Hopewell Culture National Historic Park at Chillicothe, Ohio

In the early light of dawn, the landscape at Hopewell NHP undulates with mounds hidden by mist and hardwood trees. Some of these mounds date back to 2,000 years ago and testify to the sophisticated culture created here, a culture that in ways, equaled the ancient Romans of the same time period. How did humans come to this part of the continent and what kind of civilization did they develop?  These are some of the questions that this and the next three postings of Driven by History will focus on. We will visit NPS sites connected to native peoples and ancient cultures to see how Americans lived before contact with Europeans. We begin with the Hopewell Culture National Historic Park in Ohio, and in future postings, we explore the Ancestral Pueblo peoples of Chaco Canyon, the Algonquin on the Eastern Seaboard, and the Polynesian islanders on Hawai’i.

Once people arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they spread over the landscape like water through a burst dam.  They roamed the countryside, hunting and gathering their way from the frozen tundra near the Bering Sea to the equally cold tip at Tierra del Fuego on the southern continent, from the steamy jungles in the tropics to dense woodlands and from mountains to beaches to swamps to deserts. Natural barriers like bodies of water or mountains which prevented easy traveling could only be crossed when rivers froze or high passes  thawed. In whatever way humans came to the Americas, once here they migrated over the countryside as their bands grew and like migrants today, they looked for the perfect place to live and thrive.

Throughout all of these periods, humans worked nodules of flint and obsidian to fashion some of the most refined stone tools and weapons in the world. They crafted a way of living that continues to amaze. They hunted large mammals like mammoths and bison with spears and harvested most of the carcasses for food, clothing, tools, and shelter. With sharp stone edges, they trimmed hide into clothing. They wove sandals out of fibrous plants, carved and painted art on rock walls, and made religious and ornamental objects out of shells, turquoise, bones, and even the landscape itself. These humans also studied the heavens and developed a complex understanding of the movement of the sun, the moon, and the planets. They flourished for thousands of years and eventually, hundreds of generations lived in all corners of what would be become the United States.

Isolated from the rest of the world once the Arctic land bridge sank due to global warming, humans in the Western Hemisphere evolved differently than the rest of the world. In his book 500 Nations, Native American historian Alvin Josephy, Jr. explained this differentiation:  as the indigenous peoples of the Americas “adapted to the different environments, cultural and physical variations began to appear among them.”[1] Eventually, these early Americans’ unique responses to where they lived evolved into the 500 distinct tribes that spread across the land.

The people who lived at Hopewell, in the central part of North America, developed a woodland civilization. Southern Ohio served as the cradle of Hopewell culture which expanded along the tributaries of the Mississippi River as far west as today’s Nebraska and Kansas and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. Archeologists call these people by several names, including Adena, Hopewell, Late Woodland, and Mississippians.

As early as 1500 BCE, people in the area began burying their dead with items that showcased the skills and artistry of their craftspeople, and by 1000 BCE, they started building mounds over these graves. Copper earspools, headdresses, breastplates, and other ceremonial objects and tools along with effigy pipes of birds and other animals found in these burial mounds illustrate the exquisite workmanship and wealth of the Hopewell people. In one mound, archeologists found a delicate profile of a hand while in another, they discovered a bird claw, both made out of fragile mica.

Mica hand found in a mound (NPS photo)

Mica bird claw and other artifacts from mounds

These funeral objects also hint at a deeper motivation – a spirituality that pervades the 500 nations in the Americas. From origin beliefs to migration stories, Native Americans imbued their world with a rich spirituality. From such stories, Josephy concluded: “The Creator, the Master of Life, the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka—whatever terms the various Native American groups used – breathed life into humans and bound their spirits to those of all else in their universe.”  For many of these peoples, both animate and inanimate things possessed a spirit and even a consciousness that enlivened all that surrounded them.

The objects found in the burial mounds give us a glimpse of the Hopewell way of life. Sea shells from the Gulf of Mexico, mica from the mountains in North Carolina, fossil shark teeth from the Chesapeake Bay, copper and silver from the Great Lakes region, and obsidian from Yellowstone area point to a vast trading network that covered almost two thirds of the country – from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic.

Mounds at Hopewell (NPS photo by Tom Engberg)

The most important item that allowed people to develop their complex civilizations throughout the Americas came to the woodlands region around the beginning of the Current Era. Corn cultivation changed human existence in the Americas. Developed in what is now southern Mexico about 7,000 years ago, corn (maize) is a unique plant. Disagreements exist over how corn evolved, but the main point is that it since a tough husk engulfs the cob, corn can’t sow itself. An outside agent, like people, have to do it.

As Charles Mann notes in 1491 (his book on the Americas before Columbus): “Modern maize was the outcome of a bold act of conscious biological manipulation— ‘arguably man’s first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering’.”   One corn seed produced hundreds of kernels on multiple cobs and allowed a farmer to produce enough food on a small plot to feed a family for a year. This revolutionized agriculture, and as corn spread north and south from Central America, it transformed hunters and gatherers into farmers with improved diets. In addition to corn, the Mound Builders also grew squash, sunflowers, marsh elder, and knotweed while continuing to hunt and forage far and wide for food and material.

Archeologists speculate that this culture developed strict hierarchal lines with an elite body of priests and managers directing the efforts of many people to dig the earth, carry basketfuls of the dirt to the mounds, and build the massive earthen architecture that rose high over the land. Whether this was free or slave labor is unknown. From the simple early burial sites of 2,000 years ago, the mounds evolved into elaborate platforms for ceremonies and even served as residences of the elite. Large ceremonial complexes grew around the mounds so much that archeologists estimate that the Cahokia mound complex east of St. Louis had more people than London in 1250 CE. 

Monks Mound at Cahokia (Photo by David Darling)

Some experts also speculate that the mounds housed astronomical observatories that tracked the seasons. Perhaps the mounds served as landscape calendars and were aligned to mark summer and winter solstices and equinoxes. In an agricultural society without written calendars, having a way to announce the turning of the seasons, of when to plant and when to harvest, prove vital to the success of the community.

Mounds in a variety of sizes and shapes unified this culture. Some mounds rose over thirty feet high and up to two hundred feet in circumference, and just in the Ohio River Valley alone, ten thousand mounds dotted the landscape. In addition to the traditional circles, squares, and elliptical shapes of the mounds, some assumed intriguing shapes. These “effigy mounds” depicted birds, serpents, panthers, bears, and even humans. Built between 700 and 1300 CE, these intriguing shapes occurred mainly in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. This was a vibrant and interconnected society.

Marching Bear Mounds at Effigy Mounds NM (NPS photo)

The Mississippians started to decline even before contact with European explorers in the middle 1500s. Whatever the cause, the Mississippians are considered to be the ancestral peoples for many of the tribes that have lived in the region, even to this day. The tribes of the Apalachee, Caddo, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Houma, Kansa, Missouri, Mobilian, Natchez, Osage Nation, Quapaw, Seminole, Yamasee, Yuchi, and others trace their ancestry to the Mississippian mound builders.

The people who lived and developed their communities in the central part of the United States laid the foundation for a vibrant and varied collection of tribes. Agriculturally based, they positioned their mounds to mark the passing of the seasons, they were connected to a vast network of trade and commerce, and they had a stratified social structure that included priests and rulers supported by craftsmen, farmers, and possibly slaves. As we continue our exploration of pre-contact Native Americans and their NPS parks, we will next traverse 1,200 miles to the desert southwest and to the Chaco Culture National Historic Park.

The Mound City Group National Monument was established by President Warren G. Harding in 1923 to preserve prehistoric mounds of "great historic and scientific interest." Hopewell Culture National Historical Park was established in 1992 by renaming the Mound City Group National Monument and expanding the park to include Hopeton Earthworks, High Bank Works, Hopewell Mound Group, and Seip Earthworks.

Hopewell Culture National Historic Park

16062 State Route 104

Chillicothe, Ohio, 45601

(740) 702-7677

www.nps.gov/hocu

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[1] Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., 500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 17.

Bering Land Bridge National Preserve near Nome, Alaska

Standing on a windswept beach in Alaska gazing west across the thundering surf toward Asia, the imagination sparks to envision humans entering the Americas at this place. Sometime between 20,000 and 13,000 years before the present, stone-age humans followed migrations of big game animals and occupying caves and camp sites in the Western Hemisphere. Theories on how and where this happened have engaged archeologists, linguists, geneticists, geographers, anthropologists, and climatologists for decades. At this wind tossed, mist shrouded beach on the Bering Strait, we will speculate how humans first arrived on the shores of what would become the United States.

The story of human migration into the Americas is a complex story, one of evidence (and lack thereof), of conjecture, of belief, and of debate. Common knowledge holds that roving groups of hunters and gatherers journeyed across a land bridge from Asia to Alaska. These people then spread out south through ice-free corridors that opened between retreating glaciers around 13,000 years ago. After escaping the ice, humans quickly spread across the northern, central, and southern sections of the hemisphere, adapting to the varied landscapes and environments they encountered. This narrative, popularly known as the Bering Land Bridge theory, offers a compelling explanation on how the first peoples arrived here.

Doubts hover around this theory. Was there just one wave of migration across the Bering Land Bridge or several waves? Did people from other places besides Siberia- perhaps from Europe or Polynesia- also find the shores of the Americas? Did humans arrive by boat instead of on foot? Once here, how did people change the landscape? And finally, what do descendants of the first Americans say about their origins? As archeologist Dr. Beth O’Leary says: “It’s complicated.”

Let’s go through the evidence about the Bering connection. During the last period of world-wide glaciation (from 75,000 to 11,000 years ago), the sea level dropped as massive ice sheets locked up much of the world’s water. As sea levels dropped, a land bridge emerged between Asia and America, stretching from the Chukotka peninsula in Asia to the Seward Peninsula in Alaska. The first mention of a land bridge occurred in 1590, when a Jesuit missionary to Latin America, José de Acosta, speculated that such a connection between Asia and North America allowed humans to enter this continent. By the 1930s, evidence established the existence of the land bridge so that in 1937, botanist Eric Hultén dubbed the land bridge “Beringia.” Later scholars broadened the definition to include northeastern Siberia and western Alaska.[1]

Climatologists estimate that a 600 mile wide land bridge connected the sixty mile gap between the continents. This isthmus eventually sank under the rising waters as glaciers melted sometime around 12,000 years before present (BP) -- give or take a few thousand years.

Unfortunately, the glaciers that caused the land bridge would have blocked further migration as the ice swallowed whole valleys and smothered the mountains in Alaska and western Canada. These glaciers retreated, and an ice door opened around 13,500 years BP. So humans could have crossed to America on the Bering land bridge, but unless they traveled over the treacherous glaciers in journeys that might have taken weeks if not longer, they remained blocked at the entrance to the New World.

Now here is the dilemma. Caves in Monte Verde, Chile, and Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania, have produced carbon dating of objects that shows humans entering into the Americas 13,500 years BP. The cave in Chile by some testing dates back to around 15,000 years BP and the cave in Pennsylvania from 14,000 to 12,500 years BP.[2] Other sites of human occupation at Cactus Hill and Saltville, Virginia and the Topper site near Savannah, Georgia, also could predate the opening of the ice corridor from Alaska into the rest of North America.[3] With the passage south into the rest of the hemisphere blocked by ice from around 25,000 years until 13,500 years BP, humans either survived the trek over the glaciers, or they came a different route. They might have come by sea, either along the coast of the land bridge, or across the Pacific Ocean as an extension of Polynesian explorers, or even from Europe.

Navigating small boats that held ten or fifteen people over the thousands of miles of the Pacific or across the frigid waters from Europe to Iceland and Greenland, and then to North America seems unlikely, but humans did get to the Easter and the Hawaiian Islands in such a manner. Paddling along the coast of Beringia in hide-covered boats and living off of the marine animals that proliferate there seems more likely. Using boats to spread down the Pacific coast into South America and the cave at Monte Verde makes sense. So navigating the coastlines from Asia into Alaska and then down the western Americas to Chile, while daunting, helps resolve the dilemma; however, we have no camp sites or other evidence to prove this, mainly because such sites if they do exist, lie underwater, drowned by the rising sea levels as glaciers melted.

Genetics provide some clarification of the dilemma. Analysis of the founding DNA lineages for Native Americans estimate that humans expanded into the Americas from East Asia sometime between 18,000 and 16,000 years BP. So people must have already been below the northern glacial ice sheet before 13,500 years BP.[4] Additional DNA studies point to multiple waves of migration.

There exists enough of a variation in the DNA of today’s Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere that researchers speculate that people from different parts of Siberia and East Asia contributed to the peopling of the Americas. As Theodore Schurr concludes: “… both the mtDNA [mitochondrial DNA] and the Y chromosome data show evidence that more than one expansion contributed to the genetic diversity of modern American groups.”[5] Of course, as humans evolved in the western hemisphere and became distinct from their ancestors elsewhere, the evidence is mixed up in a dynamic and fluid mixture of strands of DNA like a bowl of spaghetti.

Scholars studying glaciers, climate, genetics, and ancient human sites generally agree that humans in the Western Hemisphere came from Siberia and East Asia in more than one wave of migration and fairly quickly spread out east and south to populate the land. Since human-made stone tools appeared in the East Coast before the Midwest and the Southwest, people probably had to skirt over the northern edge of the massive glaciers and eventually came south into the continent somewhere near the Great Lakes.

Once humans entered a region, they began to alter it. The concept of a virgin wilderness is a potent myth for the United States and the National Parks; however, with the first footstep, land turned into place, and people started to change it. Even though the First Peoples’ impact might seem minimal by today’s standards, they still changed the environment. From hunting and gathering to setting fires to the prairies, from managing water for crops which they planted to creating narratives and histories about themselves and their landscapes, people impact their surroundings. Humans have lived and altered this land for hundreds of generations.

What do Native Americans say about their origins? While some do talk about long migrations, few of these stories mention coming across water in boats or crossing ice fields.  Take for example the Indians in the Southeast and along the Mississippi River. They lived in complex civilizations with sophisticated understandings of nature and the cosmos. One of the creation narratives of the Choctaw mentioned a sacred mound at Nanih Waiya that they call “Big Mother.” At this mound, the Great Spirit created the first Choctaw who crawled out of the ground and into daylight.[6] We will explore the mound builders when we go to the Hopewell Culture National Historic Park.

Hopewell Culture National Historic Park (http://worldheritageohio.org/hopewell-ceremonial-earthworks/)

The origin stories of the Ancestral Puebloan people of the Southwest revolve around humans emerging from a world that is underground, where humans, animals, and spirits lived and talked with each other. From this dark underworld, people came out of an emergence hole called a sipapu. Some tribes set out on long journeys around the continent that lasted generations in search of the ideal place to establish a permanent settlement. The wandering tribes lived in a place for a while and then moved on. We will look at one of these intermediate sites when we explore Chaco Culture National Historic Park.

Chaco Canyon (http://galleryhip.com/chaco-culture-national-historical-park-camping.html)

The humans who sailed across the Pacific Ocean to land on the Hawaiian Islands had their own origin narratives. Kane, the god of creation, fashioned a man out of some rich, red earth and breathed life into him. Red Earth Man then begat Wakea and his wife, Lihau’ula, who also were descended from the gods Rangi Sky and Papa Earth. We will look at the indigenous peoples of Hawai’i in the chapter on the Pu’u’uhonula o Honauhau National Historical Park.

In many of the creation stories of the first peoples of North America, humans came from the earth, not from elsewhere, and definitely not across the Bering Land Bridge. In this brief accounting of creation narratives, we have only focused on four out of the hundreds of tribes in pre-contact America. Just as species evolved in unique ways in the isolated lands of the Western Hemisphere, so too did their cultures and beliefs, and they diverged from the peoples they left behind. The First Americans quickly spread over thousands of miles of plains, deserts, mountains, forests, and whatever other land forms they encountered. These humans also adapted to the new flora, fauna, and environments, and in response, they created unique foods that revolutionized diets, first in the Americas and then across the globe.  From Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, we will next travel to Hopewell Culture National Historic Park in Ohio.

The Bering Land Bridge National Preserve was proclaimed a national monument in 1978 and then a national preserve on December 2, 1980. It comprises 2.7 million acres in northwestern Alaska.

Bering Land Bridge National Preserve (NPS photo: Katie Cullen)

Bering Land Bridge National Preserve

Box 220

Nome, Alaska 99762

(907) 443-2522

www.nps.bela.gov

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[1] West, American Beginnings¸149.

[2] Madsen, Entering America, 141-146.

[3] Madsen, Entering America,149-153.

[4] Madsen, Entering America, 219.

[5] Madsen, Entering America, 236.

[6] Lee Irwin, Coming Down from Above: Prophecy, Resistance, and Renewal in Native American Religions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 32

Introduction

On the Road to America (Photo by Marcello Brivio)

"Driven by the Past" is an exploration of our country’s past by exploring the places where significant events happened. By visiting these places that forged our nation, by getting to know the people who created our country at those places, Driven by the Past narrates the story of the United States through the parks that illuminate our ideals and beliefs, that reflect our complex history, and that inspire us to love our country. We’re going on a road trip to our National Parks.

2016 is the 100^th birthday of the creation of the National Park Service, and their centennial motto is “Find Your Park.” To celebrate this anniversary, I am traveling to and writing about as many parks as I can. From May to November, I will crisscross the country, visit places of sheer beauty and of momentous events, and blog about my experiences. Join me for the ride.

Here’s the plan.  Every week from now until mid-May, Driven by the Past will post brief histories of a National Park every Monday. We’ll begin with the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve to get a handle on how humans came into the Americas. Then we will visit Native American parks— Hopewell Mounds in Ohio, Chaco Culture in New Mexico, Jamestown (before the Europeans arrived) in Virginia, and  Pu’u’uhonula O Honauhau park in Hawaii. The pre-contact peoples developed advanced civilizations that rivaled those in other parts of the world. After surveying some of the peoples who lived here before the Europeans arrived, we will travel to El Morro, New Mexico for the Spanish Entrada into the desert, Jamestown (again) for the English jumping onto the shores of Virginia, the African Burial Grounds in lower Manhattan about colonial slavery, and Grand Portage in Minnesota for the French traders paddling through the waters of the continent.

In May, all this changes. I hit the road for the rest of the year. I will visit National Parks in the West, in the North, in the East, in the South. Along the way, I will continue to blog about the parks, about their significance, about their beauty, about what people did there, and what people still do. So come join the journey and travel with me to our national parks.

At this point, when I say join me, I want to be clear that I’m not personally inviting all of you to ride in my RV and visit all of these places. Not that I wouldn’t want to travel with you all…. On second thought, why not? I think we’d all find that very interesting. So come along and show me your park.

The first leg of the road trip is through the West—going down the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California Historic Trails, tromping over the hills at Little Big Horn, seeing the thermal abundance at Yellowstone, feeling geologic time at Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. We will also visit pre-contact Native American sites, frontier forts, World War II parks, and many other units of the NPS.

Then, in the fall, I will head east and south and encounter awe inspiring Native America places, colonial and revolutionary war sites, parks about nation building, industry, immigration, war, and expansion. We will visit places where momentous events happened, events that shaped our nation and ourselves.

In writing these histories, I am literally driven by history. I have put on thousands of miles as I visit the far flung historical jewels of our national parks. Driving those long hours allows me time to ponder what I have witnessed, to analyze what it means, and to figure out how to tell the story of our country. From my windshield musings, three themes emerge that are interwoven throughout our nation’s pasts: mobility, exchange, and innovation. We are a country of  inventive immigrants, from the first humans who set foot in the Americas to European colonists to people today who seek our shores. Whoever we are today, wherever we live, whatever we believe, however we support ourselves, whatever lessons we pass onto our children originate in our many pasts. Despite our nation’s focus on the future, we are products of our history.We are as driven by our past as we are motoring through the present.

So come join these journeys across our nation and through our past. We will drive the land, write about the parks, and get to know our country and ourselves.Come drive into the past with me. I mean it. Each and every one of you. Wow! That’s a lot of people, we'd better get started.