World Prehistory by Brian M. Fagan & Nadia Durrani

Author:Brian M. Fagan & Nadia Durrani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

ADENA, HOPEWELL, AND MISSISSIPPIAN (C. 2000 BCE TO 1650 CE)

Like those in the Southwest, hunter-gatherers in North America’s eastern woodlands had acquired exceptional expertise with plant foods thousands of years before sporadic cultivation of native plants like goosefoot and marsh elder began around 2000 BCE. At about the same time, the first signs of social ranking appeared in local burials. This was also when an increasing preoccupation with burial and life after death came into play.

As the centuries passed, the funeral rites associated with death and the passage from the living world to the realm of the ancestors became ever more elaborate and important. This elaboration coincided with increasing social complexity. An explosion in long-distance exchange ensued, along with the building of ceremonial earthworks.

Many centuries of long-distance exchange between neighboring communities conferred high value on certain raw materials and exotic objects in societies that valued prestige. Hammered copper objects and conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast became symbols of high status and were buried with their owners. By 500 BCE, such individuals were interred under large burial mounds. Between 500 BCE and about 400 CE, the Adena culture flourished in the Ohio Valley, marked by elaborate ceremonial enclosures and burial mounds where important people lay in log-lined tombs.

A development of the Adena named the Hopewell tradition followed around 200 BCE and flourished for six centuries. This was an elaboration of Adena religious ideology with burial strategies that spread as far as Louisiana, northern Wisconsin, and New York State. Long-distance trade carried copper from the Great Lakes region, obsidian from as far away as Yellowstone, and shiny mica from southern Appalachia. Hopewell communities dwelt in relatively small settlements and used the simplest of technologies. All the wealth and creative skill of society was lavished on a relatively few individuals—and their lives after death.

This was a society where ceremonial objects of all kinds passed from hand to hand over long distances. Carved soapstone pipe bowls, thin mica head and breast ornaments decorated with animal and human motifs, copper axe and beads; these prized manufactures passed from one person to another through vast networks of gift-giving transactions that linked different kin leaders in lasting, important obligations to one another. Unsurprisingly, Hopewell mounds and burial complexes were far more elaborate. Some burial mounds were 12 meters high, often atop earthen platforms where people were buried over several generations. All this ceremonial reflects a complex relationship with the forces of the spiritual world and the ancestors.

The center of religious and political power shifted southward after 400 CE as the Hopewell tradition declined. This was when the people of the increasingly densely populated Mississippi floodplain gradually turned to maize as a high-yielding food staple, especially when combined with beans during the late first millennium. The new crops added to food surpluses acquired from growing native plants, fishing, and waterfowl. Major economic and social change came with the appearance of the Mississippian tradition, its greatest elaboration in the American Bottom across the river from today’s St.

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