• Chicken waterer
• Microbusiness ebook
• Homemade deer deterrent

Mound City: Hopewell Culture NHP

Two miles off the interstate in the outskirts of Chillicothe, Ohio, Mound City Group is a must-see for American Indian mound aficionados.  Mound City is one section of the five part Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, run by the National Park Service and open to the public without an admission fee.  The mounds here are small to medium, but what they lack in size, they make up for in number and interpretation.

We started our visit by poring over the beautifully illustrated displays (with real artifacts from the site!) within the museum.  As the interpreter behind the desk explained to me when I came back inside at the end of my visit with a list of questions, Mound City may have been the epicenter of Hopewell Culture for 700 years, between 200 BC and 500 AD.  During this time period, Native Americans in the region were hunter-gatherers who also raised foods in the eastern agricultural complex.  They lived in small settlements across a multi-state region, but came together regularly to bury their most important dead (and perhaps to hold festivals and other events) at Mound City.  Nobody lived at this site, and no one is quite sure how often they gathered and how people knew when to show up.

Archaeologists hypothesize that Hopewell Indians built special structures in which they cremated their dead (see above), then buried the ashes under small mounds of earth (see below.)  After several burials had been made, the structure was burnt or torn down and a mound was built on top.  Clay and sand were carted from pits beyond the perimeter of the mound grouping using simple hand tools and baskets, then packed into place to build mounds.  Over the course of 700 years, 100 cremated burials were made at Mound City, and archaeologists suspect that some mounds may have taken generations to construct.

Special artifacts were often ceremonially broken and buried with the dead.  Since this part of Ohio only has certain raw materials handy, we can tell that Native Americans of the time had extensive trade routes, bringing grizzly bear teeth from the Rocky Mountains, shells from the Gulf of Mexico, and other materials from far afield.  They also worked the exotic substrates into beautiful pipes and ornaments, many of which represented local wildlife.  The museum is chock full of these stunning artifacts, but I was disappointed to read that others were taken home by early archaeologists and can only be seen in England.

When European settlers showed up in the region, the mounds probably looked a lot like the one in this photo, covered with trees and brush, but archaeologists think that when the site was active, the mounds were kept cleared, probably with controlled burns.  Did Native Americans come back to visit ancestors' burial spots like we visit our own cemeteries?  What made someone special enough to deserve burial in Mound City?  We just don't know.

To put Mound City in perspective, the Indians who build these earth mounds lived about a thousand years before those who built Sunwatch, Moundville, and Serpent Mound.  All three of these later sites are remnants of cultures fed by corn --- the easy-to-stockpile grain gave them time to build massive monuments.  But Mound City was put together by people living a hunter-gatherer-gardener lifestyle, with no supreme leader cracking the whip.  I suspect I would have enjoyed living in the small family groupings of the Hopewell Indians much more than in the larger cities of their descendents.

Mound City is worth a second visit, and the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park also has two other open-to-the-public sites within about fifteen miles.  Hopewell Mound Group covers over 120 acres and has two miles of earthen walls, a short section of which is still in its native state.  (Most of the mounds and walls have been damaged and rebuilt.)  A three mile walking trail encircles the site.



A little further south, the Seip Earthworks contains the second largest known Hopewell burial mound.  Two other sites (Hopeton Earthworks and High Bank Works) are closed to the public.  Visit the park's website for information on hours and directions to each site.