Bumps and Circles

After our stop at Circleville we settled for the night in Moundsville. Now it's typical of the serendipity of this form of travelling that both places should settle on former Native earthworks. No trace remains at Circleville, but a fantastic one remains at Moundsville.

There's one just like this beside the M5 near Worcester. (In the UK that is.)

I suspect it's because it would have been uneconomic to flatten it. In the past it's been used for a while as a way of making money. It was excavated 1838 by local amateurs, who dug two horizontal tunnels and one vertical shaft. Two burial chambers were found. They were later enlarged and people could pay to go and have an ogle. There was also a building plonked on top at one time. Honestly!

Well it's world famous now...

You may find this difficult to believe, but we were not in Moundsville for the mound; we were there to tour the old State Penitentiary. (Which I'll show you next.) As one happens to face the other, it was at last an opportunity to see if the history of America stretched back further than 300 years or so. And do you know what? It does!

A mortar did the same job then as now.

When the amateur's dug into the mound, it was reckoned to be sixty nine feet high with a diameter of two hundred and ninety five feet.

We held a stone like this in a museum in the Orkneys.

It was surrounded by a moat about forty feet wide and five feet deep, although there's nothing discernible left of that.

Here is a centre dedicated to the archeology of pre-settler North America, the Delf Norona Museum, and fascinating it is too. Inside are artefacts from inside the burial chambers.

They had pretty interesting art as well.

The Adena people were the first to build these mounds, from about 1000BC. That's right, about 3000 years ago. Now I quote from The West Virginia Division of Culture and History website:

"The first group of people to develop this unique way of life were the Adena, from about 1000 B.C. to about 1 A.D. They had well-organized societies and lived in a wide area including much of present day Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and parts of Pennsylvania and New York. A later group of Mound Builders, the Hopewell, lived from about 1 A.D. to 700 A.D. and represented a greater refinement over the earlier Adena culture. Other cultures extended Mound Builders to about 1300 A.D."

Everything was always on a grander scale in America. We only had deer picks in the UK.

Now these people didn't have the wheel or horses, so imagine the organisation of labourers required to hump all this soil into such a big pile. And of course all the workers would need feeding. Not such simple folk as they first appear.

This pot looks just like one in a Dorset museum. Must be for ceremonial use...

Also they were traders, using copper from the western Great Lakes region and shells from the Gulf of Mexico. Did you know all this? Because we didn't.

This copper may have come from the place where we went down the mine.

 

The similarities to Stone Age people in Europe is astonishing, their arrowheads axes and clubs are almost interchangeable with those in an English museum.








Earlier this year, Diane and I walked the Ridgeway in Dorset, and passed burial mounds all along the route. It seems to us that just to be human is to be connected in some way - we all end up doing the same things. The differences are less than we think.

 Apparently there are still people around who hunt out these burial places and dig them out for what artefacts remain. It's illegal, but it still happens.

All things come to an end, and the Adena culture slowly began to give way to a more sophisticated culture of the Hopewell people. And of course, on the long timeline of history, eventually the present day culture took over.

Nobody knows what this little tablet means, or even if it's original. Any ideas?

So now, hopefully, when you think of North America, you'll have a slightly greater understanding of the history of this continent.

And here's a thought: the Adena culture flourished for about a thousand years, who'll put money on the present culture being around in 700 years time?



http://www.wvculture.org/museum/GraveCreekmod.html

http://www.cityofmoundsville.com/