandstone tablet called the Grave Creek
Tablet. This curious tablet became the source of
great controversy.
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Grave Creek Tablet
The Grave Creek Tablet is a 1 ½ x 2
inch grayish sandstone tablet. (Plaster replica
below.) It was the source of a great debate due
to three lines of inscribed alphabetic characters
on one side. The hieroglyphic sign beneath the
letters resembles a cross with elongated arms and
the profile of a birds head on the end of the
right arm and a dot under the left arm. The Grave
Creek Tablet was considered to be an authentic
artifact by the men participating in the mound
excavation. The mysterious letters were puzzling,
so the Smithsonian Institution made copies of the
tablet and sent them abroad to foreign
translators. Some of the characters were not
copied accurately, so decipherments and
translations varied.
Distinguished ethnologist, Henry R.
Schoolcraft personally examined the tablet, which
he believed was authentic. He found that
characters on the tablet resembled similar
characters in numerous foreign writing systems.
The disparity of early decipherments and
translations in different foreign languages
caused some people to question the tablets
authenticity. It was translated satisfactorily
in 1972.
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Eyewitness Accounts of the Grave Creek Tablet
Excavation
Dr. James W. Clemens, a respected physician,
wrote the earliest known account of the discovery
of the Grave Creek Tablet. He was present at the
excavation as he had agreed to write a report on
skulls found in the mound for Dr. S. G. Morton,
who was compiling a book about ancient skulls.
Clemens reported, In this vault a large skeleton
was found, with a necklace of perforated shells,
two copper bracelets, and a curiously inscribed
or hieroglyphic stone, the characters of which
are distinctly traced in parallel linesThe stone
is now in my possession and I have had an exact
facsimile of it taken. Mortons book made no
reference to the inscribed tablet as his work was
devoted to skulls, and this omission bred serious
controversy. (See Ephriam Squier controversy on
following page.) Abelard Tomlinson, who was
in charge of the excavation, was accused of
fraudulently producing the Grave Creek Tablet.
This was impossible due to the sequence of events
leading to its correct decipherment. Tomlinson
recalled, I was carefully removing the dirt,
which was mostly of decayed timber, when I
uncovered the inscribed stone. The inscription
being up, it took my attention. I examined it
found it to be the work of the ancients I then
placed it with the other relics. Peter B.
Catlett helped with the excavation. He said, I
am the one that found it first. It was not in its
original bed when first found, it was taken out
of the stone arch in a wheelbarrow and emptied
outsideAs for anyone placing the inscribed stone
there, (planting it) it could not have been
done. Catlett must have seen the Grave Creek
Tablet in the wheelbarrow after Tomlinson removed
it from the debris in the upper vault. James
E. Wharton, Wheeling newspaper editor, stated,
In the forenoon they struck the center of the
vaultAmong the dirt was brought out the
inscribed stone and picked up by one of us from
the loose dirt. (Catlett?) A fraud was
impossible.
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The Controversy Over the Tablets Authenticity
?
Archaeologists became embroiled in the
controversy and many rejected the Grave Creek
Tablet as a fake. They did not accept the theory
that early Iberians had been in Adena territory.
Their argument that the tablet was one of a kind
has been disproven.
12

Dr. Barry Fell made the first sensible
decipherment of the Grave Creek Tablet in
Southwest Iberic. David Diringers 1968 recovery
of ancient Iberic vowel values enabled Fell to
make his 1972 translation of the funerary
inscription Tumulus in honor of Tadach. His
wife caused this engraved tile to be inscribed.
(Note Southwest Iberic reads from right to left.)
Fells Translation of the Grave Creek Tablet,
reading right to left
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The Braxton County or Blaine Wilson Tablet
Additional Southwest Iberic Tablets
The text of the Blaine Wilson Tablet
parallels and shares some of the vocabulary of
the Grave Creek Tablet. Dr. Barry Fell
translated the Southwest Iberic funerary
inscription to read The memorial of Teth. This
tile (His) brother caused to be made.
Consider what these inscriptions imply. Did
Iberian scribes reach West Virginia by 100 B.C.?
Did they inscribe the tablets or teach Adena
scribes their alphabet and language?

• School children Blaine Wilson and his sister
  found the Blaine Wilson Tablet beside the stump
  of a tree near Triplett Creek in Braxton County,
  West Virginia, in 1931. They took the inscribed
  tablet to their school teacher, who brought it to
  the attention of Mrs. Innis C. Davis, director of
  the West Virginia Department of Archives where it
  was stored. The 4 1/8 x 3 3/16 inch tablet is
  micaceous sandstone. Its three rows of Southwest
  Iberic script are curvilinear rather than
  rectilinear like the Grave Creek Tablet. A
  similar elongated arm cross is beneath the
  inscription.

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• The Ohio County Tablet, West Virginia

Donal Buchanan, a noted decipherer of
Southwest Iberic, translated the funerary
message on the Ohio County tablet. This
was set up for Lydia, wife, Jacob engraved it.
An elongated cross with a head on the end of
the right arm and a dot beneath the left arm is
below the last line of the 16 character
inscription. The tablet measures I ¾ by 1 ½
inches.
Robert C. Dunnell found the Ohio County
Tablet in 1956 when he was a teenager. It was in
a small archaeological site that became a rock
quarry. Dunnell took the tablet to
archaeologist Delf Norona who worked for the
Grave Creek Mound Museum. Norona said the tablet
was planted to legitimize other finds. His
original opinion that the Grave Creek Tablet was
authentic changed because other archaeologists
were calling it a fake. Fortunately, Sam Shaw,
editor of the Moundsville Daily Echo newspaper
,photographed the tablet and interviewed Dunnell
and Norona. The tablet is lost.
15
The Morristown Tablet
The Morristown Tablet was found near
Morristown, Tennessee. Dr. Paul Cheesman brought
it to the attention of epigraphic scholars in
1981. Its inscription is comparable to the
message on the Grave Creek Tablet. Donal Buchanan
found that all of the symbols on the Morristown
Tablet could be equated with those on the Grave
Creek Tablet, which led to his conclusion that
the funerary inscription must be a funerary
formula. He suggested that the name Tadach
either is not a personal name or there were two
people named Tadach who were buried in different
areas. Did someone made a copy of the Grave
Creek Tablet? What do you think? An
elongated arm cross with a birds head on the
right end and a dot beneath the left arm is
beneath the inscription.
16
The Genesee Tablet
William Johnson found the Genesee Tablet in
the Genesee River bed near Belfast, New York in
1975. High water and erosion often change the
rivers course. Epigrapher Donald Eckler spotted
the tablet in Dana Kleins collection and
forwarded a photograph of it to Dr. Barry Fell.
The Genesee Tablet is dense granular rock
measuring 2 x 3 inches. Dr. Fell deciphered the
two lines of Iberic script noting that the tablet
is a traders token. He translated the tablet in
Arabic-related Iberian to say
Confirmation. I have pledged to pay in full.
Was this an early IOU?
The Genesee River was part of a water route
used by Amerindian trading parties. The discovery
of the Genesee Tablet on a known trading route
suggests that native people led foreign traders
to Americas interior by following the waterways
and the Indian paths that connected them. The St.
Lawrence River and Great Lakes provided access to
Americas heartland from the Atlantic Ocean. The
Susquehanna River empties into Chesapeake Bay,
and the Ohio and other tributaries flow into the
Mississippi River that terminates in the Gulf of
Mexico. Would this explain how Iberians reached
Adena territory? Did they have boats capable of
crossing the Atlantic Ocean? What trade items
would Iberian people want?
17
King Midas Tomb, Gordion, Turkey

• Burial mounds have been constructed
  world-wide. One example is King Midas Tomb. It
  is similar in construction to Adena mounds. The
  Phrygian elite of Turkey were buried in log
  tombs that were hilled-over with clay, rocks, and
  dirt. The legendary King Midas everything he
  touched supposedly turned to gold - died about
  696 B. C. Many burial mounds are near his tomb
  at the confluence of the Porsuk and Sakarya
  Rivers. Why would burial mounds be similar in
  construction world-wide?