Hopewell’s small blades were multidimensional tools
TBradley Lepper
he Hopewell culture often is said to represent a Golden Age in Ohio’s pre-Columbian past. Between about A.D. 1 and 400, these people created gigantic earthen enclosures in a variety of shapes, from geometrically precise and astronomically aligned circles and octagons, such as those at Newark, to the more than 3 miles of meandering walls that surround the large bluff-top at Fort Ancient near Lebanon.
They also built burial mounds in which they frequently deposited large numbers of finely crafted artifacts made from raw materials brought to Ohio from the ends of the Hopewell world, including mica from the Carolinas and obsidian, a black volcanic glass, from Wyoming.
A humbler hallmark of the Hopewell culture is the The wear patterns on the sharp edges of the Hopewell culture’s “bladelets” consistently have shown they likely were generalpurpose tools.
bladelet, a short, narrow sliver of flint with extremely sharp edges, similar to a replaceable razor blade. Hopewell bladelets commonly are made from Ohio’s colorful Flint Ridge flint, though many also are made from Indiana hornstone.
No other ancient Ohio culture made bladelets, so archaeologists have assumed they had some specialized
purpose, such as to carve some of the Hopewell culture’s magnificent works of art. Studies of wear patterns on those sharp edges, however, consistently have shown that bladelets actually were general-purpose tools.
Logan Miller, an archaeologist at Illinois State University, says that bladelets found at most Hopewell sites were used “in a wide variety of cutting, scraping, drilling, perforating and incising tasks.” That’s why he was surprised by what he found when he studied a large collection of bladelets from two sites near the Stubbs Earthworks along the Little Miami River, 4 miles downstream from the Fort Ancient Earthworks. Miller presented his results in a paper published online in May in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology.
Miller looked at 113 bladelets from the Smith site and 23 from the Circle Overlook. At both sites, between 40 and 50 percent of bladelets with evidence of use were used to scrape or engrave bone or antler. Between 10 and 20 percent were used to “slice soft plant material,” and about an equal number were used to cut meat. Twelve percent at both sites were used to scrape dry hides.
These percentages represent “a strong focus on bone/antler working” when compared with studies of bladelets at other Ohio Hopewell sites, though it’s similar to how bladelets were used at Hopewell sites in Tennessee and North Carolina.
Miller proposes that “Ohio earthworks were centers of production where bladelets were used in maintenance, fabrication, or craft-production tasks,” and that for the sites near the Stubbs Earthworks, the fabrication tasks were focused on “engraving or gouging bone/antler.” Among the ceremonial regalia found at Hopewell sites, there are many examples of worked bone, including bear teeth that were cut, drilled, engraved and sometimes inset with pearls.
Miller points out that “many bladelets actually show no evidence of use” and suggests they might have “served a more symbolic than functional role at the earthworks.” I agree, and have proposed that these highly distinctive objects were made at least partly to be given as gifts to pilgrims as a token of their visit to these amazing earthen cathedrals.