Browse Items (299 total)

They recovered charcoal which produced radiocarbon dates ranging between A.D. 1025 and 1215, placing it within the Late Prehistoric period.

Late Archaic groups had engaged in trading such items as Lake Superior copper and marine shells for nearly 1000 years before the Adena. Trade continued during Early Woodland times with even more goods. It was not just the Adena of the Ohio Valley who…

The Adena culture of the Ohio Valley maintained contacts with other Early Woodland groups beyond their own territory. Proofs of these contacts are tubular pipes made of Ohio pipestone, and spear points and blades made of Ohio flint that have been…

Cone-shaped or hemispherical stone objects and tubular pipes are two types of objects typical of the Adena culture. The use of the pipes as smoking instruments is easy to understand. Yet archaeologists can only guess on what occasions the Adena…

Among the rarest and most puzzling Adena objects are engraved tablets. Only 13 have been found in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The Wright tablet, discovered in a mound in Montgomery County, Kentucky, in 1937, was the only one found by a trained…

The Adena culture built cone-shaped earthen burial mounds throughout southern Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana. For the most part, the mounds were built as lone monuments on terraces or high bluffs above river…

In contrast, the Coon mound in Athens County, Ohio, covered only the burial of one male, 25 to 35 years old at the time of death. The grave was 15 feet long and 5 feet deep. The sides of the grave were plastered with gray clay and lined with vertical…

Regardless of the type of vessel produced, the process of making pottery was similar throughout Woodland times and later. The women, fully aware of the sources of clay in their area, chose the amount needed and mixed it with the crushed stone temper.…

Several factors led to the development of pottery by the Woodland cultures. Among these were an increase in the food supply, the need to store seed from harvest until the planting season, new methods for extracting nutrients from nuts and seeds, and…

People of the Archaic culture in Ohio used limestone to make smoking pipes and sandstone occasionally to make bowls. Along the east coast, bowls were made from steatite (soapstone). The Archaic people also made plummets, plumb-bob shaped objects, by…