The Hopewell Ancient Native American Societies Project

Description:
The Hopewell Ancient Native American Societies Project at ASU is a transdisciplinary archaeological endeavor that aims at reconstructing in unprecedented detail the social, ceremonial, and religious lives of Hopewell peoples who lived in the upper Ohio valley, and more broadly across Eastern North America, from 50 B.C. to A.D. 350. The Hopewell were extraordinary in their mastery of solar and lunar astronomy and Euclidean geometry, which they employed in designing massive 80 acre architectural works, in their artistic productions from copper, silver, and semiprecious stones obtained by journeys of up to 1400 miles across the North American continent, and in their intricate social order and world view, which allowed them centuries of peaceful coexistence without any skeletal evidence of traumas of combat.

The Project, continuous from 1994 to present and directed by Christopher Carr, Professor, SHESC, has revealed Hopewell life by analyzing three kinds of archaeological remains-burial mound cemeteries, ceremonial paraphernalia, and artworks-and interpreting them in light of anthropological theory, ethnohistorical documentation of Woodland Native Americans, and detailed contextual studies. The mortuary data include over 1000 burials and 70 deposits of ceremonial paraphernalia in 35 cemeteries across Ohio. These data were gathered and systematized from century old records in a dozen museums over the course of seven years, and are rich is sociological information. Approximately 1000 ceremonial items and artworks have been photographed. They are being interpreted in culture-specific terms in part through their symbolic and representational content, and in part through diverse materials analytic techniques: infrared photography, digital image enhancement, mineralogical petrography, x-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, electron microprobe, Raman spectrometry, and microscopic paleobotanical and textile structural identification.

The project has involved more than a dozen ASU students in analyzing and interpreting the mortuary, ceremonial, and artistic data. Some of the aspects of Ohio Hopewell life that have been reconstructed include: leadership, its shamanic sacred and secular power bases, recruitment, and formalization over time; systems of social ranking and prestige; animal-totemic clan organization, kinship structures, and ceremonial sodalities and societies; gender roles, prestige, work load, and health; community organization in its triscalar residential, symbolic, and demographic forms; intercommunity alliances and changes in their strategies and expanses over time; and interregional travels for power questing, pilgrimage, healing, tutelage, and acquiring ritual knowledge. These subjects are published in the book, Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction, edited by C. Carr and D. T. Case, Springer Publishers, New York, 2005.

There are many aspects of Ohio Hopewell life that remain to be studied with the mortuary and artistic data that have already been assembled and that are available to interested graduate students at ASU. The lives of specific Hopewell individuals could be described in biographical richness, and the lives of different individuals could be contrasted, to create a dynamic, rich, personalized view of Hopewell life. This would be cutting-edge work conceptually in archaeology. Many hundreds of portraits of individuals, never published, remain to be line-drawn, described for costumery, and analyzed for the social and ceremonial roles of the depicted persons. The community and ceremonial organizations of peoples in different river valleys have yet to be compared and contrasted and related to regional differences in natural environmental richness and variability. Changes over time in social complexity and spiritual beliefs, which are closely interrelated in the Hopewell case, have much potential for rewriting and qualifying contemporary anthropological theory on societies of middling complexity. If you are interested in these or other topics, see Chris Carr.