Flint disk offering had varied sources
The Hopewell Mound Group sprawls across a terrace overlooking the North Fork of Paint Creek in Ross County. It consists of a roughly rectangular earthen wall, enclosing an area of more than 120 acres, linked to a smaller, perfect square. Within the “Great Enclosure” there were mounds of various shapes and sizes that were excavated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Two thousand years ago, this now fairly unobtrusive site was the epicenter of a cultural explosion that reverberated across eastern North America and beyond. And it was here where archaeologists first recognized the distinctiveness of this ancient indigenous culture.
One of this culture’s unique characteristics was participation in an interaction sphere that spanned much of North America. Ceremonial regalia recovered from mounds at the Hopewell Mound Group were crafted from copper from the Upper Great Lakes, shells from the Gulf of Mexico, and obsidian, a black volcanic glass that has been chemically traced to Yellowstone National Park.
This interaction was not, however, limited to trade. Pilgrims from across eastern North American came to Ohio’s earthworks bearing offerings of unusual raw materials from their native lands.
One of the most-extravagant offerings was uncovered in Mound 2 at the Hopewell Mound Group. Excavations revealed an inner mound about 20 feet in diameter that included more than 8,000 large flint disks, all of which appeared to have been made from Indiana Hornstone.
The main source of this flint, also known as Ste. Genevieve chert, is located in southern Indiana more than 200 miles from the Hopewell Mound Group. It has been assumed that the entire offering was the result of journeys by pilgrims all coming from a relatively small area of southern Indiana.
New research, however, indicates that the actual story behind this mound of flint disks is much more complicated.
Bretton Giles, an archaeologist at Kansas State University, and colleagues Brian Rowe and Ryan Parish from Memphis University, used nondestructive reflectance spectroscopy to analyze a sample of 172 of the flint disks from Mound 2 curated at the Chicago Field Museum.
They compared the results with the chemical profiles of 27 different flint outcrops across an area from southern Indiana to northern Alabama. Giles and his co-authors presented their results in the Fall 2020 issue of the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology.
The team found that 47% of the flint disks were, indeed, made from varieties of Ste. Genevieve chert, but it came from sources in central Tennessee as well as from southeastern Indiana.
Even more surprising, 49% were made from Upper St. Louis cherts obtained from sources in southern Illinois and northwestern Tennessee. Finally, 4% of the flint disks were made from sources in Ohio.
Giles and his colleagues concluded that “multiple geographically dispersed communities” must have been involved in obtaining the flint used to make the flint disks comprising the offering in Mound 2.
These results, based on only 2% of the entire deposit of flint disks, reveal the unexpected complexity of the Mound 2 flint disk offering; and provide further evidence of the remarkable extent of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere.
Brad Lepper is the Senior Archaeologist for the Ohio History Connection’s World Heritage Program
blepper@ohiohistory.org