Hopewell Artifacts
The Hopewell culture thrived in Ohio and other areas from about 200 BC to 500 AD. They built complex earthen enclosures with mounds and imported exotic materials through some means that included obsidian copper, galena crystal, sharks teeth, mica, pearls, silver, Minnesota Pipestone, steatite, and made finely woven textiles without a loom. The Pottery they made was sometimes on four distinct legs or flat bottomed.
Most of these courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society
Tremper Mound Artifacts
Archaeologists found a cache of over 500 artifacts on the floor of one of the compartments near the east end of the mound. Among the objects were stone pipes, beads, mica and galena (lead ore) crystals, earspools, cut animal jaws, stone ornaments, "boatstones," copper rattles, and fragments of woven fabric.
The most spectacular of these artifacts were the animal effigy pipes which are in the next slide. Nearly all of the objects had been broken on purpose. In contrast, the Hopewell people placed a second cache of intact pipes and other objects in the mound as they were building it over the remnants of their charnel house.The only other known cache of Hopewell effigy pipes was found beneath mound 8 at Mound City near Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1846. Those pipes had also been broken and placed in a cache in the house floor. Animal species such as hawks, cranes, and wildcats are represented in both groups.
Perhaps the caches were the work of one or two master craftsmen at each site who were communicating with each other. The Mound City cache, along with other artifacts found at that site, is now in the British Museum, London, England.
