North American Archaeology

Woodland Tradition: Adena

For additional materials on Adena, see:

• Adena, with links to photos of Adena artifacts from a site in Connecticut
• Essential features of Adena ritual by R. Berle Clay, with some illustrations.

Among the best known of the Early Woodland cultures

Concentrated in a small area - around 300 sites are within 150 miles of Chillicothe, Ohio, extending into Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, with another cluster near Lexington, Kentucky.

Many sites now destroyed!

Dates span time from about 2800 BP (800 BC) to 100 AD

Importance comes from its influence rather than its extent

Most core area sites have large and largely unexplained earthworks - not just the usual mounds

• high narrow ridges of earth that enclose large fields
• may be circular, square, pentagonal or follow irregular edges of flat-topped spurs or promontories
• sometimes conical or domed burial mounds lie within the earth works, sometimes directly over earlier villages

Food Resources and Material Culture

As in the Archaic, food resources came from a variety of species- evidence comes from perishable specimens preserved in Adena rockshelters and caves in Kentucky

• Preserved human feces from the Newt Kash Shelter contains sunflower, goosefoot seed in quantity-both cultivated

  Also bits of bone, feather, a grasshopper leg and a beetle fragment

Full list of species present is almost endless:

• deer, elk, black bear, woodchuck, beaver, porcupine, turkey, trumpeter swan, ruffed grouse
• several edible seed grasses and nuts
• cultivars seem to have been a secondary resource

Other perishables from the caves:

• wooden pestles, for use in "hominy holes," mortars carved in bedrock
• woven sandals of grass and fiber
• beds of grass and leaves

Salts Cave in Kentucky produced native bottle gourds and squash, sandals, cordage, torches, wooden bowls, gourd utensils,

Mining tools also found

• important in that they were mining gypsum and crystalline mirabilite from 3000 BP onward
• gypsum was a prized white pigment; mirabilite a cathartic, perhaps both used in trade
• mines dug deep in the caves by torch light, with the cave mouth serving as residence

Death Rituals and Burial Mounds

Death rituals are the best known part of the culture (perhaps an accident of early archaeological interests in collections)

Burial mound in general are artificial small "hills" created when individual loads of earth carried from nearby borrow areas, sometimes of different colored earth, giving mounds a patchwork coloration if dug in cross section

Mound design- varies widely

Smaller ones

• often built in one stage over a single person
• corpse placed in a simple pit with mound built over it quickly

Larger ones

• log lined pit or a simple clay-lined basin with charred human remains from cremation

Robbins Mound, Kentucky

• A series of mounds-52 tombs of four types

1. earthen-wall enclosure lined with logs and bark with a log roof
2. tomb within a cavity left by the collapse of an earlier tomb
3. log enclosure on a flat surface covered by earth
4. tomb constructed on a slope, by cutting a level floor on a slope
5. tombs possible on all levels of the mounds, with as many as 6-8 increments

• Each built in increments over a dozen burials, placed in the mound at different times
• A few log tombs with 1-3 individuals covered with red ocher or graphite, buried in extended position and with grave goods, but --
• Cremation the preferred disposal method, with nearly total cremation in clay-lined pits or partial cremations in association with log-lined tombs
• Jennings suggests that it is an association of death and fire as in some places in the Orient or some Archaic centers to the East

Some round Adena structures are unique in construction-once thought to be houses-overhead

• Walls of paired posts set in ground to slant outward.
• Rafters supported by four sturdy center posts in a square around a central fire pit
• Roof of matting or thatch
• Walls of flexible poles or cane woven or "wattled" around the posts
• Size varied -20-80 feet in diameter
• Many destroyed by fire
• Some now suggest they were charnel house, built over the mound pit where bodies were defleshed and stored until major ceremonies were held

Grave goods are relatively rare:

• smooth stone gorgets (rarely copper) in oval, rectangular or reel shape- chest ornaments
• distinctive tablets-rectangular, 3"x4", 1/2" thick, engraved with raptors or waterbirds, or geometrics that may have been used for textile or body stamping-overhead

Pottery as grave goods was unusual, but good, plain utilitarian ware, conical or round bottom jars with check-stamping

Textile arts were well developed-plain plaiting, twilling, and twining, with examples found near or around copper objects where copper salts preserved the material

A range of other objects: awls, heavy chipped stone knives, points, scrapers, hoes, nut stones, river mussel pearls, shell beads, spoons from terrapin carapaces, cut animal jaws, celts, bowls from human skulls

Unusual items: upper jaw of a wolf cut so that the incisors and canines are intact on a kind of handle made by carving the palate to a spatula form - part of an animal mask? Human skulls cut in similar ways also found -overhead

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larry-zimmerman@uiowa.edu
University of Iowa Anthropology
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