Indian Mounds of Wisconsin

4. Early Burial Mound Builders: The Early and Middle Woodland Stages

4 Early Burial Mound Builders The Early and Middle Woodland Stages Until recently, the construction of burial mounds, along with the introduction of pottery vessels after about 1000 B.C., was used to mark the beginning the Woodland period or tradition in eastern North America. It is now clear that the custom of mound building is much older and the result of social and economic changes already under way during the Archaic. THE FIRST EARTHWORKS IN NORTH AMERICA Mound building seems to have begun independently in several regions of North America. Along the Atlantic coast in Labrador, a complex maritime culture of caribou and sea-mammal hunters had begun to bury their kin, covered with red ocher, in low earthen and rock mounds by 5600 B.C. Near the Gulf of Mexico, larger earthen burial mounds excavated in such places as Louisiana and Florida have recently been radiocarbon dated to between 4000 and 2000 B.C.1 The mound-building tradition in Louisiana eventually led to the construction of the imposing Poverty Point site on the Bayou Macon in the Mississippi River valley about 100 miles below the mouth of the Arkansas River (Wgure 4.1). Poverty Point is considered to be the Wrst major civic, ceremonial, and trade center in North America. Around 1200 B.C., ancient Native Americans built huge concentric earthen embankments that enclosed a large plaza.2 Immediately to the west of the complex is a mound in the shape of a hawk that is 710 feet long and more than 70 feet high. Bird 82 imagery, representing the “upperworld” in the cosmology of Native Americans , carries through to the modern day, appearing in such forms as thunderbirds . As we shall see, birds of various sorts, particularly raptors, played a prominent role in the artwork and belief systems of Woodland and Mississippian peoples in the Midwest. ADENA After 1000 B.C., the custom of building burial mounds spread to the bands and tribes living in the Ohio River valley, where it marks the beginning of the Early Woodland stage or period and the great Adena Complex.3 Like the Old Copper and Red Ocher Complexes in Wisconsin and adjacent regions, Adena was not one culture, but a cluster of rituals shared by a number of diVerent peoples. One ritual was the erection of large conical mounds over burial pits or chambers dug into the ground that frequently contained the Early Burial Mound Builders 83 Figure 4.1. The Poverty Point site, on the Bayou Macon in Louisiana, is the remains of the major earthen ceremonial center in North America. (Drawing by Clarence H. Webb, Geoscience and Man 17 [1982]; used with permission of Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge) remains of a single person. In later Adena Complex mounds, these elaborate chambers were lined with logs and lay beneath the Xoors of pole-and-thatch grave shelters that were burned to the ground before the mounds were constructed . Mounds grew in size through time by the addition of more burials and earth. One Adena mound in Moundsville, West Virginia, was more than sixty-seven feet high. Near the burial mounds, the Adena people built large earthen enclosures that possibly served as sacred spaces for conducting ceremonies related to the burials. The burial of relatively few people in pits below the mounds reXects the growing complexity of Native American societies in eastern North America in which diVerences in social status were becoming evident. This trend continued throughout the eight centuries of Adena life and beyond. Simultaneously , long-distance trade networks grew more elaborate, and important people buried in the mounds are often accompanied by symbolic items of great prestige value acquired from distant places: seashells, sheets of mica from North Carolina, pipestone from Ohio, blue-gray hornstone chert from Indiana, lead (for white pigment) from southwestern Wisconsin or northern Illinois, and copper from around Lake Superior. HOPEWELL Around 200 B.C., Adena climaxed with the development of the phenomenal cultural complex in the Ohio River and lower Illinois River valleys called Hopewell.4 Archaeologists date Hopewell in these areas to between 200 B.C. and A.D. 400 and assign it to the Middle Woodland stage or period. During this time, trade networks continued to expand, moving around great quantities of exotic items and raw materials and ultimately linking together much of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. This vast ceremonial trade network and its...