Abstract
In southwestern Ohio, in the Little and Great Miami river basins, Middle Woodland societies that are categorized as “Hopewell” lived social and ceremonial lives that, in many ways, were quite distinct from those of their Hopewell neighbors in the Scioto drainage. Community-wide and multicommunity ceremonial life was physically and symbolically more remote from the landscape of daily life in the Miami area. Most ceremonial centers were hilltop forts rather than geometric earthworks on easily accessed middle terraces of valleys. Death and relating to the dead appear to have been far less central, by and large, to the community and multicommunity ceremonies of Hopewell peoples of the Miami drainages than those of Scioto Hopewell peoples. A very low proportion of the ceremonial centers in the Miami drainages seem to have included burial mounds. No excavated grave within a ceremonial center had large numbers of redundant artifacts that would indicate large ceremonial gatherings and gift giving focused on specifically the deceased. Likewise, only one large deposit of decommissioned ceremonial artifacts is known to have been placed on the floor of a mound that entombed human remains. No burials laid out in the form of birds in flight are known, nor are burials associated with any large stone bird effigy or bird-shaped charnel house. The anonymity or socially soft-spoken rendering of the dead seems to be a theme that runs through the mortuary records of Miami Hopewell peoples. Burials generally were accompanied by few or no artifacts, and seldom included markers of an individual’s clan. More group ossuary interments were made than in the Scioto area, where there was only one, in one of the very earliest of charnel houses.
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Acknowledgements
I am very thankful to Dr. Robert McCord, Curator of Paleontology, the Arizona Museum of Natural History, for the generous time and care he took in identifying the parts of ordinary animals that constitute composite Creatures 1, 2, 3, and 4. I am grateful to Dr. David Penney, the late Dr. N’omi Greber, Dr. Tom Emerson, and two other anonymous colleagues for their helpful comments on earlier articles that led to this chapter. I especially give my heartfelt thanks to Rex Weeks for his teachings about cultural sensitivity to Woodland Native Americans past and present and his instruction in ethnohistorical and critical analytical tools for sharpening sensitivity. I am indebted to Rebekah Zinser for drafting Figure 14.7 from field drawings.
Notes
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1.
Parts of this chapter are extensions, revisions, and compilations of parts of two previously published articles (Carr and McCord 2013; 2015).
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2.
By a “composite creature” I mean a single being that combines the parts of two or more distinct kinds of ordinary, nonhuman animals. The term does not include human-animal composites. This distinction follows from one made in historic Woodland and Plains Indians narratives, between animal-animal composites that are stable animal forms of the cosmos and human-animal combinations that are phenomenologically different, temporary shaman-like or misfortunate transitions of humans into animals.
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3.
This summary is a composite of information from Willoughby (1922:63–74) and the following records in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University: six field Diagrams 2–7 in Glassine Envelope for Turner Group 1882-35, Mound 4; two field Diagrams labeled “Section of Mound 4, September 11, 1882” and “Mound 4” in Glassine Envelope for Turner 1883-44A; correspondences from C. L. Metz to F. W. Putnam on September 9 and October 6, 1882, in the X-file for accession no. 82-35A(2) Turner Mounds and Other Ohio Sites; and 6 pages of field notes “Exploration of Mound 4 of Turner Group” in Glassine Envelope.
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4.
Below the Central Altar, on top of the natural gravel subsoil, were sequentially placed 20 inches of puddled clay; 7 inches of irregularly stratified ashes, sand, gravel, clay, and loam; 1.5 inches of black ash; burned clay 4 inches deep; unburned clay 2 inches deep; and the burned clay forming the base of the Central Altar. The first two clay layers mentioned were associated with another altar built prior to, below, and adjacent to the one of interest here. Above the Central Altar and its fill and cap of flat stones were a 0.5 inch deep layer of black ashes; 8 inches of stratified ashes, sand, loam, and gravel; 8 inches of gray ashes with many animal bones and occasional pottery and mica fragments; 20 inches of darker clay with traces of ashes and charcoal and occasional animal bone fragments; and 21 inches of clay with numerous charcoal flecks.
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5.
Feature 10 cremation chamber-tomb in Mound 3, like most of the other features of the mound, was oriented about 25o east of north.
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6.
The setting of the ritual drama in the Below realm(s) could imply that the social group that orchestrated the ceremony was a clan, phratry, dual division, or sodality with a water-related eponym, like those that existed in historic Woodland Indian tribes (e.g., fish or alligator clan, fish or water phratry, lower dual division; Thomas et al. 2005:344–351, tables 8.1–8.3). However, the sizes of the ceremonial gatherings around the Central Altar of Mound 4 and the Feature 10 cremation chamber-tomb were probably much larger and involved multiple local symbolic communities (sensu Ruby et al. 2005), given the easy access to river travel afforded by the Turner site’s location and the large labor force required to build Mounds 3 and 4 and the conjoined mound complex.
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7.
Also, the creature’s mouth is not wide open to bite, and in no historic narrative of the death journey of which we are aware does the snake harm the deceased journeyer by biting.
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8.
A third provenience that probably indicates a journey to an afterlife that passed through the Below realms and that was similar to the journeys represented in the Central Altar of Mound 4 and the Feature 10 cremation chamber-tomb in Mound 3 is the Central Altar of Mound 3. Among the artifacts it contained were those pertaining to three kinds of creatures analogous to the three found in the Central Altar of Mound 3: four copper, G clef–shaped cutouts (Willoughby 1922:plate 11-a) that mimic, to us and Willoughby (1922:48), the shape of the four horns of Creature 1, the rattlesnake-carnivore; twelve alligator teeth that recall Creature 2, the primitive fish and alligator/caiman composite; and five mica cutouts of the upper halves of bears, apparently swimming, partially submerged in water (Willoughby 1922:56, plate 15), which replace the horned rattlesnake and recall the underwater-underground bears know by historic Woodland and Plains Indians (Chapter 8: Bears, Table 8.2). Like the Central Altar of Mound 4, that of Mound 3 and its contents were covered by strata having water associations, implying the location of the creatures in an underwater-underground realm. From bottom to top, the strata in the altar were three large sheets of mica, 4 inches of clean sand, and flat waterworn stones. However, the altar in Mound 3, in contrast to the Central Altar of Mound 4, appears to have been the place of decommissioning of paraphernalia from multiple ceremonies of varied purposes, only one of which might have dealt with the death journey through the Below realm(s) and encounters with powerful creatures. The multiple ceremonies are suggested by the great diversity and number of artifacts within the Central Altar of Mound 3. Also, the altar contained artifacts associated with the Above realm(s)—two mica cutouts of human faces with bird noses, that is, bird-persons, and one copper cutout with bird talons (Willoughby 1922:56, plates 10e, 15c)—in addition to the G clefs, alligator teeth, bear effigies, and other artifacts associated with the Below realm(s). Finally, the altar included three artifacts, at least one of which represents the cosmos at large rather than only the Below realms. One (Willoughby 1922:plate 10e) is a copper cutout comprised of a circle—at once the whole cosmos and the axis mundi in cross section (Carr 2008b:295–297, figure 5.2B)—with points in the eight cardinal and semicardinal directions, and two bird talons suggesting the spin of the cosmos. The other two artifacts are human parietals, each again circular and possibly referencing the entire cosmos, and carved with a turtle (elements of a map/sawback turtle and/or snapping turtle) indicating the earth-turtle island. The carina on the turtle’s back may double for bird feathers, indicating an Above realm, while the turtle’s legs may double for those of a feline, indicating an underwater panther and a Below realm (Carr 2008d:55, 59, figures 2.9a, 2.9b).
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9.
Mound 1 of the Esch mound group is Hopewellian, in the sense that it contained classic Hopewellian artifacts, including a copper and iron panpipe, a copper celt, silver-covered copper earspools, platform pipes, a conch, a mica sheet, cut mica, and an effigy bear canine. Two uncalibrated radiocarbon dates from Mound 1 are: A.D.1 ± 120 and A.D. 270 ± 90 (Maslowski et al. 1995:30, 34). Prufer (1964b:49) seriated the Esch mound group as a totality (Mounds 1 and 2) to the middle of the Ohio Middle Woodland period. Ruhl’s (1996:78, 89–90, figure 9, table 6; 2005:702–703) seriation of earspools does not include any from Mound 1, only those from Mound 2, which apparently was constructed much later in time, per the seriation and a radiocarbon date (Maslowski et al. 1995:37, 38; A.D. 590 ± 70; A.D. 720 ± 70).
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10.
Mound 1 at the Hopewell site was not the scene of a ritual drama about the journey of souls of deceased individuals to an afterlife, although it did contain a sculpture that possibly depicted an underwater-underground composite creature. Mound 1 contained four sandstone tablets, each carved with a massasauga or possibly an eastern diamondback rattlesnake. One specimen may have depicted protrusions of some kind surrounding or surmounting the snake’s head, according to the local resident who found it, but the head portion has been lost and the protrusions cannot be verified (Carr and McCord 2013:24–25). Thus, the carving might or might not have depicted a horned serpent. The carving had been wrapped in sheets of copper, possibly suggesting an underwater association (Squier and Davis 1848:277). Significantly, the mound did not contain any human remains, thus offering no evidence that the possible snake with head protrusions was a creature encountered on the journey of a deceased person to an afterlife. Fragments of carved bone tubes were found in the mound (Moorehead 1922:89), indicating that bone preservation was not a factor in researchers not finding human burials there.
Thirty to forty chlorite disks, which create a green powder similar in color to copper corrosion when scratched, were also found in the mound (Stevens 1870:278). The spatial layout of the tablets and disks is unknown. Mound 1 is one of several mounds located in the northeastern corner of the Hopewell earthwork within a few hundred feet of a spring, which could have been envisioned as an entrance to the Below realms, as were springs, rivers, plunge pools, and other water features generally by historic Woodland and Plains Native Americans.
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11.
A much broader understanding of the possible functions of Ohio Hopewell earthworks than Byers and Romain offered is given by DeBoer (1997). He envisioned the earthworks as analogous to those of the Chachi in Ecuador, which were “multifunctional installations that served as church, capitol, court, cemetery, as well as territorial marker” for holiday celebrations, weddings, funerals, feasts, and games (DeBoer 1997:225, 232).
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Sound, continued application of Hall’s (1979) interpretation of mound construction using water-logged soils as a reenactment of the Woodland earth-diver myth and as world re-creation is found in geological studies by Van Nest (2006) and Sunderhaus and Blosser (2006:143–145). Sunderhaus and Blosser (2006:141) also tied earthwork construction at Fort Ancient to Woodland Native American notions beyond world renewal, including perhaps migration mythology, ritual purification, representation of the multitiered universe, and the axis mundi as a means of communication between tiers. Likewise, Birmingham, who credits Hall with the inspiration of his interpretation of the effigy mounds of Wisconsin as places where world renewal rites were enacted (Birmingham 2010:xxi), attributed effigy mound construction to a much wider range of religious-ideological and other causes: the expression of clan totems and membership; burial of the dead; tying the group to the land and marking the group’s territory by their burying their ancestors in that place; expressing a dual kinship system and a dual cosmic organization that mirrored each other; expressing the creation of the cosmos; and re-creating the world periodically by duplicating in earthen form both its cosmological and social structure; social feasting; and creating a shared regional ethnic identity (Birmingham 2010:11, 17, 21, 31, 34–35, 201, 202).
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Carr, C. (2021). Little Miami Hopewell Ritual Dramas of Death Journeys through the Lower Realm(s). In: Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44917-9_14
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