POVERTY POINT TO MISSISSIPPIAN

Poverty Point

SANTA LUISA, a known Archaic port on the Gulf of Campeche’s North Veracruz coast, would have served as likely debarkation point for pioneering 3d millennium B.C. boat-people to the Mississippi delta, via Tampa, Crystal, & Waccasasssa Bays of Florida’s inner-side, not clockwise up the desolate Texas coast or through backward aborigines overland, where archaeologists have sought a waystation or artifact trail in vain. The sailing pioneers were big, with occipitally deformed round heads, invading a longheaded gracile population such as prevailed throughout Late Archaic middle America to the Great Lakes, whose fierce resistance retarded southern advance when it reached Louisiana and proceeded upriver therefore slowly, by war. Short of Lake Ponchartrain still in sight of the Gulf they established a semicircular defensive settlement upon a preempted native village at Cedarland Plantation, Hancock County, Miss., facing a swamp which also bounded its east side, to raising an eventual bordering oyster-shell-&-earth midden 229 yards outer diameter, 230 inner, adumbrating characteristic horseshoe-shaped centers on bayou moats upriver, where the principal center that dominated the North Gulf by c.1085 B.C. arose at Poverty Point on Maçon Ridge, NE Louisiana just north of Epps at the confluence of 6 large rivers including the Mississippi, which then flowed 25 miles closer, in sight across Maçon Bayou.

Dr Covey traces the evidence of the La Venta Olmec incursions north to establish Poverty Point and some 100 surrounding sites, then moved up the Mississippi and the Ohio to become the "Adena".

These warlike invaders emigrated from a warlike Olmec context which they endeavored to duplicate—same horticulture of largely same plants with same trough metates, rectangular or trapezoidal hoes and triangular adzes, same style microliths and clay figurines, cigar-shaped ceramic pipes, bird divinity, imperial distant trade, cremation, and moundbuilding oriented to true north, 7-8° east of magnetic north.

Olmec in Turn duplicated Shang China, where true-north alignment registered 5° east of magnetic north, as Mike Xu pointed out and surmised Olmec called themselves Yin as Shang called themselves. Olmeca, it turns out, referred to a people 2 millennia prior to “Olmecs.” The great historian of early China, Kwang-chich Chang conceived a homogeneous population for a thousand miles, Central Asia to the Yellow Sea, whose Bronze Xia, Shang, & Zhou clans successively dominated. Abrupt urbanizing of Mexican hamlet culture without intervening evolution suggested to many scholars a Shang invasion before conclusive demonstration. Gordon Eckholm by art and value analysis perceived Shang derivation of Olmec 1964. Betty J. Meggers of the Smithsonian e.g. adduced in her epochal “Transpacific Origin of Mesoamerican civilization” March 1974: dispersed settlement pattern, carved jade, feline deity, 2-meter-high rammed-earth platforms, writing parallels, zero concept & place enumeration, accurate calendar, motifs/de-signs/symbols including X cross and eye/paw/wing, etc., N/S site orientation, batons flaunting rank and, among other things, cleft skulls such as attributed to pre-Shang rulers and appearing on Shang bronze vessels.

Whereas at Anyang king and shaman had been separate offices, the Olmec king combined both. Divination by scapulamancy seems dispensed with in Mexico, probably due to regressed literacy. Bronzework also lapsed except in pottery imitating bronze vessels, probably because of tin dearth to alloy with copper, also because no metallurgists accompanied migrants, escaping soldiers. With Zhou decapitation of the Shang empire at fall of Anyang, the whole thousand-mi. expanse soon fell, creating refugees by the hundred thousand, when Chinese still rememebered the Shan hai jing Kamchatka Current route to Alaska Peninsula, whence coasting to Oaxaca took merely patience.

What distinguished the Bronze Age was not basically bronze but city dominance, exemplified by San Lorenzo from c.1450-1250 B.C., displacing a couple of primitive hamlets, the city distinguished by 8 colossal black African stone heads which certainly are not Chinese. Wayne B. Chandler 1987 did trace a black strain in other Olmec sculpture that corresponds to Egypt/Nubia, Mongolia, Melanesia, and Shang China. The Polish craniologist Andrjei Wiercinski 1970, 1972 discerned negroid skeletons in Tlatilco, Cerro de las Mesas, & Monte Albán cemeteries dating from Olmec. We cannot escape con-cluding Olmec a hybrid, transatlantic/transpacific/indigenous.

Since Olmec entrenched in Mexico some 3 centuries before the fall of Anyang, migration thereto from Shang China had to have been occurring irregularly in that period, its inundating push resulting from the catastrophe. Anyang’s fall marked the crucial impetus. No solution of the year agrees with all given data, including 5 lunar eclipses recorded on oracle bone during the zenith Wu Ding reign which even Kwang-chih Chang could reconcile to no known calendar, at last 1986 settling on 1100 as a round number. Other eminent authorities diverged 1230-1027. David Nivison’s 1980 date, 15 Jan. 1045, has found wide favor, but Shuang 1992 computed 1122. By any count, the coincidence of Shang demise and Olmec flourishing arrests.

With c.1250 violent destruction of San Lorenzo, the chief Olmec center shifted 51 mi. north to La Venta Island, whence it established subcenters such as Chalcatzingo 330 mi. WWNW, frontier gateway in highland Morelos on the Amtzinac funneling hinterland products like obsidian to the coastal capital c.700-500 B.C. Migration out of the Olmec orbit to the opposite coast began by carbon dates c.1500 B.C., continuing in fits & starts all through the Olmec period and ever after.

POVERY POINT carbon dates range from 1115 B.C. ±95. After 1872 Smithsonian discovery, the site languqished forgotten till Clarence B. Moore descried it from his steamboat 1913. Not till 1952 when James Ford saw Army Corps of Engineers aerial photos did anyone realize the stadium design of a mile-square pre-planned city, 5-yard-diameter tholos houses built atop 3 1/3-yard-high artificial ridges, the ground between them black from fire-pit charcoal strewn with worn-out and broken utensils. Trash mounds accumulated up to 23 1/3 yds. A custom of dropping baked-clay briquettes into porridge and banking them red hot around raw meat—melon-shaped and grooved cylindrical for respective slow and fast cooking—began on Carolina shores and after moving around the Florida coast along to Louisiana, Poverty Point seized on it. Ford found 20 million briquettes there by the end of his 1955 season. They have turned up as far afield as falls of the Ohio at north-bank Kelley Site near Clarksville, Ind. and Tick Island on St. Johns River, NE Florida. Along the front terrace of the same Maçon Ridge, Poverty Point settlements dotted, overlooking the now relic Arkansas.

Charcoal from the crematory fire at commencement of enormous Mound B carbon dated 700 B.C., approximately the time La Venta’s fluted, volcano-shaped mound got underway. Mound B ran 133.3 x 200 yards at base, 18.6 yards high shaped like a bird flying north—1 mi. due north of even more enormous Mound A, which abutted the center rear (west) of the ridged-octagon central city, 233.3 x 266.6 yds. N/S, 23.3 yds. high (= a 7-story builiding, 1/10 inch short of 70 feet) shaped like a bird flying due west, both mounds apparently modeled after the gigantic flying-bird effigy at San Lorenzo.

Having no rocks within 30 miles, Poverty Point imported 40% from more than 100 mi. and procured raw materials from a 682-mile radius for grinding beads, figurines (of which some of the female have Shang/Olmec cleft foreheads), pendants, rocker stamps to perforate-decorate orange pottery, atlatl weights, bola plummets, pipes, etc., most prizing dark red jasper from the Tennessee valley of northern Alabama foir bead and bird pendants, O.M. Lien, R.P. Bullen, & Clarence H. Webb jointly reported Oct. 1984 a Poverty Point red-jasper owl amulet found on the bed of the Withlacoochee, which empties into the Gulf at Yankeetown, NW Florida. The orange pottery was that of La Venta’s subcenter Chalcatzingo , and St. Johns River, NE Florida, intermediary between Chalcatzingo and Poverty Point.

By frontier alliances and subcenters like La Venta’s Chalcatzingo, Poverty Point formalizeding an informal network, in the terminology of David C. Grove, co-excavator of Chalcatzingo beginning 1972, published 1984, whose observations on that site equallyC. apply tocould just as well have been referring to Poverty Point’s long-distance acquisition network for status goods. Contemporary with La Venta, Poverty Point lorded over a Shang/Olmec-style network of over 100 known sites (95 of them discovered between 1960 & 1980) clustered about 10 known major subcenters, as Webb supersedingly defined 1982 (the last) or probable subcenters: Jaketown 60 miles NE in the Yazoo delta region of west-central Mississippi; 60miles Teoc Creek on the Yazoo NNE of Poverty Point; Claiborne, Miss., east of the delta on the margin terrace of Pearl River Estuary at Lake Ponchartrain’s tip in sight of the Gulf; Beau Rivage, west of the delta at the head of Bayou Teche 138 miles south of Poverty Point; Calion cluster along on the Ouachita, south-central Ark.; Caney Island in Cypress Bayou below Catahoula Lake, east-central La.; Bayou La Batre at the Alabama-Tobogbee confluence SW Ala.; Elliott’s Point around Choctawhatchee Bay in the Fla. panhandle; Lambert Phase, the name given an area extending the N/S length of extreme west Tenn. including the Memphis vicinity plus individual Poverty Point towns across the Mississippi near the junction of Ark./Mo. states; & O’Bryan Ridge, SE Mo., extending to the Mississippi/Ohio confluence.

Claiborne of these, Webb surmised, resulted from Poverty Point recolonizing of Cedarland Plantation, shifting it east to the other side of a swamp arm, where settlers raised a yet larger midden—more horseshoe-shaped approaching a pentagon—full of black sand and clam instead of oyster shells, 280¼ yards outer diameter, 193 1/3 inner. It too lasted long to accumulate untold tons of shells defensively. A conical mound rose 350 yards east of village center. Pottery and other artifacts range nearly the gamut of mature Poverty Point types

The centralized Poverty Point domain as a whole bore every earmark of a state. Ford, principal excavator before Webb, decided to keep it classified a chiefdom because putting its wealth in a priestly bureaucracy instead of army, though granting warriors privileged position. Whether that be the criterion defining a state, it describes what culminated upstream centuries after Poverty Point demise. Ford called the entire period 1200-400 Theocratic Formative (= Preclassical).

Adena

As La Venta lost control of longdistance river routes to competition higher up, that disintegrated the Olmec feudal domain into old and new hamlets by 500 B.C., so developing interlopers upriver stifled Poverty Point with the same result at the same time. Denizens abandoning Louisiana moved upstream past the Poverty Point boundary at the approximate site of St. Louis, then up the Ohio transplanting Poverty Point culture wherever they went, intruding aboriginal Late Archaic Red Ochre on the north and Glacial Kame on the west. We call this transplanted Poverty Point Adena, after the name Territorial Gov. Thomas Worthington gave his stone mansion 1807 just NW of Chillicothe where William C. Mills definitively identified the culture summer 1901 excavating Adena Mound in a cornfield beyond Lake Ellensmere east of the mansion on the hilltop property overlooking the Scioto distantly far below to the north.

Clarence Lovejoy's 1897 excavation of Story Mound, a near duplicate a mile east, proved most valuable for first discovery of an associated 5-yard-diamtholos house matching Poverty Point's. Adena migrants also obviously brought their Poverty Point language, which ought to have been Olmec, which ought to have been Shang. Eight-language monosyllabic poly-synthetic Mixe-Zoquean spoken in the former Olmec heartland, Mexican and U.S. linguists agree, descends from Olmec, which they have yet to compare with Shang. It gives our best clue to Adena speech, which oceanic Algonquin eventually overcame, first from longhead Illinois conquerors encroaching east.

The Lower Gulf cultural center meanwhile gravitated from Poverty Point 245 miles SE to Tchefuncte on Lake Pontchartrain’s north rim, to become the principal intermediary between Veracruz and Midwestern Adena. That Adena habitants maintained contact with their mother region appears from adoption of Tchefuncte innovations in pipes, pottery, and direct-fire cooking in place of heated ceramic briquettes. In the pattern of La Venta imperialism, Adena formalized an already distant trade network, transferring besides tholos houses, heavy bowls (Fayette Thick), bird deity and birdstone pendants, clay figurines, gourd & seed-grass horticulture, cremation, and effigy & burial mounds to the Ohio Valley.

Reactionaries resisted mounting evidence for actual population shift. Venerable James B. Griffin, who achieved dictatorial prestige as director of U. Michigan Museum of Anthropology, was 73 at his 1978 diagnosis of Ohio Valley innovations as a mere regional exchange mechanism and set of cult-of-the-dead burial customs among varied bands not blood-related. But skull-deformed skeletons (nutcracker cradleboarded front & back) in Adena mounds prove the more robust, heavy-boned, roundheaded Olmec/Poverty Point breed, chiefs in Adena Mound itself ranging 5'7-11¾" amid a native gracile longheaded population that seldom reached 5'5". Mound burials throughout the Adena domain show the same rugged, square-chinned, occipitally-flattened high-valuted heads. A 25-30-year-old man 7 feet tall occupied Grave 40 in the Barrett-Site Dover Mound on the Ohio 10 mi. NW of Maysville, Ky., across-river from Ripley, O., which carbondated before 700 to c.100 B.C. He sported 5 pearls in upper & lower 2nd molars.

Traceable by conical burial mounds and bird or animal effigy mounds, Adena centered primarily on the South-Ohio Scioto and west-W. Va. Kanawha near Charleston, with major subcenters in Indiana, Kentucky, and on other rivers of Ohio and West Virginia. The largest Adena mound, at Miamisburg, O. nearing Indiana rose originally at least 22 2/3 yds. upon a 33-yd.-high bluff a mile east of the Great Miami River in south-side Miamisburg 77 crowfly mi. WNW of Chillicothe, its 292½- yd. circumference covering ½ acre, approximating Poverty Point Mound A. Excavation 1869 decapped a yard or more from the summit, whence a shaft sunk 12+ yds. ascertained burials at that depth and higher at 2 1/3 yds.—ash/stone/dirt layers attesting differing periods of interment.

Grave Creek (MAMMOTH) MOUND rose before excavation 21 2/3 or 22 1/3 yds. (formerly claimed 37), 98+ yds. diam. at base (computed also 131) in a symmetrical cone to a 20-yd. diam. flat top that based a shrine of some sort, the eminence associated with a 5-acre octagon and small mounds surrounding in a line of mounds along the W. Va. side of the Ohio midway (3+ mi.) between Ohio River, Little Grave Creek north, & Grave Creek south. (The 2 creeks take their name from a landmark Indian grave.) The original mound rose 7 or 8 feet on a hill, thereafter periodically enlarged. The plausible official estimate dates the total built between 250 & 150 B.C. Its 200 ±50 B.C. carbon date marks Adena apogee.

The astonishing likelihood that an Adena king lay buried herein was a Carthaginian garrison commander appears from the celebrated 1¾?-long, oval gray sandstone Grave Creek Tablet, recovered from a tomb at mound center halfway up, June 9, 1838. Five mold-cast copper bracelets like those in the Bat Creek, Tenn. chief’s grave ornamented the arms of the man’s skeleton. In a mess beside it lay 66 or 150 (2 versions) perforated mica sheets and a stone wrist-guard. Earlier, April 4, horizontal tunnelers from the north side lower, 4' up past charcoal and burnt bone of a cremation fire, reached an 8 x 12? vault aligned N/S. Logs on end supported logs laid over the top. The chamber tomb contained a 5' 9" man and a woman too disintegrated to measure, buried standing, evidently king & sacrificed queen. Beside them lay a 6" atlatl weight and 650 disk-shaped shell beads (mistaken for ivory).

The queen of the indefinitely later king escaped sacrifice, supposedly by Carthaginian instead of Adena tradition, and bade the tablet placed with her husband’s corpse, it so recorded. Eminent Danish professor Carl Christian Rafn identified its engraved 3 ruled lines Iberic. David Diringer’s 1968 recovery of ancient Iberic vowel values enabled Barry Fell 1974 (mistakenly thinking the tomb the one at mound base) to discern the king’s name South Iberic Tadach—later as Punic Tasach, reading retrograde:

Tumulus in honor of Tasach This engraved tile (His) Queen caused inscribed [ESOP III/2 #76, 3-4]

Fell surmised this a standard mound-tablet formula because resembling the 4 3/16" oval Braxton Tablet which a rural schoolboy, Blaine Wilson, found along Triplett Creek 8 mi. west of Gassaway, SE of Miamisburg in Braxton County—Iberic in a similar script closer to Catalan Greek:

Tumulus in honor of Teth This tile engraved (His) brother caused inscribed [ibid. 4].

J. Huston McCulloch verified 3 separate signs in the 2nd line where Fell interpolated a small foot to connect a freestanding vertical stroke with angled parentheses to make a W = shin (pronounced sh), correctly seeing it could be nothing else. Fell ascribed the first tablet to a probable Andalusian, the second to a probable immigrant from Valencia or Aragón; both if so, surely commanders of Carthaginian trading-stations. Carthage had conquered Spain mainly for manpower and since employing only a fraction of Spaniards in its colossal army during the 2nd Punic War—in Italy as cavalry, Africa as infantry center—implies stationing overseas. Carthage had far too few Phoenician-blood citizens to man an empire that stretched from Canaries to the Amazon through Mexico to the Ohio, reaching the Ohio via the old Poverty Point trade route up the inner Florida coast around to the delta and up the Mississippi, thence to West Virginia along the axis of Adena settlement. Carthaginians had also sailed up the east side of Florida to New England but unlikely portaged from the Atlantic to the Ohio, loath to travel afoot on foreign soil. (Vikings later sailed down the Ohio.) Adenans would not have known that Carthaginian sea & garrison commanders were subject to higher imperial authority out of sight.

BRACELETS, not known at Poverty Point or early Adena, betray Grave Creek Mound Late Adena, as does Hopewell bent-bar technique in Dover Mound’s Grave 40. Finger rings also appear in Adena burials late, as do the rare inscribed funerary tablets. Not so rare were small stone tablets whose obverses engraved 4, 6, or 9 panels in curvilinear snake designs, reverses palettes to grind ochre for inking obverses to stamp bodies and clothes as in contemporary Veracruz, revealing initiation. A notable specimen turned up 1842 as pillow beneath a deceased’s skull in the middle of 8 1/3-yd.-high Cincinnati Mound at 5th & Mound Sts. (Cincinnati). Snakes, though typifying Olmec, had not typified Poverty Point. Their resumption in the Ohio Valley shows the influence of snakeminded Illinois encroachers, who leaped to Hopewell civilization by way of Adena tutelage in centuries of coexistence. They discontinued palette tablets but held to snake preoccupation.

Adena Mound was Late Adena because its most elaborate first grave, dug into gravel below base line and bonfired at what became mound center, contained an effigy pipe of a short-legged Mexican male whose enormous earspools in lobes attest royal rank. The snake design of his loincloth bespeaks Hopewell, as does the effigy pipe itself. The figure stands 8?, gray in front, brick red in back, iron-oxide-splotched. A stem perhaps a yard long (which had burned or decayed) was inserted in the 1/8" diam. opening in the headdress. A 5/8" diam. exit hole ran through the feet. Nicotiana rustica tobacco reached Adena from Mexico (rather than the U.S. Southwest, where tobacco did not appear for another millennium-plus—unless Adena & Hopewell pipes smoked herbs). Other graves in Adena Mound contained 4, 5, & 6" cigar-shaped ceramic pipes. Earspools ran in both Adena & Hopewell. No actual specimens appeared in Adena Mound but turned up frequently in mounds of the same valley farther south. Anticipating or adopting Hopewell stone-box burials, Adena Mound’s Grave 14 at south-side baseline had 3 stone slabs at head and 4 at foot, overlain with unhewn logs which left only their molds.

Mills found the original Adena Mound rose 6? yds. and held 21 graves. The 2nd stage enlarged on all sides, about a yard on the south but nearly 17 on the north and 4½ added on top. The 12 burials of this stage attest Adena decline, corpses no longer bark-wrapped or log-enclosed. Any skeletons had decomposed beyond gender identifiability. Of 33 total burials in both stages, at least 2 were adult females, one of whom measured 5'7" (while the native norm ran 5'). On her right arm she wore a boat-shaped 2-hole 5¾" limestone gorget that 2 copper bracelets encircled, appearing an atlatl wrist-guard—a huntress? Seven adults lay decomposed unrecognizably more than maturity. There was one child, with mother, the rest robust adult men. The tallest (Grave 20) was also largest-boned. Beside his wrist lay a 2-hole limestone probable wrist-guard, and at his right knee 3 rounded diorite atlatl stones 2, 1¾, 1 7/8" diam. His right hand held a 5" spearpoint of Flint Ridge chalcedony. Near his left knee lay a finely-wrought 5" ceramic cigar-pipe.

One of the 5'8" men with singularly heavy bones bore a bracelet of bear claws. Defleshed tibias & fibulas of the 5?8? man in #14 were red-painted. He wore 4 copper bracelets on each arm, a string of 200+ disk beads averaging ¼? diam. around his head and a duplicate about his loins. At his feet lay 9 elm-leaf-shaped Flint-Ridge-chalcedony knives 3-4" long and another 2 at his right side. At his left lay a 4 x 2½ x ½? beveled-edge sandstone tablet with 4 random indentations which Mill surmised used in making bone awls such as a 5-6" dozen from Virginia deer scapulae beside him, together with a 7¼" hollow bone needle 1/8" diam. pierced at its bigger end. On either side of his head lay a mountain-lion canine perforated as beads. A 3" ash layer directly over his s epulchre contained bones of a mother & child mixed with bones of deer, elk, black bear, raccoon, otter, beaver, wild turkey, trumpeter swan, & great horned owl—a slaughter as at Anyang, Natchez, Ur, Burrows Cave, Proto-dynastic Egyptian Nekhen, etc. to accompany an illustrious deceased, with a grand sendoff funerary barbecue.

Unhewn-log sepulchres ran usually 8-9' long, 5-7' wide, 18" to 1½' high. But #21 on the north side was roomy enough to stand in, its logs up to a foot+ diam. and up to 19' long, the sides 8' apart. A 500-bead necklace of shell, bone, & freshwater pearl lay at his shoulder, very large beads (barrel, spheroid, concave) at his left knee. He wore a shell amulet in raccoon shape. Near his head lay 3 deer-antler spearpoints, 3 stone knives, & 7 Flint-Ridge chalcedony “arrowheads.” Bows & arrows supposedly went unknown in America till Late Woodland, 2 eras later, but Mills distinguished between spear & arrow heads. (Small points could fit small spears.) We can prove atlatls but unprovable bows, which would have decayed, do not mean they did not yet exist. This is the grave that held the unique effigy pipe.

Copper finger-rings, ocean-shell beads, and a worn mussel-shell hoe with hole for handle (an anomalous item probably lost in the grave building) numbered among other artifacts. Quite a few graves held no ornaments or implements. Besides flat-on-back cremations ran disarticulated secondary-burial bones. Heads pointed north, south, or east. Heavy-wall Fayette Thick pottery, deemed unworthy of burial with the dead, survived in trash middens.

No carbon dates come from Adena Mound itself (exca-vated long before carbondating and wholly obliterated) but 2 other Late central-Ohio-Valley mounds registered respectively 218 ±50 A.D. & 559 ±250 A.D.

UNIFORMITY OF ARTIFACTS throughout the Adena area suggests more centralized government than centralizing Poverty Point, increasingly stratified, authoritarian control largely via funerary and other ceremonialism. The incredible spread from its large central nucleus looked like imperial expansion but N.Y. state archaeologist William Ritchie & Carnegie Museum archaeologist Don Dragoo 1957-58 realized a Hopewell-driven Adena refugee exodus. Ritchie had reported 1937 in some astonishment at least 6 blocked-end Adena limestone pipes with other typical artifacts such as earspools and bird pendants that had turned up 1923 in Pine Valley, N.Y. mound burials on the east shore of Canandaigua Lake, subsequently in central and eastern New York near Amber on Otisco Lake and near Hoffman in Schenectady County, also at a large cemetery near Palatine Bridge in Montgomery County and in Mohawk Valley, N.Y. at Stillwater and North New York at the foot of Grindstone Island in St. Lawrence River, etc. By 1936 he had been startled to find Adena in New England—pipes, bird pendants, earspools, etc. recurring in a wide swath of mounds. Dragoo later had a similar experience in the upper Ohio Valley, where scattered village sites bore typical blocked-end ceramic cigar-pipes, “reel-shaped gorgets” (earspools), rectangular wrist-guards which he and Ritchie called gorgets, stemmed points, Fayette Thick potsherds, etc. McKees Rocks Mound at Pittsburgh stands the easternmost large Adena mound. There the movement divided, groups splaying northward through the Allegheny Valley into SW New York, those south up the Monongahela. No definitely known Adena mounds rise along the Allegheny, but several village sites dot, and stray artifacts strew.

Less harried bands built small stone mounds along the Monongahela. Cyrus Thomas reported such 1891 (published 1894) at Monongahela City, where a mound contained a quartz or calcite pipe, and a bigger nearby mound Ohio Flint artifacts. Similar mounds continued on Cheat and Youghiogheny tributaries as far as eastern West Virginia and west Maryland, pointing to the Potomac as farther route to Chesapeake Bay, where groups settled on opposite shores, West River, 10 mi. below Annapolis, and Sandy Hill at Bay top (NE Md.). Judging from recovered pipes, these royal Maryland enclaves smoked exponentially more than nuclear Adena centers left behind.

West River yielded 3 carbon dates: 75 B.C. ±255 A.D., 255 A.D.±250, & 325 A.D.±400, compared to 2 Upper Ohio: 290 B.C. ±100 & 50 A.D. ±100 which, with artifact affinity, con-firmed Upper Ohio derivation, thus physical transfer. Sandy Hill’s immense cemetery contained 100% of 92 diagnostic Adena traits, its stone items Ohio pipestone, Flint Ridge chal-cedony, & Indiana flint from Harrison County bordering the Ohio. The 2 Maryland enclaves evidently represented royal en-tourages carrying all their considerable wealth the full distance.

Some bands who got that far pressed on to found a village at Fenton on the Delaware, other bands via the Delaware on to North New Jersey, founding a village at Rosencrans (89% Adena traits), yet other up the Hudson, Mohawk, and Connecticut to Canada & Vermont. Their Long Sault Island village in the St. Lawrence (75% Adena) still included Ohio & Indiana stone foreign to this area and New England. The retired Royal Ontario Museum curator W.A. Kenyon 1986 traced 10 Adena mounds up the St. Lawrence, 5 of them above Lake Rice.

Groups who went up the Delaware appear to have made contact with those who went up the Allegheny. Ritchie named the hybrid Adena/native Archaic Middlesex, after a type-site he identified in central New York 1937. It spread to West New York, Ontario, & South Maine, usually along major rivers, concentrating in the east half of New York and west half of New England. Rosencrans is also classified Middlesex, retaining Adena blocked-end cigar pipes, leaf-shaped knives, discoidal-shell & copper beads, copper awls with rectangular cross section, & boatstone.

A different refugee division fled down the Ohio west and up the Tennessee south, to forge Tennessee Valley “Middlesex” called Copena, over all North Alabama and at 2 South Tennessee towns, one in Hardin Co. off the Tennessee, the other in Marshall Co. where the Tennessee’s Duck tributary led. A trait Ritchie & Dragoo did not count was positioning of mounds with panoramic vistas, like Adena Mound—some-thing Kenyon appreciated of Adena that reached South Ontario.

Hopewell

FOR 2 CENTURIES from c.150 B.C. the dominating Adena interlopers coexisted intermarrying with Ohio Valley aborigines, during which outnumbering Illinois Indians, springing within Adena’s western orbit, swept east steadily arrogating the Adena trade network. They intensified the culture that civilized them which they superseded, as Mycenæans, also with a different language, learned from and overcame Minoan.

Ohio’s “First Historian” Caleb Atwater described the 38 defining mounds on Capt. Mordecai C. Hopewell’s farm just NW of Adena Mound, 1820. Ephraim George Squier, Chillicothe Gazette editor, & Dr. Edwin Hamilton Davis, Chillicothe physician, surveyed from 1846. Phillips Academy professor Dr.. Edwin King Moorehead explored extensively for the Field Museum 1891-92. Henry Clyde Shetrone, Ohio State Museum, conducted an “exhaustive examination” 1922-25. W.C. Mills extended the term Hopewell to other sites in 1909-22 reports & his 1914 Archaeological Atlas of Ohio. Shetrone applied it to the original 38 in Exploration of the Hopewell Group 1926 and to the culture at large in The Mound-Builders 1930. Their younger colleague Moorehead wrote The Hopewell Mound Group 1922 but 1932 credited the name-coining to Mills and Shetrone.

HOPEWELL CULTURE, expanding the vast Adena orbit, eventually surrounded the Great Lakes, notably South Michigan & South Wisconsin, moved across all Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, most of Iowa, SE corners of Minnesota and Nebraska, NE corner of Oklahoma, eastern third-plus of Kansas, all but a SW sliver of Arkansas, northern 2/3 of Louisiana, all Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Mississippi, & Alabama, at least western half of Georgia, South Carolina to the coast, western third of North Carolina & Virginia, and Pennsylvania short of New Jersey.

This expansion followed trade lines already phenomenal in the Poverty Point era but now procuring obsidian from the Yellowstone of Wyoming, grizzly claws & canines from the Rockies, copper from Lake Superior, pipestone from Minnesota, mica from mountains of western North Carolina, silver from Ontario, conch shells, alligator teeth, & fossil shark teeth from Florida, fresh-water pearls—the Hopewell Group of mounds alone yielding over 100,000—likely from Illinois, Wabash, and/or other local streams—all status-symbol items, implying widening class distinctions and tightening autocratic control.

Consolidation of this immense river network into a homogeneous empire became the dominant trend of the 1st century B.C. through 1st 3 centuries A.D., coinciding with immigration from Roman Mauretania (Algeria & Morocco) and Further Spain (Punicized Celtiberic Andalusia). Ojibway, Natchez, & Yuchi traditions concur that a super chief called Great Sun ruled the whole, likely from Newark, O., through satrap subsuns, all quarters speaking dialects of Algonquin, a language family far older than Hopewell that surroundingly prevailed well beyond it.

PEOPLE DID NOT LIVE on the grassed mounds but in hamlets nearby—scantily known partly because mound-minded archaeologists did not seek associated settlements but also because houses were constructed of perishable materials and commonly submerged in floodplains, scattered in wide-spaced loci of 50-100 inhabitants which give the impression of a loose association when increasing homogeneity out of disparate elements suggests emergent or persisting central government. Despite low density population, competition within and between villages accompanied growth, dependence on trade, and menace of raids, in turn conducing alliances. Defensive alliances were or became religious, economic, and nuptial. Scattered small units would have been vulnerable to a not-necessarily-numerous organized force within or without that imposed a religion with its ritual language in a taxing/conscriptive mechanism one hamlet at a time, to control river highways.

Hopewell mounds did not strive for Adena height. Hopewell’s highest was the 11-yd.-high central mound, #25, of Hopewell Group. Hopewell burials, ¾ cremation, grew more elaborate while enclosing fewer per mound. Important uncremated received log tombs. Stone-box tombs—flat slabs boxed around & atop—became diagnostic of Hopewell.

Knotweed and some barley increased Hopewell seed diet over Adena. An authoritarian elite probably encouraged fruit and nut-tree planting besides fiber & salt plants plus medicinal herbs including holly Ilex vomitoria for the ceremonial purgative black drink, botanist Patty Jo Watson inferred 1988. Proliferation of lovingly carved soapstone or modeled ceramic ritual platform pipes representing all kinds of animals & birds imply more attentive tobacco cultivation.

Hopewell brought in or evolved thin-walled pottery, which paradoxically withstood heat better. Four-footed bases number among new Mesoamerican imports along with mica mirrors and copper-jacketed panpipes, as Hopewell belatedly resumed the thousand-year-old Poverty Point technique of flaking blades from prepared cores.

Outlying homesteads are best known by a pair that lay directly in the path of a federal expressway (FAP 408) under construction along the west border of Illinois. A 2-man archaeological survey discovered the Massey site in a wheatfield June 11, 1976 (named for its latest landowner, Fred Massey). The Archie took its name from a construction worker who first found potsherds and a chert hoe there, discovered 885 yds. east June 30 in roadway clearance. Both rolling-bluff sites, 3 mi. SW of Jacksonville, bordered the north bank of Sandy Creek, which flows into the Illinois 16 mi. west.. A team consisting of Kenneth Farnsworth, Ann Koski, David & Nancy Asch, & Tomas Cook with highway equipment hastily excavated & interpreted the probable year-round farmsteads totaling together 2560 sq. yds. A single family may have occupied sequentially or 2 families concurrently some of the time, especially c.100 A.D. Charcoal from Massey carbondated 20 & 200 A.D., from Archie 50 & 150 A.D., all 4 dates ±70 (computed by the Libby half-life corrected for C11 fractionation).

Postholes at both farms described an oblong within a rectangle open at NE corner. Massy ran c.5½-yd. diam. (lengthwise 8¾ yds.), Archie 5 1/5. Deepest postholes indicated a center post, large SW-corner post, and 2 gateway posts on the SW side. Two Massey plats suggested habitation/butchering, overlying a Late Archaic hunting camp. Smiling Dan, a base camp 15½ mi. due west close to the river, had occupants primarily 50-250 A.D. Napoleon Hollow twin opposite, across-river, lay less intensively occupied, 20 B.C.-140 A.D. Projectile points ran standard Hopewell. The sites bearing no stone, chert had been transported in, all implements manufactured on the premises. Potters molded local clay in styles of farther-south “Crab Orchard” and Lower Mississippi Valley (La., Miss., Ark.). Acid soil had dissolved all bones. Flotation analysis showed gathering of only hog peanuts in the woods, but other nuts comprised a large proportion of the diet—hazelnuts over half of these; black walnut, thick-shelled hickory, bitternut hickory, & oak acorns less. Cultivated starchy seeds included 2/3 knotwood, less than 1/3 goosefoot (both fall-harvested), little barley & maygrass (smaller-scale late spring or early-summer- harvested). Oil-seed crops included sunflower most, marsh elder, pepo squash, bottle gourd; no maize. Without surviving bones, Asch & Asch could not determine animals eaten.

Frontier-Illinois homesteads were not isolated, situated near major base camps of a feudal system among 200+ Hopewell sites known in immediate environs of the Lower Illinois Valley—approaching urban interaction.

OUR KNOWLEDGE of Hopewell pathology comes largely from Elizabeth Site’s north-corner-mound cemetery on a 54+-yds.-high west bluff overlooking Illinois River and Napoleon Hollow south, excavated 1979-85, reported 1988 by Susan R. Frankenberg, Donald G. Albertson, & Luci Kohn, who attributed increased degenerative disease to old age (36.10 years—a 5.33-year rise of life expectancy over Archaic [Adena?], 10-12 over succeeding Mississippian). Periostitis of legs & arms from bone infection, fracture healing, or syphilis, and arthritis especially of elbows frequent, along with anemia and meningitis.

MEDITERRANEAN STIMULATION of Hopewell is seen first of all in elephant effigy pipes, such as the pair displayed since at least 1885 in the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum at Davenport, Ia. Peter Mare plowed up one of them in a Louisa Co. cornfield; the Rev. A. Blumer extracted the other from a mound on the farm of P. Hass in the same county. Another was unearthed 1889 at Toolesboro, Ia., and there are others, kept mainly out of sight and studiously ignored. A notable specimen came from Ross Co., O. Seip Mound, 2nd largest Hopewell mound, 10 yds. high but a massive 83 1/3 yds. long x 50 wide.

Increase Allen Lapham surveyed an elephant effigy mound near Cassville, Wis. July 1850, matched by another discovered 1872 near the Mississippi in Grant Co., Wis. Archaeologist R. Clark Mallam reported a since-destroyed elephant mound just above Garber, Ia. on Turkey River, which empties into the Mississippi nearly due west of Cassville, Wis. Elephants engraved on stones in Southern Illinois Burrows Cave should date from the same era, as also a Hopewell-mound stone knife in the Ohio State Historical Society Museum that engraves a tropical hunter about to spear an elephant, below the Coptic “Mystic Symbol” (Yahweh in Hebrew retrograde, David Deal clarified 1992, 1994, etc.) which recurs vastly, especially in Michigan Hopewell mounds but farther afield including Burrows Stones.

The many remarkable Hopewell urban sites—all different—reflect Mediterranean presence. The most extensive Newark earthworks appear to center Hopewell culture & probable empire. North Newark obliterated Hopewell remains in its sector. The viewable lie in SW Newark, 32 mi. NE of Hopewell Group at the junction of South & Raccoon forks with Licking River. Civil engineering professor James P. Scherz found they employed 3 Egyptian units of measure: statute foot (same as English, which retained that of 3rd-millennium-B.C. Mesopotamia & Egypt); 1%-shorter royal foot (Scherz’s “musical cubit” 3.2 ratio = interval of 5th in music); & Livio Stecchini’s geographic foot (1/6000 of a minute of arc at Egyptian Delta latitude). Stecchini found Ptolemies took over ancient Egyptian measures uncomprehending their harmoni-zation. We must add that Carthage in turn took over Egyptian measures as well as Egyptian religion; which explains their prevalence in Hopewell America and Teotihuacán Mexico in the absence of ethnic Egyptians other than Copts.

Using these 3 versions of foot simultaneously in rope lengths cubed to harmonize the 3 values, Newark squared the circle (insofar as squarable), constructed a 400-yd. circle with matching square and 8-gate 5+-acre octagon, as well as parallel embankments and circular & elliptical mounds over 4 sq. mi., showing π, ψ (golden section, 1.618), solstices, equinoxes, maximum declination of sun & moon, etc. which earthworks all the way to Great Lakes incorporated. Ross Hamilton 1999 discerned Newark’s great circle & octagon align max. & min. northern & southern moonrise & moonset.

From Mauretania and Further Spain (Hispania Ulterior, capital Córdoba) must have come myriad Jews to account for such artifacts as the 6x3" wedge-shaped keystone which Licking Co. surveyor David Wyrick discovered June 1860 in Newark’s “Stone Stack” that bore a Hebrew tag on each of its 4 sides which Lynn Holmes translated 1973: meleck eratz (king of the earth), torah adonai (law of the Lord), dbhar adonai (Word of the Lord), & godesh quoashim (Holy of Holies), only 4 or 5 of the square characters corresponding to those in present use. The packed stone cone rose 16 2/3 yds. upon a 19½ -yd.-circum-ference base 10 mi. south of Newark near Jacksontown. Quarrying 10,000 wagon loads from it 1831-32 to line the Ohio Canal, etc. revealed a circle of small clay mounds enclosed within the base, one of which Wyrick with his young son opened Nov. 12, 1860 to discover bones, brass rings and, embedded in clay beneath them, a miniature oblong stone “sarcophagus,” its top and bottom halves cemented shut. Prying open disclosed a black limestone 6 7/8" long depicting a robed, turbaned MSH (Moshe=Moses) in bas relief standing in an archway holding a tablet of the Ten Commandments inscribed in 259 square paleo-Hebrew letters without spaces, dividers, or points running down each side of the arch, then along rims and back. A space at bottom allowed slipping a strap through, and the lower left side shows wear from holding strapped to wrist—a tefilla, or phylactery, Deal & James Trimm identified 1996. Zena Halpern suggested May 5, 1999 the phylactery became a mezzuzah, sealed and meant to remain forever unseen as holy protection. (Zulu witch doctor Credo Mutwa of Soweto, South Africa owned a Ten Commandments tablet in the same paleo-Hebrew with same Moshe—a tablet fitting Zulu religion no more than the Newark Decalog Stone fit Hopewell culture.)

From a 7'-high mound 3 mi. east of Newark somebody extracted a right-triangle-shaped limestone 1865 (hypotenuse 3½"). A shin engraved on a human forehead probably, said Holmes, stands for Shaddai (almighty). The side of a dog or panther bears 4 or 5 strange letters, but clear Hebrew on the forehead of an aged face: teth, lamedh, heth, sayin, abbreviating “It is good to love the aged.” From this mound 2 years later David N. Johnson extracted a sandstone human head bearing Hebrew yodh, he, nun, oe, lamed, abbreviating, Holmes discerned, “May the Lord have mercy on him, an untimely birth.”

The Rev. Dr. Arthur Murray June 1991 translated a curse prayer on a Burrows Stone engraved in same-style Hebrew as the Bar Kokhba Bat Creek inscription. Zena 1995 recognized the triangle-base Hasmonean menorah on a Burrows-Stone border (with shofar, lute, harp, & Egyptian hieroglyphics identifying a king). A prodigious Hopewell “Fortification” on East Fork of the Little Miami c.20 mi. above its mouth near Milford (c.110 SW of Newark)—plowed out of existence by 1894—appears on Maj. Isaac Roberdeau’s splendid 1823 map, rediscovered 1988 in Army Corps of Engineers records by which David Berry of Columbus first noted the “gridiron” of 9 parallel earthworks 550 yds. long 55 apart forming a giant Hanukkah, and McCulloch 1996 its enclosing wall the shape of an ancient oil lamp.

THE LANGUAGES of Burrows Stones run consistently Mediterranean, all spoken 1st century B.C.-1st few centuries A.D. in Roman Mauretania and its trading partner, former Carthaginian colony Further Spain)—Neo-Punic (i.e. the language of Carthage after the 146 B.C. eclipse of Carthage, still widely spoken in its former empire; Numidia had been civilized by Carthage), Celtiberic, Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, Numidian (Old Libyan), & Latin—precisely the mix, vocabularies in which persisted as a tier of Central Algonquin after Hopewell demise which could only have been acquired during Hopewell incandescence and which monumentalize the powerful influence of Mauretanian refugees on Hopewell civilization.

In addition to vocabularies in these tongues, Ethel Stewart, Buff Parry, & Barry Fell independently detected an Arabic strain. Etymologist/foklorist/physicist J.J. White suggests these luminaries construed Punic as Arabic because using Arabic dictionaries (appropriately since roots are the same).

Egyptian measures of Hopewell earthworks have their counterpart in Egyptian-style burials in Burrows Cave with statues, urns, lamps, engravings in Egyptian style. Crypts duplicate the tomb of Juba II, king of Mauretania and royal Numidian heir, which duplicates Tutankhamon’s in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Libyans, Carthaginians, Numidians, Alexandrine followers of Ptolemaic heiress Mauretania queen Kleopatra Selene, and Roman Isis cultists all would have employed Egyptian as their ceremonial language—repetitious ceremonies the surest avenue to native appropriation, reinforced by Libyan’s having grown indistinguishable from Egyptian in sound; Copts speaking Egyptian though writing it (when writing) in Ptolemaic Greek.

LIZARD MOUND PARK in SE Wisconsin above West Bend within 20 mi. of Lake Michigan exemplifies Hopewell expansion with sophisticated mathematics. The complex consists of c.32 varishaped mounds—circle, oblong, dragon-fly, dagger—that look random and hardly animalistic but demark precise clocking angles and unascertained functions as they spread mirror-matching close to headwaters of Milwaukee River which flows into Lake Michigan and within 10 mi. (looking west) of Rock River branches which flow into the Mississippi. Under Scherz’ direction William Wenzel, Pat Arnstein, & Larry Johns resurveyed 1990, ascertaining e.g. that Lizard Mound itself at the group’s SW corner points to the winter solstice sunrise, as does the tail of its obliquely-placed nearest-east neighbor, while a right-angled gap between it and its mirror-extension further neighbor points NE to the summer-solstice sunrise. A notched dagger-mound just off Lizard Mound head points true north. Three circular mounds in an east-west row align with the spring equinox sunset. All circular mounds, large and small, served as sighting-points to, from, or along. Other mounds point toward the rising and setting moon at its maximum southern swing in an 18.6-year cycle, whereby to reset solar calendars and 18.6-year lunar cycle. By certain mounds observers could also set maximum tides and eclipse cycles. Besides Lizard Mound in Wisconsin, Joan Price 2000 diagrammed the extraordinary Lake Mendota complex which, in addition to solstices, recorded the Mars interval and 8.3-year Venus Interval.

Six mounds of NW Ontario along Rainy River to Lake of the Woods demark Hopewell’s northernmost expansion by diagnostic globular pots (which Adena did not bury) and panpipes.

N.C. state archaeologist David Moore 1984 discovered an enormous mound enclosing a 300 sq.-yd. village in a cornfield of the 8,000-acre Biltmore estate at Asheville.; wherefore preserved. On the Swannanoa River at the intersection of a South Carolina-to-Ohio trail with a Virginia-into-west-N.C. mountains, the village featured a series of tholos structures 25-28 1/3 yds. diam. (c.36 postholes), doubtless gathering-place of vicinity hamlets. Concerted excavation began 1989. By Dec. 1, 2002 Tim Whitmire could report Hopewell “rocker-stamped” pottery, clay figurine fragments, Ohio glossy heat-treated flint blades, & upper-Midwest cut-&-polished gray wolf mandible. The several archaeologists identified 9 construction stages, earliest on yellow subsoil. They believed its c.200-500-A.D. occupants Connestees, whom they regarded likely Cherokee ancestors. Similar Connestee Mound lies 15 mi. west near Canton.

Hopewell continued or resumed Poverty Point contact with Mexico via NW Florida, whereby Teotihuacán influence infiltrated the Ohio Valley. But a time came when Ohio Valley influence filtered back to Florida over the attenuated water line. The principal waystation between Ohio Valley and Veracruz, Crystal River in NW Fla. throve 4 mi. from the Gulf upriver on the north side. The modern town Crystal River lies another 6 mi. farther on at the great spring that originates the river. Archaic villages existed on the site when denizens of Late Deptford culture of the Savannah estuary moved down with their compelling ceremonialism and took over the native village on Crystal River perhaps 200 B.C. and, strategically located for distant trade, made it the regional ceremonial center between Tampa and Apalachicola Bays by 100 A.D. forsaking primary reliance on horticulture of the previous village for shellfish, mainly oysters.

Clarence Bloomfield Moore first steamed his stern paddler up Crystal River 1903 to the great symmetrical shell-heap in plain view from the river—9 yds., 1', 8" high—an oblong 60 2/3 yds. diam. NW/SE, its top a plateau 35 2/3 yds. diam. one way, 16 2/3 another. A 60 2/3-yd. graded ramp 4 2/3-7 yds. wide ascended on the NE. Moore did not see this composite was not a colossal trash midden but a temple mound anticipating Mississippian, like flat-topped Marietta Mound in Ohio. North of this monument 115 yds. stood “Sand Mound,” a 4-tier ziggurat like those of Teotihuacán, which Moore took for merely a terraced burial mound from which he excavated c.225 graves and winter 1906 another 186 from what remained of the terrace below the mound—no deformed skulls, a major difference from Hopewell. Despite excellent mapping, he did not recognize large structures quite a distance NW of Sand Mound and farther north, or the geometrical majesty of the 200-sq.-yd. plaza, which Sand Mound centered and which functioned as a Hopewell-type observatory as well as cemetery and ceremonial ground.

Clark Hardman, Jr. 1971 demonstrated its registering winter solstice sunsets, equinoxes, and much more which many postholes that held perished markers confuse. Numerous untested sighting-stones stand beyond the vast park in the woods. Ripley Bullen’s resumed excavation verified Moore that copper and other Hopewellian objects occurred at relatively deep Deptford levels corresponding to Hopewell heyday. Two carbon dates Bullen managed, not from the lowest level but within the Deptford stratum were 80 A.D. ±130 and 200 A.D. ±130. Charcoal from food refuse buried at dedication of Stele 1 yielded 350 A.D. ±210 & 530 ±125, 2 runs of the same sample, of which Brent Weisman in his commissioned 1995 comprehensive commentary accepted only the un-pretreated latter. He distinguished 4 successive style-periods, none characterizable Hopewell but more Hopewell similarities than any other Gulf site. The most obvious: earspools and copper-jacketed panpipes, as Moore discovered, not recognizing the latter as panpipes and calling earspools ear plugs. Emerson Greenman when asst. curator of the U. Michigan Museum of Anthropology Great Lakes Division 1938 saw Crystal River tetrapod and waisted pottery Hopewell though most of what Moore dug up not. Of 321 traits he abstracted from 17 Hopewell mounds in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, & Illinois, North Florida mounds matched 136, Crystal River the largest number, including mica sheets, huge marine-shell containers, fabric-wrapped copper artifacts, globular shallow & effigy bowls, “roulette” rocker pattern between lines, crucible-like cups, ceremonial cohering, large number of stone celts, puma jaw cut for a mask, etc., adding more traits in common while discussing. The rostrum of a puma skull for mask found in Dover Mound, Ky. reveals this Hopewell custom Adena or acquired from Hopewell during coexistence. Greenman also missed the geometrical layout (because Moore had) and observatory function (not discovered for more than another 3 decades). He also missed rare negative bowl painting, which Gordon Willey & Philip Phillips knew 1944 centered on the Ohio below its mouth and Tennessee-Cumberland area but presumed no trade! though not entirely ruling out a connection. Moore found one of his best museum pieces 1918 in the ancient cemetery at Cedar Keys north of Crystal River at the Suwanee mouth bearing a convoluted Hopewell-style engraving of snake pairs in motion.

HOPEWELL WILTING c.400-600 A.D. looks like a pandemic devastation depleting vitality, as if refugees from desperately deteriorating Rome brought its raging bubonic plague to the upper Midwest. Only this late in the era did disturbance impel resettlement on fortified summits, leaving lowland centers undefended. The best example and most duplicated, Shawnee Ft. Ancient, occupied a 100-acre peninsula-like projection on Little Miami’s east bank overlooking the river 90 yds. below, some 65 crowfly mi. west of Hopewell Mound Group, c.15 south of Miamisburg, SW Ohio. Other notable palisaded hilltops materialized at Ft. Miami near the Great Miami mouth at extreme SW Ohio past Cincinnati, and a few mi. upriver near Hamilton; Spruce Hill Fort near Bourneville in the same county as Chillicothe; Glenfort Fort NE of Chillicothe; and the best preserved, Fort Hill, northern Ohio.

The Sháwano confederation, according to Yuchi legend, operated ecumenically before Hopewell deterioration on both sides of the Ohio when centralization broke down in internecine strife. Lenapés (called Delawares after removal east) claimed they emerged from the Ohio side of the Ohio, i.e. within the Hopewell nucleus, which extended across-river into West Virginia and Kentucky. Decadent Hopewell expanded, like Adena of yore from Hopewell aggression, far into its former frontier to embrace ethnic groups and cultures as diverse as Great Plains Blackfeet, Arapahos, & Cheyenne on the one hand and tidewater Powhatans on the other, linked, as Frank Speck marveled 1928, only by language, already common on the eastern seaboard.

A safe distance from the contagion, Southern chieftainships, or satrapies—provinces to de Soto—sustained Hopewell independent, into Mississippian (Late Woodland). Chechi in their title equaled “satrap,” signifying former feudal subordination to higher authority. Thus the chechi of Creek/Yuchi Coosa Province, which stretched from Alabama to the South Carolina sea, became king of that domain. Algonquin speaking Shawnees, likely relatives of disease-felled Hopewellians, moved into Ohio with little memory of Hopewell glory or knowledge of its technology; wherefore descendants could not remember Hopewell or Adena.

Hopewell snake obsession persisted, culminating in the anomalous orbit-in-mouth Great Serpent writhing a quarter mi. across the declining slope of a ridge on the west side of Brush Creek Bend 1½ mi. NW of Locust Grove, South Ohio, illustrating a drama which in Egyptian was Apep, who swallowed or attempted to swallow the sun in its nightly voyage beneath the earth. If swallowing, he disgorges at sunrise. Brad Lepper, Ohio Hist. Soc. archaeologist, reported carbon dating of test borings 1997 c.1070 A.D., placing it in Mississippian which, though resuming moundbuilding (but not burial mounds) and snakemindedness, eschewed effigies, as usually had Hopewell. It fits with numerous representations of snake sun-swallowing in Burrows Cave, sealed c.800 A.D., whose artifacts therefore date no later but indefinitely earlier, prevailingly at Hopewell zenith. Date discrepancy, if the carbon date is verified, may reflect Hopewell holdover in its most fortified southern-Ohio nucleus. On the Lake Rice north shore, Ont., Serpent Mound, 64 2/3 yds. long, its orbit mound a distance west of mouth, rose the probable last.

Luther College, Ia. archaeologist Clark Mallam 1981 identified the mid-Kansas depressed effigy just NE of Lyons, and 1982 removed a 6-7" layer from the packed clay beneath & sides lined with surplus, to disclose an earth-carved 53 1/3-yd. serpent with sun in mouth. By lighting experiments his associates at 1983 summer solstice beheld sunshine focused on its orbit. Mallam hesitated to call this effigy Hopewell, doubting Hopewell reached Kansas, but P.J. O’Brien had reported the Don Wells Hopewell Site c.100 crowfly mi. NE near Manhattan 1972, and 1948 the James Younkin site on bluffs 5.8 mi. from Junction City overlooking the Republican River ¼ mi. south, which gave up a Hopewell platform pipe together with Hopewell 4-lobed Zoned Stamped jars, etc.

Mississipian

MAIZE HORTICULTURE limitedly introduced in Hopewell yielded small 12-16-row ears. Richard A. Yarnrell 1986 noted that in the hiatus between Hopewell and Mississippian when fine Hopewell crafts ceased and people concentrated on new flat mounds, frequently in pairs for temple and palace, corn continued to acclimatize and evolve to the large 8-row Eastern or Northern Flint variety, the basis of Mississippian’s replenished population. Maize remained totally absent in the American Bottom where Mississippian grew most powerful, till its Emergent phase 800-1000 A.D. and, though spreading vastly, occurred regularly in large quantities nowhere till after 1000, Gary Crawford, David Smith, & Vandy Bowyer concluded Jan. 1997.

In the course of universal transition to maize dependence, tribes speaking Muskogean; languages crossed the Mississippi from “far west,” in the terminology of their earliest legends, a 43-year sojourn in Choctaw annals, from persecution of a more powerful people in one version, inability of the land to support expanding population, and surely desiccation of already desert habitat. A hint that the far west land had been Asia, Angie Debo cautioned, could have been picked up from missionary inference. Muskogeans likeliest migrated from North Mexico. The Jewish Scot Indian trader James Adair, who preferred to reside among Chickasaws who had their largest Jewish hybrid, knew 1775 that the names Choctaw and Chickasaw contracted Choccomaws and Chickemacaws, betraying Mexican totems. De Soto called Chickasaws Chicaza; Louisiana French Tchikacha, Creeks Tchikasa, Choctaws Chahta, Yuchis Gahcáhhah. Chickasha, Okla. is pronounced Chickashay. Elvas of de Soto’s amanuenses called Choctaw country Pafallaya, which John R. Swanton recognized a form of Choctaws. Surrounding tribes were also called Pa^ms-Pafallaya, “Long Hair,” for not cutting locks.

After jointly crossing the great river on canoes & rafts, Choctaws and Chickasaws separated at the Yazoo, Chickasaws to northern Mississippi, Choctaws to the Jackson Prairie & Pine Hill region across Pearl River in East Mississippi.

Creeks struck across the Mississippi farther up. De Soto 1540 found them ensconced in 3 provinces—Abrihka on the middle Coosa in NE Alabama; Tallapoosa on the Tallapoosa, central Ala.; & Apalachicola on the lower Chattahoochee, SW Georgia. De Soto with his sick men and hogs introduced influenza, smallpox, measles, anthrax, etc. all the way to Arkansas & Texas which in a generation depopulated the region at least 80%, to end moundbuilding. Regrouping via alliances and incorporations gave gradual rise to the Creek Confederacy. Upper Creeks occupying the Coosa and Tallapoosa, including Alabamas, Kosatis, Tuskegees, for a time Mobile Yamassees, & (although speaking Algonquin) part of the Shawnees. Lower Creeks east & SE occupied the Chattahoochee (Ala./Ga. border). Lower Creeks dwelt with Hitchitis on the Ocmulgee, their Ocheese, which South Carolinians shortened to Creek, also with Apalachees, Ocmulgees, & ethnically, linguistically distinct Yuchis.

Creeks regarded Lenapés & Yuchis their grandfathers, meaning predecessors, as Yuchi tradition claims. Yuchis had surely been prominent in the Uto (i.e. Yuchi)-Aztec migration from Shan Shan Province of Xi-Xia Kingdom in Central Asia (thus Shoshoni) at Tibetan overrunning. The Xiongnu ’Aza (= Tibetan barbarians) combined with Teks (shepherd North Tibetans as distinguished from rice-growing South Tibetan Tai) comprised the Tu-yü-hun royalty who lost their province. King Srong bsan Sgam-bo of Tibet beginning 663 A.D. moved into Shan Shan to initiate the great migratory wave. The composite horde would then have reached California as early as 700 in the waned Hopewell aftermath. Benjamin Barton 1797 said Delawares called Creeks Masquachki (Swampland), moving the learned Smithsonian linguist Albert S. Gatschet to speculate whether this Algonquin term, appropriated via Shawnees, implied eastern origin. But Muskogee, a non-Creek word, was nevertheless a Muskogean confederation ritual term meaning “Snake/man/earth,” plural Muskogulgee, gul=“union.” Musko-gean languages borrowed heavily from Yuchi and Algonquin. U. Calif. linguist Mary Haas decided 1958 the Algonquin had not been borrowed but, likelier than Algonquin derivation, Creek speech overlay a native Algonquin substrate. The Mississippian culture (8-row corn, temple mounds, shell-tempered pottery) adopted in the 100+ communities of the Ohio’s Black Bottom and comparable American Bottom stretching 70 mi. south of the Missouri/Illinois/Mississippi confluence from Alton, Ill. above St. Louis to Chester below, grew with no Muskogean influx, continuing to speak ancestral Algonquin.

LORDING AMERICAN BOTTOM flatlands up to 12 mi. wide before river bluffs, Cahokia, near Collinsville obliquely opposite the site of St. Louis and twinned same size at St. Louis (whose founding it eradicated), less than 40 mi. by river below the Mississippi-Illinois confluence on ruins of an earlier village, appears to have ruled beyond Muskogean orbit as capital of the former Hopewell territory, core shifted SW, including major subcenters Angel in extreme SW Indiana on the Ohio as it approached the Wabash border of southern Illinois at Evansville, and Kincaid at Illinois base on the Ohio at its confluence with the Tennessee, NE across from Paducah, Ky. On the east side of Cahokia Creek just SW of its confluence with Canteen Creek to wind to the Mississippi, dominating Monk’s Mound (named for Trappists who gardened there early 1800s) rose in 4 terraces 100' covering 14 acres reflecting periodic enlargements 900-1200 A.D., the greatest mound north of the Valley of Mexico. A 104 x 48' temple rose atop probably another 50', centering a distorted diamond 2¼ mi. N/S, 3 mi. E/W, which enclosed another 120 or more variably lower mounds—conical burial; (partly burial) ridge mounds; mostly flat-topped temple mounds—extending 6 mi. north along the Illinois. Pitched-roof houses, freestanding separately as in Adena & Hopewell but square, usually less than 20 x 20', clustered orderly about a great plaza east of Monks Mound, and smaller plazas about other mounds & ponds. Specific poles in a circle called American Woodhenge at the NW corner registered solstices, equinoxes, & initial days of seasons. Together with its cross-river counterpart, this settlement burgeoned after 700, by c.800 a city, when its Transitional grayware, still crisscross cord-pressed like Hopewell but shell-tempered with occasional appliqué figures—both traits (with others) diagnostic Mississippian—ran identical to latest sherds in Burrows Cave 120 mi. due east which had come under Cahokia influence before sealing/abandonment, surely occasioned by Cahokia’s sudden imperial expansion to 1150-A.D. apogee in the population range of 20,000 (Claudia Mink 1992), 30,000 (Joan Price 2000), approaching 40,000 (Melvin Fowler 1975). 75,000 (Carl Waldman 1985). If only 20,000, it exceeded London at that date or any American city north of the Valley of Mexico.

A 2 mi. enclosing stockade, replaced 3 times before 1250, consisted of 15-20' diam. oak & hickory logs 20' high sunk 4 or 5', at the cost of denuding, wildlife habitat destruction, and exposing bluffs to stream-silt erosion. Bastions at regular intervals confirm defensive intent, but Fowler suggested possible core aristocracy defense against the masses farther out. Despite city prosperity, skeletons betray periodic retarded growth from starvation/disease, besides massacres at death of exalted personages for mound entombing. Life spans regressed from Hopewell to 27.7 years, older than 35 rare, highest mortality first year, high incidence of anemia probably due to iron deficiency of corn diet, fractures common as healed bones document. Most adults suffered dental caries (corn diet). Cranial deformation and incisor filing recurred frequently, along with chipped teeth from rough chewing [George Milner 1984].

Precipitate decline 1200-1300 had begun c.50 years before cooler, drier summers that meant shorter growing seasons could account for but accelerated. The city met this exigency with a redistributive network, Ohio State U. anthropologist Richard Yerkes discerned 1987. But the 8-row corn which enabled phenomenal growth ultimately undermined metropolitan power, Robert L. Hall had seen 1973, because together with availability of buffalo, it rendered surrounding settlements less dependent on central authority, which in any case declined as it lost control of them.

Cahokia artifacts prove surprisingly unrevealing except as diminished continuation of Hopewell, its pottery distinguished from it only by the shell tempering whereby sherds fizz in water, and rim appliqué occasionally holding over Hopewell bird & animal effigies; also Hopewell- copper cutouts of Algonquin-myth Rabbit, Bladder, & Turtle. An engraved winged man on a small sandstone tablet compares with other Mississippian/Mexican birdmen.

MISSISSIPPIAN CULTURE, regardless of ethnicity and language, prevailed universally with usually paired temple/palace platform mounds, nearly identical pottery, and corn farming. Stone box burials persisted to some degree, especially among Shawnees. The favorite pastime throughout was slow roasting of prisoners, as Adair and many others observed Southeast, East Coast, Great Lakes to Rockies, carried out by women.

Core area major Mississippian regional centers included Mound Bottom WSW of also major Kincaid in North Tenn. and Hiwassee Island in the Little Tennessee SE of Mound Bottom; Cucaliss on the Mississippi in extreme SW Tenn.; & Winterville, Miss. at Arkansas-Mississippi confluence. Regional centers beyond the core area included Ft. Ancient on the Little Miami at Oregonia between Dayton & Cincinnati; Aztalan in South Wis.; Spiro Mounds on the Arkansas, NE. Okla.; Belcher on the Red in extreme NW La.; Emerald Mound on the Mississippi, South. Miss.; Moundville on Black Warrior in east-central Ala.; Etowah 3 mi. SW of Cartersville, SW Ga. within semicircling Pumpkinvine Creek and between that & Etowah River; Hollywood on the middle Savannah; Ocmulgee on the Ocmulgee in central Ga., Kolomoki on the Chattahoochee, SW Ga.; Mount Royal on St. Johns, NE Fla.; & Ashevillle, extreme NW N.C.

An earthen wall on 3 sides of a parallelogram enclosed nearly 18 acres at Aztalan, the 4th side (lengthwise) West Branch of Rock River on ESE outskirts of Lake Mills, due east of Madison and directly south of the town Aztalan, a name bestowed by pioneers who knew of Aztecs but not Mississippians. Palisaded individual flat-top mounds strewed within. The central, gentle-sloped Temple of the Sun presents a typical 2-tiered Mississippian platform mound. Often reddish-slipped Cahokia pottery leaves no doubt Cahokia thrust this far north, but paucity of skeletons or artifacts implies brevity.

That such imperialism was violent appears from a 30-acre battlefield at Spiro Mounds in blackjack-oak-&-hickory woods between the Arkansas and its Poteau branch SW of Ft. Smith, holding 2500-3000 head-pierced-or-bashed skeletons per acre, along with copper breastplates, shields, & spearpoints, also monolithic axes which could be either Hopewell or Mississippian. Geologist/archaeologist Edwin Walters, who published his initial findings at Ft. Smith 1889, estimated 60,000-100,000 slain warriors of both sides interred [Ruel McDaniels 1969]. Whether Cahokia aggression to force Spiro into its empire, the immense battlefield-turned-graveyard attests the scale of savage war. Lawrence Keeley 1996 calculated that precolumbian raids and massacres dispatched a higher proportion of population than hideous modern warfare, as the 1325 massacre of 500 men, women, & children at Crow Creek, S.D. illustrates. The homicide rate of “prehistoric” Illinois villagers ran c.70 times that of 1980 U.S.

Spiro floresced in the larger Caddo culture of 5 phases spanning 900-1800, the center of Caddo religion that extended into Missouri and Arkansas. Its 80 acres of a dozen large mounds including massive 6-yd.-high Brown platform/burial mound, 4 more detached mounds, & numerous small burial mounds run along a 4-mi. stretch of Choctaw land hardly ¼ mi. south of the Arkansas within a bend of it. Saddle-shaped Craig Mound dominates the complex 33 1/3 x 100 yds. diam., 18 2/3 yds. high at highest, eroded from higher. It gave up 750 and indefinitely more skeletons, some 7' long. Spiro flourished farthest west of major Mississippian ceremonial centers, 350 crowfly mi. SW of Cahokia, particularly identifying with Moundville & Etowah, its “weeping eye” and numerous other Mississippian motifs of Maya stylistic affinity depicted on conch shells and embossed copper plates, etc.

Spiro native Lewis (Bill) Hamby discovered driving past Craig Mound summer 1938 a green stone Ming statuette grader-exposed of the seated bodhisattva Guan Yin 6¼" high. (A 1969 metal-detector-discovered gold statuette of the same deity but different era somewhere in Indiana dated June 11, 525 A.D.) Mike Xu adduced startling Chinese parallels in Spiro motifs Oct. 1998. A backhoe during Poteau, Okla. housing construction 20 mi. south of Spiro mounds turned up a brass bowl 6" across, 2 ½" deep from a yd. or 4' depth near Poteau River c.1967 (now in Kerr Museum). Its outer-rim engraving depicts a running elephant. Later a matching bowl materialized in the same general vicinity. Chinese characters on the bottom of both read “FORTUNE.”

Spiro became the first and intensest center of the 1300-1500 decline-despairing Southern Cult religious revival of Hopewell imperialism that extended to Moundville and Etowah, on to Cahokia, finally Ontario and Grand Tetons—also known as Death Cult as if anticipating doom.

A 7" shell gorget excavated from Etowah Mound C 1932 displays 2 male dancers at right angles to each other, right hands clasping, whose Numidian inscription in Tifinag script Gloria Farley first recognized Oct. 1983 and Fell trans-literated/translated the next few months:

Halaq lahw dini sana yamin yad dalla (A disk to give pleasure, a religious artifact of good omen to guide by (the right hand) [ESOP XI/2 #273, 233-34].

Muskogean languages were neither Berber nor Uto-Aztec but infiltrated by both, as well as Chinese and Mexican.

Massive Mauretanian migrations following Roman suppression 41-42 A.D. of the revolt at Caligula’s assassination of King Ptolemy 40 A.D. and repeat of an entire army suppression of the Mauretanian Jewish Revolt in tandem with the empire-wide Bar Kokhba rebellion 132-34 evidently left a series of colonies on the Gulf, where “isolates” Tunica on the Mississippi in NE La., Chitimacha (SW Miss. through delta), & Atákapa (La. into Texas and juxtaposing Chitimacha the opposite direction in delta) Fell found essentially Egyptian [ESOP XIX (1991), 43-90]. His 730 cognates of Atákapa with Egyptian/Coptic/Nilotic-Hamitic included e.g. Atákapa kako (rain), Egyptian & Nilo-Hamitic khakhat; Atákapa ak (green), Egyptian & Nilo-Hamitic akh; etc.

CHEROKEES comprised the largest Mississippian population, bordering Creeks NE. Although claiming never having moved from their place of origin, they too had a migration story that Creeks may have influenced in a far west inception, its account of ascending an icy, snowy mountain sometimes interpreted as descending via the Bering Strait but ought to refer to the Blue Ridge on their reverse flight west. Kindred Iroquois origin myths have Mohawks enter New York first, from the east, which archaeology shows they entered last, from the south. Tuscaroras thought they originated in a mountain at Oswego Falls and, after descending to the sea and wandering afar, including over the Plain of Abraham in Québec, reentered New York behind Mohawks before moving to North Carolina. Sandy Creek Onondagas on the east shore of Lake Ontario claimed they issued from the ground at Tecanonouaronsi, head of the River au Sables south branch. Senecas (Santweronon = Mountaineers) said they originated at the head of Lake Canandaigua, western N.Y. below Lake Ontario, Wyandots on or near Montreal Island. Delawares, who grew close to Iroquois during their migration with the Five nations (excluding Tuscaroras & Cherokees) thought their Lenapé (“First” or “Principal”) tribe migrated for 40 years from far west of Fish River, which their visitor on the Delaware, Moravian missionary John Heckewelder 1676 took for the Mississippi but, in the Lenapé epic poem Walam Olum starting them, as John Hayward saw 1876, would rather have been the upper Ohio, while Horatio Hale 1883 realized Shinake, their native fir-tree country, pointed to the upper St. Lawrence. Iroquois (before separated from Hurons) joined Lenapés to defeat blocking Cherokees and continue to the Delaware together. Explorer-physician John Lederer, encountering Chero-kees in West North Carolina 1669-70, believed they followed from the NW. Barbara Alice Mann’s anachronistic rear-rangement 2003 made uncoalesced Iroquoian-speaking Cherokees Hopewellians whom Algonquin-speaking Lenapés drove out on their way east.

Cherokee as Iroquoian presents the most aberrant speech of the family group which, if all 7 nations had once resided contiguously, would have lain somewhere in the north as early as the 6th century (when Hopewell had already collapsed). Dean Snow 1994 traced Iroquois to hamlets on the Juniata, east side of Jack’s Mt. in central Pennsylvania c.775-1300, thence up and down the Susquehanna but already in the 8th century gardening on the Juniata while their legends speak of a pre-horticultural shamanistic north-forest era. Cherokee ancestors ought to have subsisted with the other Iroquois nations in north woods then, long before tribal identities crystallized. John J. White (of level Ohio) surmises Cherokees Alleghenies, found in Tennessee & North Carolina Appalachians only because driven there, on the premise that people would not voluntarily choose to live in mountains. Related Seneca Iroquois, who drove Ojibways up the St. Lawrence to Wisconsin in the 14th or 15th century (by W.W. Warren’s 2 different 1853 computations), loom prime candidates as drivers of Cherokees from Great Lakes.

De Soto came upon Cherokees in western North Carolina mountains 1540. His Portuguese amanuensis 1557 called them Chalaque, otherwise Spanish Xalaque and Garcilasso de Vega’s Achalaque. French Cheraque dates from 1699, Woodward’s Chorakae 1634 (on Savannah head branches), standard English Cherokee 1708. Catawbas called Cherokees Mañerañ, “Coming out of the ground,” and Lenapés Tallige-wi, from the root waloh or walok, “cave” or “hole.” Cherokees referred to themselves as Tsa´lagi or Tsa´ragi, which has no meaning in Cherokee; but in ceremonies called themselves Ani´tu´hwagi, “People of the Kit´hwa,” a medieval settlement on the Tuckasegree River. Tuckasegee Village still exists on the Tuckasegee less than 20 mi. SE of Cherokee in west-N.C. mountains. Swanton 1946 thought Cherokee derived from Creek tciloki, “People of a different speech.”

Alligator-teeth emblem & tropical blowguns complicate. Blowguns in Appalachia appear no earlier than the 18th century, but anthropologist David Evans 1984 found Chibchan words in Cherokee, noting Central American Chiriqui Lagoon/Lake/Bay where the native l anguage is Chibchan. Iroquois Ani-kita-kwa, as William Bartram spelled the term 1791, translates in Chibchan “We of the same blood” with variants. Cherokee Tulsa attorney Mack Bettis sees an affinity with Chola, India. Prof. Donald Panther-Yates’ DNA research 2003 found Cherokees European and South American.

Their 17th-century capital was Estatoee which S.C colonists called Tugaloo, on the Tugaloo north bank below its junction with the Chattooga 20 mi. east of Toccoa near the site of Jarrett’s Bridge, NE Ga. Their principal Over-the-Hill capital stood at Great Echota, on the south side of the Little Tennessee a short distance before Citico Creek in Monroe Co., SE Tenn., although the great Nacoochee Mound, implying greater age, rose in New Echota at the junction of Oostaula & Conassauga Rivers, Gordon Co., NW Ga.

Far-flung Cherokees and Iroquoian relatives celebrated the midsummer Muskogean Green Corn week of dances which Yuchi shamans who resided in tribes of different languages abetted as teachers of the Sháwano Great Medicine Society which intermediated Hopewell tradition all the way to Tunicas, Natchez, Senecas, & Mandans.