Remembering the Roots of Our Past

Perhaps the secret of the re-greening of Ohio today    
lies in unlocking the mysteries of our distant past. . . .

Read the Story of Saving Spruce Hill -- ancient Hopewell hilltop enclosure

The Arc of Appalachia rests on human history as well. The story in this sacred landscape is an ancient one. The most recent native peoples called the land O-hi-o, the great forest through which the beautiful river runs, curving around some of the most fertile country in the world. Ever since the glaciers melted approximately 12,000 years ago, the river lands have been densely occupied by successive generations of river people. The waters were highways through the forests — their source of food, their lifeblood. The O-hi-o and the major tributaries of the majestic Sci-o-to were so sustaining that no less than 10,000 earthen mounds have been left behind in just Ohio alone by Hopewell, Adena and other mound building cultures. Nearly every mound was constructed in close proximity to a creek or river.

The Eastern forests that nourished these early Americans were abundant in wildlife, including elk, bobcat, bear, panther, wolves, bison, river otters, Carolina parakeets, and passenger pigeons as well as the mammals we know today. In autumn huge crops of chestnuts, walnuts, beech and shellbark hickories dropped bushels of mast to the ground, feeding everything from Allegheny Wood Rats to white-tailed deer. The land and rivers of the O-HI-O were so productive that the Hopewell societies could conduct ceremony, build earthen mounds, construct sacred-geometric wall enclosures, support cadres of specialized artisans, twist fine vegetable fibers into fabric for clothing, sculpt sophisticated pottery, sponsor heroic journeys of exploration, and establish complex social hierarchies —  all while remaining primarily hunter-gatherers. Agriculture of distinctive eastern American crops — prior to the introduction of maize — was employed, but it was not a mainstay. There was apparently no need for the early mound builders to abandon a lifestyle that our modern civilization sometimes wistfully remembers and sacredly mythologizes as the Garden of Eden.

No one has ever been as intimate with the remarkable animals of the Eastern Forests or more prolific in animal-inspired artwork than the Hopewell culture who lived on the land from 200 B.C. to 500 A.D.  Excavation of two Hopewell mounds in the Eastern United States revealed immense caches of tobacco effigy pipes. Two hundred stone pipes were found in a Chillicothe mound, and 136 at the Tremper mound near Portsmouth — the only mounds in the entire cultural region to produce such collections. Many featured a native animal — such as turkey vulture, bear, wolf, snake, toad, or dozens of other native species. Each pipe was constructed with attentive, intimate and loving detail. In one instance a raccoon was carved in classic stance, head gazing upward while the left paw probed deeply into the cone of a crayfish hole.  Perhaps these pipes were the people’s ceremonial and sacred connection to the diversity of life in the Eastern Woodlands; their way of claiming relationship. Since each species was frequently represented by a pair of pipes, might these pipes have served in Hopewell mythology as their expression of the duality of life? Or was it simply, as some have suggested, the work of a master artist and an apprentice? Why were the effigy pipes produced in such small numbers and kept in only two places? In what ceremonies where they used? Why were nearly all of the pipes buried at once and taken out of use, apparently never to be replaced? These mysteries are worth pondering. It should be of great interest to Ohioans that although the Hopewell people lived throughout most of Eastern United States west of the Alleghenies, their ceremonial effigy pipes were found nearly exclusively along the life-giving SCI-O-TO —  the river that was the axis of power for the Hopewell peoples, and the axis of the modern-day Arc of Appalachia to which this newsletter is devoted.

Studying Hopewell artwork elicits several lasting impressions. One, that the art is timeless in its ability to stir the soul.  And two, that the Hopewell people obviously danced in partnership with nature in a way that we can only poorly imagine, since we have lost long ago the connection, familiarity, and enchantment they had with the living world. If sublime art and ecological balance are indications of high cultural achievement, then the mound builders of Ohio were master achievers. Perhaps the secret of the re-greening of Ohio today lies in unlocking the mysteries of our distant past.