The great earthen mounds of southern Ohio have attracted archaelogical attention since the first half of the nineteenth century. Until now, little has been known of the social organization of the Native Americans who constructed these spectacular ceremonial monuments. In the early 1960s, Olaf Prufer argued that the Ohio Hopewell societies who built the mounds that characterize the Middle Woodland Period (200 B.C. to A.D. 400) lived in a small, scattered hamlets. Prufer's thesis was evaluated at the symposium "Testing the Prufer Model of Ohio Hopewell Settlement Pattern" at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Pittsburgh, April 10, 1992. Several of those essays and others, including two by Professor Prufer, are included in Ohio Hopewell Community Organization. Within the last decade, more than 100 instances of Middle Woodland domestic sites have been documented. The authors examine plant and animal remains, ceramic and stone fragments, and traces of structures and facilities recovered through survey and excavation. The essays illustrate many of the controversies revolving around scientific study of the Hopewellian lifeway. In an Afterword, James B. Griffin shows that the problem of Hopewellian settlement pattern has deep intellectual roots, and its solution will be significant not only for the Ohio Valley but for world prehistory as well. While the volume holds obvious interest for professional archaeologists, it will also appeal to amateur archaeologists and visitors to prehistoric sites and museums.

Bioarchaeological Documentation and Cultural Understanding

"This religious, symbolic, social, and ecological interpretation of one of the most fascinating archaeological records of the prehistoric world of Native Americans cannot help but stimulate discussion and debate."--Jacket.

Among the most socially and personally vocal archaeological remains on the North American continent are the massive and often complexly designed earthen architecture of Hopewellian peoples of two thousand years ago, their elaborately embellished works of art made of glistening metals and stones from faraway places, and their highly formalized mortuaries. In this book, twenty-one researchers in interwoven efforts immerse themselves and the reader in this vibrant archaeological record in order to richly reconstruct the societies, rituals, and ritual interactions of Hopewellian peoples. By finding the faces, actions, and motivations of Hopewellian peoples as individuals who constructed knowable social roles, the authors explore, in a personalized and locally contextualized manner, the details of Hopewellian life: leadership, its sacred and secular power bases, recruitment, and formalization over time; systems of social ranking and prestige; animal-totemic clan organization, kinship structures, and sodalities; gender roles, prestige, work load, and health; community organization in its tri-scalar 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. This book is useful to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in the workings and development of social complexity at local and interregional scales, recent theoretical developments in the anthropology of the topics listed above, the prehistory of eastern North America, its history of intellectual development, and Native American ritual, symbolism, and belief.

Considered a wonder of the ancient world, the Newark Earthworks—the gigantic geometrical mounds of earth built nearly two thousand years ago in the Ohio valley--have been a focal point for archaeologists and surveyors, researchers and scholars for almost two centuries. In their prime one of the premier pilgrimage destinations in North America, these monuments are believed to have been ceremonial centers used by ancestors of Native Americans, called the "Hopewell culture," as social gathering places, religious shrines, pilgrimage sites, and astronomical observatories. Yet much of this territory has been destroyed by the city of Newark, and the site currently "hosts" a private golf course, making it largely inaccessible to the public. The first book-length volume devoted to the site, The Newark Earthworks reveals the magnitude and the geometric precision of what remains of the earthworks and the site’s undeniable importance to our history. Including contributions from archaeologists, historians, cultural geographers, and cartographers, as well as scholars in religious studies, legal studies, indigenous studies, and preservation studies, the book follows an interdisciplinary approach to shine light on the Newark Earthworks and argues compellingly for its designation as a World Heritage Site.

Collects 1,000 entries on the subfields on anthropology, including physical anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, linguistics, and evolution.