Hopewell Culture National Historical Park

I like how we hear different parts of a story at different places. I’ve been to the Hopewell mounds in Newark and at Old Stone Fort but this was the first time to the Mound City Group near Chillicothe Ohio.

The mounds were built from approximately 0 – 500 C.E.  The section we saw had 23 mounds along with an earthen embankment surrounding all the mounds. Most of the mounds were used for cremated burials.

Mound 7 is the largest and included 13 cremated burials. No one really knows what the original height was of these mounds. Trees grew on and around the mounds for 1500 years after the Hopewell stopped using this area. The mounds were farmed for 50 years and then the military came in during WWI to build Camp Sherman for training that flattened most mounds. What is here is a restoration of the original mounds.

This elliptical mound had only 4 people buried here but several hundred flint spearheads. The majority of the pieces were broken before burial.

Apparently smoking was big back then. One mound had almost 200 pipes with all sorts of designs.

Archeologists have found quite a few artifacts within the mounds. The range of the material sources is amazing. There were several spectacular copper pieces. The copper and silver came from mines in the Great Lakes area. We visited some small mines there. 

The mica pieces are the biggest I’ve seen. These are from North Carolina. There is flint that may have come from the Newark Flint Ridge. Obsidian came from Wyoming and Idaho. Shells came from the Gulf of Mexico and sharks teeth came from the Atlantic Ocean. The amount of trade that this required is fascinating.