Adena culture

The Adena culture is the archaeological name for a group of related Native American societies of the Early Woodland period, centred on central and southern Ohio, that shared a distinctive way of burying their dead beneath earthen mounds. It is usually dated from about 500 BCE to 100 CE, though some accounts place it within a wider Early Woodland span beginning around 800 BCE. The Adena are best known as mound builders and as the forerunners of the Hopewell tradition.

The culture takes its name from a large mound on the early nineteenth-century estate of Thomas Worthington near Chillicothe, Ohio, which he called Adena; the mound became the type site against which other finds are compared. The name describes shared practices, not a single tribe, and what the people called themselves is unknown. Adena sites are concentrated in Ohio, especially the Scioto and Hocking valleys, and spread across the eastern United States into neighbouring Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana and Pennsylvania, with outliers further west. The Adena are the best known of several eastern cultures that began building ceremonial mounds at the end of the Archaic period.

Hundreds of large Adena mounds once existed, ranging from about 20 to 300 feet across, though only a small number survive. Excavations show how many of them grew. The dead were kept in a wooden mortuary house; at the time of burial the house was burned with the bodies and offerings inside, and basketloads of carefully chosen earth were heaped over the remains. A new mortuary house was often built on top, and the cycle repeated, so that a mound rose in stages. Grave Creek Mound at Moundsville, West Virginia, built in successive stages from about 250 to 150 BCE and still 62 feet high, is the largest surviving example; builders moved more than 60,000 tons of earth to raise it. Miamisburg Mound is the largest conical mound in Ohio.

Who built the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio remains disputed. Radiocarbon dates published in 2014, and corroborated in 2019, suggested Adena construction around 300 BCE, with repair around 1100 CE. The archaeologist Bradley Lepper and colleagues have challenged this, arguing that the dated samples were not reliable and that the Adena are not known for effigy mounds or serpent imagery, so the later Fort Ancient culture is the more likely builder.

Most Adena people lived in small, scattered settlements of one or two houses near the mound centres. Houses were circular, 15 to 45 feet across, with outward-leaning paired posts and bark-covered conical roofs. People foraged and cultivated native plants. Trade brought copper from the Great Lakes and shells from the Gulf Coast, which were worked into bracelets, rings, beads and pendants. Small carved stone tablets bearing animal figures or curving designs, some with traces of paint, may have been used to stamp patterns on cloth, hides or skin. Adena pottery was thick and mostly plain or cord-marked, and unlike many other goods it was not placed in graves. Rings of paired posts found at sites such as Mount Horeb in Kentucky, excavated in 1939, point to ceremonial timber circles.

Archaeologists see Adena ceremonial life as the foundation for the Hopewell tradition, which elaborated its mound building, burial customs and long-distance exchange on a larger scale. In some areas, such as the Big Sandy and Kanawha valleys, Hopewell-related groups appear to have merged with local Adena communities.

Our maps for 500, 400, 323, 300 and 200 BCE draw the Adena Culture as an approximate area; the outline marks a zone of shared burial practices, not a political territory, and the map years do not mark the culture's beginning or end. Its successor, the Hopewell tradition, appears on our maps from 100 BCE, and much later Ohio peoples such as the Miami from 1492.