Synopses & Reviews
This book presents, for the first time, a detailed, holistic synthesis of the lifeways, culture, history, and material record of the ceremonially and socially rich Hopewell peoples who lived in the Scioto valley and neighboring areas in Ohio in the first centuries A.D. The Scioto Hopewell built monumental, 80 acre earthworks aligned precisely to astronomical events, masterfully worked glistening metals and semiprecious stones into elegant designs, and honored their dead with these vocal artifacts in community burial houses two-thirds the size of a football field. The Scioto Hopewell's intricate social order and religious concepts of alliance afforded them three centuries of intercommunity peace. The first half of the work, written in the vein of classic ethnographies that focus on a local group in context, thickly describes the local, natural and symbolic environmental setting, subsistence and settlement pattern, community and sociopolitical organization, ceremonial organization, intercommunity dynamics, and world views of Scioto Hopewell peoples. By taking an encompassing and historical view of Scioto Hopewell life, both its origins and ending are revealed. These detailed cultural and historical reconstructions are strongly anchored empirically in the second half of the book. The data bases document the archaeological and human remains from all 52 Ohio Hopewell ceremonial centers that have been excavated and reported; the intrasite layouts and precise geographic placements of most of these centers as well as the locations of many other, unexplored ones; and the ceremonial functions, meanings, and social role associations of 51 kinds of historic Woodland Native American ceremonial paraphernalia analogous to those used and interred by Ohio Hopewell peoples. The book is also liberally illustrated with photographs and drawings of Scioto Hopewell artwork, ceremonial paraphernalia, sites, and landscapes. The authors share all these data, along with many insights about key, future research topics, with the hope that others will use them to continue to pursue the empirically rich, holistic, and humanized understanding of Ohio Hopewell peoples begun in this book.
Review
From the reviews: "Future archaeologists will likely look back on this book as marking a major watershed in the study of Ohio's Hopewell people." George Milner, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Synopsis
The Scioto Hopewell people of North America have been of great interest to prehistoric archaeologists for a number of reasons: a their monumental, 80 acre earthworks aligned precisely to events in the day and night skies, a masterfully worked glistening metals and semiprecious stones into intricate and elegant symbolic designs, a and their community burial houses two-thirds of a football field in size.
Along with this unique physical evidence, archaeologists also know about their society and culture. Their world view and rituals inspired the artistic exploration of the principles of three-dimensional perspective a thousand years before Renaissance artists discovered them in the Old World and unlike the artistic norms of any other Native American people. The Scioto Hopewella (TM)s intricate social order and their religious-based concepts of alliance afforded them three centuries of peace among both individuals and communities. For these reasons, the Hopewell are a unique case in prehistoric North America.
This book has two aims. The first is to present in rich detail a coherent holistic synthesis of the culture, lifeways, environment, and history of the Hopewell people - who were one of the most socially complex people in the Americas at the time, and for centuries before and afterward.
The second goal of this book is to systematize and present for use by other researchers and students the massive, largely unpublished mortuary-archaeological and physical anthropological information and other supporting data that have made the fullness of our cultural reconstructions of Scioto Hopewell life possible. This is presented in the DVD that comes with the book.
The authorsremove the organizational overhead that previously has constrained archaeologists from making in-depth, empirical inquiries into the social and political life, rituals, and religious concepts of Hopewellian peoples generally. And in so doing, they are able to encourage further detailed studies and deeper understandings of these remarkable peoples.
Synopsis
The Hopewell peoples lived in the Scioto valley and neighboring areas in Ohio in the first centuries A.D. This is the first book to examine them using a holistic approach. It is based on 10 years of research and analysis of data uncovered at several sites.
About the Author
Christopher Carr is an archaeologist with primary interest in the prehistory of eastern North America, especially the social organizations, rituals and belief systems of tribal peoples of the Midwest from about 1000 B.C. to Contact. To reconstruct these aspects of their lifeways, he focuses on their mortuary practices and art. His research makes strong use of anthropological theories about the causes of development of tribal and rank social organization from simpler social systems. It also has involved the development of archaeological theory about how mortuary practices and artistic style reflect social and political structures and processes.
Table of Contents
Preface.- Acknowledgments.- Part I: Rationale and Framework.- Documenting the Lives of Ohio Hopewell People: A Philosophical and Empirical Foundation.- Part II: The Scioto Hopewell: Land, People, Culture, and History.-Environmental Setting, Natural Symbols, and Subsistence.- Settlement and Communities.- Social and Ritual.- World View and the Dynamics of Change: the Beginning and the End.- Part III: Inventory and Documentation.- The Ohio Hopewell Electronic Data Base: An Overview.- Ceremonial Site Locations, Descriptions, and Bibliography.- Definition of Variables and Variable States.- Evaluating the Accuracy of Aging and Sexing of Human Remains by Previous Researchers.- Methods for Aging and Sexing Human Remains from the Hopewell Site.- The Functions and Meanings of Ohio Hopewell Ceremonial Artifacts in Ethnohistoric Perspective.- Contextualizing Preanalyses of the Ohio Hopewell Mortuary Data, I: Age, Sex, Burial-Deposit, and Intraburial Artifact Count Distributions.-Contextualizing Preanalyses of the Ohio Hopewell Mortuary Data, II: Associations of Artifact Classes across Burials.- Data Accuracy and Precision: A Comparison of the Ohio Hopewell Data Base to N. Greber's and T. Lloyd's Data Bases.- Future Topics on Ohio Hopewell Culture That Could Be Investigated with the Data Base.- Bibliography.- DVD: Data Bases and Appendices.