Cherokee Hopewell ?

Cherokee-Hopewell thesis rings untrue because two different eras, centuries separated. We cannot rely on tribal memory before 500 A.D., when Hopewell was disintegrating or had disintegrated.

Mann's Cherokee-Hopewell thesis rings untrue because anachronistic, conflating two different eras, centuries separated. We cannot rely on tribal memory before 500 A.D., when Hopewell was disintegrating or had disintegrated. Whatever eradicated Hopewell, probably pandemic (smallpox, measles, diphtheria, anthrax, influenza, whooping cough, bubonic plague, etc.) such as wiped out more that 95% of the native population from 1492 on and Vikings all the way to Ft. Ransom, N.D. before 1500, in the latter case almost certainly by bubonic plague that had spread from Norway to Iceland, Ireland, Greenland, Vinland (Newfoundland Island), and Great Ireland across Canada to the U.S./Alberta/-Saskatchewan/Manitoba Great Plains. Some of the colonists fleeing this Black Death alas carried it. So tribal memory before 500 A.D. perished with death of designated rememberers--amnesia of course exempting Athabascans, Muskogeans, or Uto-Aztecs, et al. who arrived in the Americas after 500 or survivors of older populations beyond Hopewell orbit who never knew Hopewell to transmit a memory of it.

We can commonsensically say Lenapés had occupied lands west of Ohio at the time of Hopewell demise, Shawnees south and east of the Ohio immediately afterward. Were Shawnees who moved across the river to sites like Chillicothe, relatives of former Hopewellians or occupants of Ohio all along? Shawnees, Lenapés, as also Illinois Indians farther west spoke Algonquin, suggesting that that language which prevailed universally over all North America north of Mexico, Atlantic to Rockies, before Iroquois and Viking intrusion, had been the language of its Ohio Valley heart. Cherokee speaking an Iroqois language would have arrived in their Tennessee/Appalachian homeland long ago but post-Hopewell.

PEOPLE CALLED HOPEWELL were longheaded gracile aborigines of Illinois in the so-called Archaic or earlier, who assimilated high Adena culture before overcoming it eastward from the Illinois River, not Far West deserts, in late centuries B.C. We cannot identify them with Lenapés--as Lenapés themselves do not, though linguistically related.

Aborigines whom Adenans invaded from the Gulf to the Ohio were likewise longheaded gracile. Mann quotes Maureen Korp [The Sacred Geography of the American Mound Builders, Native American Studies II (Lewiston, N.Y:Edwin Mellen 1990), 4, 18-19] that no one knows who the creators of Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian cultures really were or where they went, although Korp identified their probable descendants as Cherokee, Sioux, and Algonkian [117](Cherokee and Sioux certainly not). We know Adena ancestors transferred Olmec culture of Mexico via inner Florida to Mississippi Delta to a central bastion in Louisiana called Poverty Point and that colonists of the disintegrating Poverty Point "empire" carried its culture up the Mississippi along well-established distant water routes into Ohio and far beyond, recognized by their rounded skulls, heavy bones, often gigantic size, burial mounds, horticulture, thick-walled pots, pipes, bird pendants, earspools, etc.

They may very well have been "Moon Eyed" in the day reckoning but could not have been Cherokee. Illinois aborigines who had intermarryingly assimilated Adena took it over in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and western West Virginia, flushing Adena refugees into New York, New England, St. Lawrence River, Cheaspeake Bay, and Delaware River. William Ritchie and Don Dragoo recognized their distinctive mounds and artifacts along water routes northeast, west and south and identified many of their typically Adena artifacts wrought from native Ohio pipestone and Flint Ridge (Ohio) chalcedony.

Mann supposed Hopewell invaders of Adena Cherokee because adding square to Adena circle [p. 200]. Sky & Earth may well be the two symbols' meaning but how to connect square specifically to Cherokee? or for that matter, circle to Adena? Man discounts any Mediterranean incursion of Hopewell, although Hopewell squares square-the-circle (insofar as that is possible), as Prof. James Scherz demonstrated, and did so via Egyptian units of measure with a knowledge of both pi and phi (golden section).

Thousands of mounds containing plates (copper, slate, ceramic, sandstone etc.) inscribed in Coptic and Hebrew bearing the "Mystic Symbol" (Yahweh read retrograde, as David Deal discerned) especially throughout Michigan but as far as Burrows Cave in Illinois' Little Egypt, implying Egyptian Christians 1^st-3^rd centuries A.D.

Inscriptions in Celtiberic (both ogam and alphabetic letters), Greek koine, Hebrew, Latin, Neo-Punic, and Numidian as well as Eqyptian (the identical mix we find in Roman Mauretania and ex-Carthagianian Spain 1^st B.C.-1st few centuries A.D.) imply refugees from the region of Algeria and Morocco in that period, and also the same languages creolized in Central Algonquin, together with anomalous Arabic. Carthaginian gold coins, symbols of Tanit and Ba'al, etc. attest earlier as well as continuing Carthaginian influence. Mapstones found in Burrows Cave document a progression along the old Poverty Point route up the Mississippi and Ohio (rather than down starting from the eastern U.S. seaboard), successive mapstones showing steadily increasing upstream of Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri.

We find no Cherokee trace as yet in the whole span, Poverty Point Archaic to Mississippian Late Woodland. Mann's date for Hopewell inauguration, c.200 B.C., may be right, but 2450 B.C. citing Webb & Baby 1975 [p.156], would be an early Poverty Point date. Separately identifiable Adena runs nearly two miliennia later.

DR. JOHN LEDERER c.1669-70 figured Cherokee reached their home territory c.1250 A.D.; which sounds about right. Dean R. Snow traced Iroquois to c.775-1300 pre-proto hamlets along the Juaniata and upper Susquehanna of central Pennsylvania, already horticultural, whereas their earliest Midwinter Ceremonial celebrated a pre-horticultural tradition in northern forests. They exemplify c.1150-1350 central New York Owasco Culture. Their Norse-type longhouses evolved thereafter into the 15th century in Onandoga County.

Then a Latin American component brought Borneo-type blowguns late in precolumbian history; cf. Panamá's Chiriqui City, Bay, & Province. It looks as if Cherokees, woven of extremely disparate strands from afar, evolved out of degenerating Hopewell, inheriting pipes, black drink, snakemindedness, etc. from holdover Hopewell, along with post-Hopewell bows-and-arrows though not Cherokee (but possibly Yuchi) turbans, already in the Mississippian period without ever participating in Hopewell heartland or heyday.

Donald Panther Yates' DNA studies surprisingly show a European and a South American component. Though an enigma, Cherokee identity is Mississippian rather than Hopewell. Tuscaroras of North Carolina joined New York Iroquois to make the 5 Nation 6, while Cherokees remained independent. Various traditions include an eastward migration of Iroquois including Cherokee. Other traditions say southward, northward and westward. If as James Mooney logically contended, all Iroquoian speakers once resided contiguously, their vast habitat would have to have been Pennsylvania and/or Virginis/West Virginia and/or New York.

John Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary adopted by Lenapés when 19 and residing with them the next 49 years, related the earliest Lenapé memory of 100 years before when Lenapés migrated in a body to Namaesi Sipu (River of Fish) which he assumed the Mississippi but was surely the Ohio, where they fell in with Iroquois for their farther trek east (no Lenapés/Iroquois driving of Cherokee out of Hopewell Ohio.) A hundred years before sounds like a long memory but takes us back only to 1718, 11-13 centuries, too late for Hopewell. Senecas told John Thorton Kirkland (1770-1840) that coming east,(implicitly from tropical country), Iroquois first settled in the country of the Creeks far south in Creek county before the 8th-10th century arrival of Creeks.

Muskogean Creeks, Choctaws, & Chickasaws also entered post-Hopewell domains to grow close to Cherokees and also Sawnees. They came out of Mexico and crossed the Mississippi into Mississippi. Although their Mississippian culture was that of Cahokia, we cannot find Cahokia culture resulting from outside populations or changing from Algonquin speech.

The Mississippian culture of Spiro and much of Texas and Arkansas was Caddo, extending eventually into the Great Plains. Wallace Chafe, we saw, determined an Iroquois/Caddo relationship, still tenuous but Chafe's fellow linguists generally tend to reject contextual evidence. Both Iroquois and Caddo emerged west out of eastern woods, also Catawba Algonquins, miscalled Dakota after one division of them emerged with Sioux on the Great Plains. Cherokee as Iroquoian retains a mysterious relationship. John White contends the Cherokee mountain homeland betrays retreat [west & separate from Ohio] before main Iroquois imperialists from north and east; which we noted left them out of their powerful Norse-modeled confederation.

We can identify neither Cherokees nor Iroquois as early as Hopewell, let alone inside Ohio. Yuchis, encountered close to Cherokees, Shawnees, Tunicas and Natchez, impinged on Midwest and SE tribes from the Pacific coast in the Uto-Aztec invasion, whose date H.S. Gladwin estimated c.700, which Ethel Stewart later concurred in, discerning the Tibetan conquest of Xi-Xia Shan-Shan 663-69 as initiating the Buddhist Uto-Aztec refugee movement (Uto= Yuchi; Aztec= Tu-yü-hun 'Azas plus North Tibetans, who called themselves Tek, Shepherds, Ethel Stewart demonstrated).

All America was one nation, their chiefs called suns

Vanguard Yuchis assumed a supervisory rõle of the Algonquin Ohio Valley from late or early-post Hopewell times speaking universal Algonquin to others while retaining their Indo-Iranian/Sogdian Yuchi among themselves. Yuchis claim to remember a time when all eastern America was one nation, their chiefs called suns. Natchez and Ojibway traditions agree, positing sub-suns who ruled feudally under a Great Sun, presumably at a major northern Hopewell center like Newark. Rulers of southern regions, e.g. Alabama-to-Atlantic Coosa in Mississippian times bore chechi in their title, meaning satrap or sub-sun, but central Hopewell disintegration left them sole suns in their respective territories.

We can find no intimation of Midwestern Hopewell natives speaking anything but Algonquin in the immense Hopewell area. Mann gratuitously declaimed a doctrinal hope:

there is absolutely no connection between European Celts and Native North Americans. Reckless conflation of the two debases the cultures of both [209].

Hybridization does not debase but invigorates. Gifted, superior Cherokees attest multiple hybridization. Mann wrote unaware of Paula Sten, who demonstrated Algonquin cognate with Magdalenian Euskera, which was already Celtic in the Pleistocene, notwithstanding conventional conjecture of linguists who are appalling historians while doing superb work within their abstracted limits. Sten found the earliest Cree Algonquin dialects monosyllabic, agglutinative, polysynthetic, ergative, minus r-l words, very close to exceedingly old pre-Indo-European Basque. It could be premature to proclaim a Celtic strain in Cherokee absolutely unconnected with Europe, but Cherokee certainly is not Algonquin/Celtic, or Muskogean, Tunican or Yucchi.

Mississippian commences in the Mississippi Valley around 700 A.D. Cahokia rises not before 750 at earliest, with a type of mound different from Hopewell, in fact twin platform mounds for palace and temple respectively, along with 8-row corn as staple; etc. That Cahokia traded with Fort Ancient sites does not prove Shawnees in Hopewell Ohio, much less Cherokees [126]. James B. Griffin authoritatively declared Fort Ancient culture along both banks of the Ohio from Indiana to West Virginia Shawnee, but Fort Ancient postdates Hopewell by 8-10 centuries, c.1400-1650. Even earlier Graham Village culture on Ohio's Hocking River carbon-dates 1189 & 1070 [271] far along in Mississippian.

Neither does the etymology of Cherokee (Choctaw choluk, "pit" or "cave" and other speculations) prove any connection with Hopewell.

Mann figured Cliff Dweller collapse into the encompassing political movement that brought the demise of Ohio mound culture [167]. Hopewell mound culture collapse c.400 or soon after, most likely from pandemic; Cliff Dweller 1300 or 1400 to descending Apaches, following Pueblo collapse due largely to the 12th-13th-century Great Drought; Mississipian mound culture to a different drought centuries later and subsequent European epidemics. Historians must take better account of chronology.

Athabascan Navajos moved into vacated Pueblo/Cliff Dweller territory in the 18th century but believe they have resided there forever. Choctaws similarly believe they have resided in Mississippi forever, Cherokees in Appalachia (not including Ohio) forever, nevertheless indefinite centuries after Middle Woodland Hopewell.

[Consultants: Cherokee attorney/author R. Mack Bettis, Tulsa; tribal-genetics expert Cherokee-Teehahnahmah Donald N. Panther-Yates, Ga. Southern U.;& physicist/ethnologist/etyimologist Editor John J. White, MES Columbus, O., whom I thank for their learned elucidations.]