This two-volume set is the third in the series by Christopher Carr and colleagues examining the archaeological entity known as “Hopewell,” from roughly 300 BC through AD 450. In more than 1,400 pages Christopher Carr and colleagues examine Hopewell public mortuary ritual in the Scioto River Valley of south-central Ohio, delving into concepts of soul, afterlife, and personhood. The goal of this two-volume set is to approximate a specific Native perspective in each of the 14 cases of mortuary ritual drama uncovered. Volume 1 focuses on the topic of ritual, and volume 2 focuses on the theme of personhood. Dozens of pages of appendices are available and accessible in online supplemental materials.
Volume 1’s chapters are grouped into four parts. Chapters in part I (chapters 1–3) outline the rationale for the project, advocating for consideration of culturally close Native mythology and reflecting on vocabulary and Western influences on archaeological terminology, including terms such as “supernatural” and “faith” that lack any epistemological basis in cross-cultural examination. Carr considers religion “wholistically,” specifically meaning “ideas as well as ritual practices and their material and symbolic expression” (p. 58). Consequently, he criticizes many scholars for essentializing “a” Native ontology (even on the scale of “Hopewell”), for applying Cartesian or phenomenological philosophies, for positing ideas about soul and ritual sequences that have no basis in the extensive cross-cultural examination (chapters 6–9), or for failing to ensoul nonhumans and often even humans. Instead, he argues, we should consider ethnographic and Native-authored material from culture groups as close as possible to the archaeological culture or should rely on the archaeological patterning contained in the appendices.
In chapter 3, Carr and contributing coauthor William Weeks Jr. reject the applicability of terms such as “supernatural,” “supreme being,” “transcendent,” and “beliefs” (which they argue can be pejorative), and they instead favor “ideas,” “faith,” “worship,” “prayer,” “purity,” “pollution,” and “perfection/progress.” They spend four pages discussing and defining “religion” (favoring instead the broader hyphenated term “philosophy-religion”), and they devote five pages to discussing and defining “sacred.”
Part II begins with Carr’s cross-cultural exploration of ritual dramas and then moves to the analytical development of 14 Hopewell ritual dramas documented in chapters 10–14. “Ritual drama” is complicated, and it requires myth or history to “cue” the sequencing of actions and heroes to be impersonated, writes Carr. I think that “impersonation” is not the correct concept. More to the point is that of the Nahuatl teixiptla, when teotl (movement, recombination, essence) fills a “vessel.” The vessel “walls” make “bundles,” a point that relates to and expands Carr’s discussion of bundles in Chapter 22. It is teixiptla—a vessel filled with teotl—that explains why a rock might be infused with a spirit, and again it is teixiptla that presents as a spirit or hero in Carr’s ritual dramas (pp. 138–139). Aztec teixiptla appeared with deity insignia and regalia and acted in recognizable ways (e.g., flute playing, having multiple wives, experiencing similar deaths). They were the deity “devoid of their social and personal identities” (p. 139), not “impersonators.”
Part III begins with Anna C. Novotny’s chapter on “field anthropology” and the concept of l’ anthropologie terrain, and it then moves to taphonomic considerations of Ohio Hopewell burials and cremations based on considerations of photographs of archaeological contexts. Appendices contain “data, photographs, and primary observations” (p. 164) of 68 graves, including 83 individuals, from 15 sites in the Scioto River Valley. The data potential of the photos and line drawings for reconstructing the ritual dramas of part IV was “good” (p. 187) and, I would add, essential to this study.
There is much in Native American religion that transcends temporal periods imposed by archaeologists, which is the point of Carr’s emphasis instead on ethnographically recorded theological points and rituals. Carr writes, “Past native voice [via artifacts and features] may speak more encompassingly than present native voice” (p. 45) when supported by archaeological context. Therefore, four exhaustive studies of ethnography follow in part III, undertaken by Carr, Christopher R. Caseldine, and Samantha R. Feinberg, generating dozens of pages of data appendices that are available from the publisher online. The first two chapters are ethnographic accounts from 42 Indigenous North American groups, with particular interest in recorded ideas about how “essences” journey to an afterlife. The result is 12 distinct concepts about the afterlife journey, challenging generalized concepts drawn from several influential studies. This work with ethnographies and its focus on the variables in beliefs ground this extremely important and successful study. Metanarratives and local narratives are assembled for the reader, and a searchable database is provided with emphasis on geographical distribution. The second set of two chapters in part III teases out ideas about underwater-underground beings encountered during the journey to the afterlife. Here Carr considers Christian influences on afterlife narratives of Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, finding the notion of “evil” as particularly intrusive (p. 414) among Jesuit records and perpetrated by twentieth-century scholars. Twenty-four kinds of underwater-underground beings are documented, none of them always harmful (pp. 427–428), and many of them having distinct residences, appearances, and roles. Among the topics considered here are dogs, owls, and “bad” birds sometimes encountered along the journey to the afterlife.
All of the material in the first three parts (490 pages) of volume 1 is prologue to part IV, which focuses on the reconstruction of afterlife ritual dramas of Hopewell peoples of the Scioto Valley and elsewhere in eastern North America (chapters 10–15, encompassing some 340 pages). Chapter 10 by Carr and Novotny examines seven burials in Charnel House C under Mound 25 at the Hopewell mound group near Chillicothe, Ohio. These burials are convincingly interpreted as stages in a tableau of an afterlife journey—the flight of the soul from the deceased (shown as a skeleton with limbs “in flight”), arrival at the edge of the earth and encountering the Milky Way, events along the path, and encounters with diverse beings. They argue that this tableau using sacrificial humans was composed for the purpose of instructing the dead of three communities. The projected audience of 100 or so community members watched inside the spacious charnel house—an architectural manifestation of the cosmos itself—looking at the tableau. Cremains had been poured out into shapes relevant to the drama. In chapters 11 and 12 Carr discusses bird-shaped burials and effigies at other sites in the Ohio Valley and in the upper Mississippi Valley as well as Mississippian stone figures in Georgia. Only the Georgia bird effigies are similar in meaning—that of soul flight—to those of bird-human burials in Scioto Hopewell, while the other bird examples are clarified as portrayals of Birdman (p. 685–689), or in the case of effigy mounds, clan animals. This clarification alone is a major contribution to American iconographic studies as are the various forms of underworld characters.
Chapter 13 explores Below World dramas enacted in mortuary settings in the western charnel house under Mound 25 at Hopewell, in burials 2 through 7 at Seip, and in charnel houses 12 and 13 at Mound City. Male-female pairs and children portray families that are metaphorically communities. Chapter 14 gives attention to more ritual dramas set in the Below World found among the burials in other mound centers—Turner, North Benton, Tremper, Newark, and Ater. These two chapters illuminate the ritual significance and symbolism of composite underworld and underwater characters as well as dogs.
Chapter 15 closely examines 13 Middle Woodland dramas Carr and coauthors have identified, dating from AD 150 to 300, for repetition and differences. He rejects the ideas that these rites are part of sodality-based cults or are world renewal rites or are part of a pan-Hopewellian religion. Instead, they are simply part of a shamanic philosophy-religion that is much older than Hopewell (p. 836). Examples from sites associated with Glacial Kame culture and that of the Early Woodland period Cresap mound are discussed here to demonstrate the antecedents to Hopewell practices. With examples ranging from Havana (Illinois) to Squawkie (Pennsylvania) manifestations of “Hopewell,” Carr talks about audience, the variable of the ritual specialist, and temporal differences in ritual dramas.
Encompassing chapters 16–22, the second volume focuses on the theme of “personhood.” Chapter 16 is probably the most significant discussion of personhood (divisible or indivisible) in print, extracting 10 categories of “persons” from both Western thought and from ethnographic databases about Indigenous societies in the Americas. Significantly, he dispenses with the notion of “partible dividual” (p. 902). Chapters 17 and 18 examine ethnographies of 43 Eastern and Plains tribes for documentation of “soul-like essences” along nine variables. In light of the Nahua belief in three souls located in blood/heart, head, and flatulence, it is surprising that three souls are so rarely specified north of the Gulf of Mexico (p. 978). Chapter 19 debunks the prestige goods model and the influence of any aggrandizing humans in the archaeological record of the Middle Woodland period. They conclude that cooperation for community good is much more likely to explain the mortuary rituals and terraforming of “Hopewell” people.
In subsequent chapters Carr and Heather Smyth probe Scioto Hopewell soul ideas through mortuary “power” objects placed on, under, and around skeletons. This is extremely well-grounded research, not speculation, based on the ethnographic data presented in chapters 11–17 and a Hopewell bioarchaeological database used to explore various aspects of Hopewell souls. Carr and colleagues demonstrate that the most frequently marked area of the body is the head, seat of the “free” soul, followed by the hands. In Nahua thought (Jill Furst, The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient Mexico, Yale University Press, 1995), the heart-soul imparts skill and aptitude. I wonder, then, if the hands of artisans were marked as an extension of that soul.
Power objects positioned around corpses are made of either metal (the personhood of copper objects and of mica is discussed in chapter 22), pigment, animal parts, or certain stones, but there are no examples of power objects made of shell, even though shell was the focus of a lengthy quote on healing (pp. 1230–1231), and healing objects were the focus of one of nine research questions (p. 1237). I am startled by their conclusion that there were 28 souls in Scioto Hopewell thought, based on 28 places where power objects were positioned at the body, and surprised at even the number of 16 or 12 souls in other locations in Ohio (p. 1390). These numbers are high because Carr and coauthors equate exit places with distinct souls. I returned to Furst’s (1995) book to count exit places for the three souls of the Nahuas and came up with 25 to 28 exit places, but she records only three distinct souls. Nevertheless, there is no damage done to the broader point—that specific burial goods and their bodily placements tell us much about ancient ideas of soul essences.
Missing from the research questions was why some people were marked with power objects or were included in ritual dramas but most were not, and why most of the deceased were buried in contexts other than charnel houses. Collectively, excavations at Scioto Hopewell sites have identified 289 individuals in 12 cemeteries (chapter 20). Among those, 89 individuals are associated with power objects and not with the ritual dramas. Elsewhere in Ohio (chapter 21), of the 348 individuals buried in charnel houses only 66 are associated with power objects. Perhaps burial placements (inside or outside of charnel houses) and associated items (power objects) were tied to different fates of the soul in the afterlife of each individual. I was also left wondering why so few Middle Woodland communities sponsored ritual dramas.
Becoming Scioto Hopewell is a tour de force of logic and detail. Some of the significant findings of the present volumes are (1) there is no evidentiary support for a Hopewell interaction sphere or Hopewell religious cult; (2) other-than-human beings can be both beneficial and detrimental for humans; (3) there are significant regional and temporal differences in the meanings of bird images; (4) Hopewell artifacts and burials show cooperation in sending off the soul, not competitiveness in display; (5) human sacrifice probably was conducted at some Hopewell sites; (6) different categories of shamans were present within Hopewell societies; (7) there is great antiquity in the presence of dogs and “brain eaters” in afterlife journeys; and (8) no single modern Native American group is a direct analogue for Hopewell people who were themselves as varied in afterlife beliefs as are contemporary Indigenous peoples of eastern North America.
Carr and colleagues have done all of the hard work for us in examining ethnographies of contemporary and historic Indigenous communities to identify aspects of Native beliefs about the afterlife. They summarize those data here in variables, tables, and appendices. Anybody who wants to discuss meaning in the archaeological record of eastern North America, from Woodland through contact periods, needs this resource.
At the same time, I think Carr needs to look to the Archaic period for a more nuanced understanding of Hopewellian death rituals. Although Carr does reference Glacial Kame and older shamanic practices, important clues about mortuary ritual and philosophy-religion for Woodland-era peoples could be drawn from Late Archaic communities of practice. In his opening paragraph to the book, Carr writes that “southern Ohio people gathered in ceremony . . . to mingle together the souls of their deceased in order to create a spiritual-social alliance among the communities” (p. 3). Bundled burials in Archaic period shell mortuaries show us that throughout the Ohio Valley corpses were brought to these places to be mingled with real and fictive kin in the ground and with the living. Carr states (p. 1492) that Scioto Hopewell people were the first to enact ritual dramas. I beg to differ.
In the case of the Archaic mortuaries, both those made of shell and those made only of dirt, there are examples of groups of four and five bodies that at the least indicate a common rite involving human sacrifice, as teixiptla of one or more spirits (Cheryl Claassen, Feasting with Shellfish: Archaic Sacred Sites and Rituals, University of Tennessee Press, 2010). A Milky Way path of the souls is demonstrated by burial in the shell/star medium beside a river and also by the 212+ dog burials on the Green River in Kentucky. These dogs almost certainly represent guides through the Milky Way, a role that is well documented in chapters 13 and 14. Refreshingly, Carr dispenses with the idea of Hopewell-era warfare in favor of sacrifices for ritual drama, just as I have done for the Archaic peoples living south of the Ohio River (Claassen 2010). Although I can think of no arrangements of corpses in Archaic settings that evoke birds in flight, burials with bird remains do exist. Even many projectile points, the most common Archaic grave good, have the bird-in-flight form. I would propose, then, that ritual dramas were practiced during the Archaic period.
To the followers of Carr’s program, it may seem that there is now little left to do after three successful and very detailed studies of Scioto Hopewell. Yet, indeed there is more. What I see missing, in addition to further consideration of antecedent rituals and ritual dramas, and an exploration of the souls of people not included in mound or charnel house settings, is an examination of whether ritual dramas continued on beyond the (permeable) boundary of a single charnel house. For instance, does the journey that begins at Newark, Ohio, in the charnel house under the Eagle mound continue to the north and then west across the landscape using other pathways and enclosures? Was there a spirit pathway connecting the multiple mounds at Mound City that relived a journey? Were multiple ritual centers with earthworks located along the Scioto or the Miami Rivers connected through narrative and pathway into an afterlife journey? I also would encourage Carr and others to consider possible evidence for associated rituals, perhaps carried out at specific landscape features, like rockshelters, caves, and mountain tops, or ceremonial stone landscapes. Moreover, I wonder why Carr has found so few ritual dramas.
I am quite stimulated by the material in these two volumes. Furthermore, I have been and continue to be quite impressed by Carr’s command of theoretical works, his critical perspective, his strategy for understanding the Hopewell archaeological phenomenon, and his tenacity maintained across 30 years of research in Hopewell archaeology. This study of Scioto Hopewell mortuary ritual drama is wonderfully smart, educational, complex, insightful, and useful.
