Adena Culture: Early Mound Builders of the Ohio River Valley

The Adena culture was a group of Native American societies in the middle Ohio River Valley that built some of the first large burial mounds in North America, roughly between 500 BC and AD 100. Their best-known monument, Grave Creek Mound in West Virginia, still rises about 19 metres (62 feet) above the surrounding town. The Adena laid the foundations of the earthwork traditions later developed by the Hopewell.

Background: the Early Woodland period

Archaeologists divide the history of eastern North America into periods. After the Archaic, when people lived mainly by hunting and gathering, came the Woodland period, beginning around 1000 BC. It is marked by pottery, more permanent settlement, early plant cultivation and the building of mounds.

Mound building itself was older. Hunter-gatherers in Louisiana had raised earthen mounds thousands of years earlier, as at Watson Brake. What was new in the Adena world was the scale and regularity of burial mounds across a wide region, linked by shared customs and exchanged goods.

Who the Adena were

“Adena” is an archaeological label, not the name of a people or a nation. It comes from Adena, the estate of Ohio governor Thomas Worthington near Chillicothe, where William C. Mills of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society excavated a large mound in 1901. Sites with similar burials and artefacts were later grouped under the same name.

Adena communities lived in small, scattered settlements of a few households, often in round houses built of posts. They hunted deer and other game, fished, gathered nuts and wild plants, and grew native crops of the Eastern Agricultural Complex, such as sunflower, squash, goosefoot, marsh elder and maygrass. Maize was not yet important. Their pottery was thick and simple, and they used stone tools, including distinctive stemmed projectile points.

Mounds and earthworks

Adena mounds were usually conical and built in stages over generations. A typical sequence began with a burial in a log-lined tomb or a cremation, sometimes inside a building that was later burned or dismantled. Earth was heaped over it, and later burials added new layers, so a mound grew taller over time.

Grave Creek Mound, in Moundsville, West Virginia, is the largest conical burial mound usually attributed to the Adena. It was built in several stages between roughly 250 and 150 BC and once had a surrounding ditch. In 1838 local landowners dug a shaft and tunnel into it and found burial chambers with skeletons and ornaments. Miamisburg Mound in Ohio is of a similar height.

The Adena also built low circular earthen enclosures, often called “sacred circles”, with an interior ditch and an opening. They probably served for ceremonies rather than defence.

Objects and exchange

Burials contained objects that show both skill and long-distance contact. These include copper bracelets and beads from the Great Lakes region, sheets of mica from the southern Appalachians, marine shell from the Gulf Coast, stone gorgets and red ochre. Small engraved stone tablets with curving bird and animal designs may have been used to stamp patterns on cloth or skin.

One of the best-known pieces is the Adena Pipe, a tubular pipe of pipestone carved as a standing human figure, found in the Adena Mound in 1901. It is now the official state artefact of Ohio.

Legacy and the “Mound Builder” myth

In the 19th century many white Americans believed that a vanished “lost race” of Mound Builders, not Native Americans, had raised the great earthworks of the Ohio Valley. Early surveys such as Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848) recorded many sites but left the builders’ identity open. The Smithsonian Institution’s mound survey, published by Cyrus Thomas in 1894, showed that the mounds were built by the ancestors of Native American peoples, and the myth has long been rejected by scholars.

The Adena tradition fed directly into the Hopewell culture, which from about 100 BC built far larger geometric earthworks and traded over much of the continent. Later still, Mississippian peoples built platform-mound cities such as Cahokia.

Timeline

• c. 1000 BC: The Woodland period begins in eastern North America.
• c. 800–500 BC: Early Adena-style burial mounds appear in the Ohio Valley.
• c. 250–150 BC: Grave Creek Mound is built in stages.
• c. 100 BC: Hopewell traditions begin to develop out of Adena practices.
• c. AD 100: Distinct Adena burial practices fade.
• 1838: Grave Creek Mound is dug into by local landowners.
• 1894: Cyrus Thomas’s report confirms Native American mound building.
• 1901: William C. Mills excavates the Adena Mound near Chillicothe.

Why it matters

The Adena show that farming villages of modest size could organise major public works and maintain trade networks across much of eastern North America. Their mounds are among the oldest standing monuments in the United States, and studying them helped overturn the racist “lost race” theory, restoring the achievements of Native American history to their rightful builders.