The Hopewell Mound Builders: How They Lived

One of the most intriguing artifacts left by ancient Native American peoples is the earth mound. It comes in many different shapes and sizes, and it served many different functions in ancient times. The greatest mound builders were those in the Hopewell culture.

The Hopewell culture was the most advanced ancient Native American culture of central North America. It flourished from about 200 B.C. to about A.D. 500, mainly in the Ohio and Illinois river valleys.

The Hopewells built their villages along rivers and streams. They relied on hunting and gathering for much of their food, but they also raised corn and perhaps beans and squash.

The Hopewell culture thrived in many ways. It had skilled craftsmen who produced artistic excellence in pottery, stone, and copper. Apparently it established many well-developed trade routes.

But the preeminent feature of the culture was its extensive system of complex earthworks. The Hopewells built vast numbers of earthen mounds that served as enclosures, burial places, defensive structures, and sites for religious rites.

In fact, the original English-language name of the culture, during the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, was Mound Builders. Its current name derives from the name of a 19th-century farmer, Cloud Hopewell, on whose Ohio farm the earliest explorations of the native culture were made.

An effigy mound is a particularly fascinating kind of Hopewell earthen mound. Hopewell artisans formed each effigy mound into the shape of an animal, such as a bear, a bird, a buffalo, a deer, a snake, or even a turtle.

Little is known of the effigy mounds except that most of them appear to be burial sites.

Naturally the rediscover of these mounds in the 19th century caused much curiosity and discussion among laypeople and researchers. Here is a reference to the mounds in a 19th-century American journal of archeology: "Bancroft...places Pidgeon and Lapham on an equal footing, as the original discoverers of the 'effigy mounds'" (1886, Oxford English Dictionary).

This early 20th-century quotation from the Encyclopaedia Britannica shows the continuing interest in, and confusion about, the effigy mounds: "In Wisconsin the most interesting mounds are the effigy mounds-earthen forms of mammals, birds and reptiles....The purpose of these effigy mounds is probably totemic" (1929, Oxford).

After A.D. 400 the distinctive features of the Hopewell culture gradually disappeared. Remnants of the culture lasted to the mid-1600s.

The Hopewell Culture National Historical Park (originally established in 1923 as the Mound City Group National Monument) is located in Ross County, southern Ohio. It consists of 1,032 acres set aside to preserve the Hopewell cultural artifacts and prehistoric mounds, including the animal-shaped effigy mounds.

Sources:

Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference 2004 (CD-ROM).

The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989.