Adena culture evolves in the Ohio River valley.
The Adena culture emerges in small settlements in what is now southern Ohio and parts of present-day West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Indiana. The inhabitants farm a few crops—including pumpkins, gourds, and tobacco—but they are primarily hunters and gatherers. In their plentiful environment, they can rely on wild plants and animals for food and still maintain a relatively sedentary existence.
The most distinctive characteristic of Adena sites are clusters of burial mounds. Early mounds include ridges formed along natural hills and freestanding earthworks in the shapes of circles, squares, and pentagons. The Adena people construct between 300 to 500 mounds. The largest, such as the Great Serpent Mound (see entry for 200 B. C. TO A. D. 400), require the cooperative labor of many people. That some burial mounds are much larger than others also indicates that some Adena have higher status than others.
The contents of the mounds provide evidence that the structures were built for religious rather than defensive purposes. Used for burials of corpses or cremated remains, many contain luxury goods for the dead to take with them to the afterlife. These goods include neck ornaments, slate pipes for smoking tobacco, and stone tablets carved with
“All preconceived notions were abandoned. . . respecting the singular remains of antiquity scattered so profusely around us. It was concluded that, either the field should be entirely abandoned to the poet and the romancer, or, if these monuments were capable of reflecting any thing upon the grand archaeological [problem] connected with the primitive history of the American continent, the origin, migration, and early state of the American race, that then they should be carefully and minutely, and above all, systematically investigated.”
—archaeologists E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis on their excavation of ancient Indian mounds
World History
