Scholars have been studying and writing about the Hopewell people, in one way or another, for more than 200 years. At various points, interests in synthesizing ideas and data have brought researchers together in person and in text to contribute toward more integrated and holistic understandings of the “Hopewell phenomenon.” Such was the impetus behind the original (1978) and second (1993) Chillicothe Conferences on Hopewell archaeology—to bring together in the Hopewell “core” a group of scholars researching diverse aspects of Hopewell people, places, and practices. The third such conference was held in May 2016, and as was the case for the first two, many of the presented papers were collated into an edited collection. The two edited volumes of Encountering Hopewell represent that collection, containing 19 chapters produced by 31 authors who together discuss a rich and variable mosaic of lifeways and ceremonialisms practiced in the Eastern Woodlands during the Middle Woodland period (50 BC–AD 400).
Many chapters in Encountering Hopewell continue long-standing debates in Hopewell archaeology: sedentism, settlement systems, and foodways. In the “core” area of southern Ohio, where these debates have raged hottest, the team of Pacheco, Burks, and Wymer (Volume 2, Chapters 3 and 9) assuage any remaining doubts concerning sedentism. Indeed, Pacheco and colleagues (Volume 2, Chapter 3) paint a remarkable picture of daily life some 1,800 years ago at Brown's Bottom in the Scioto River Valley. There, an extended family lived in a large structure (13.7 × 13.7 m) lit and warmed by four hearths. Within this structure were benches along each wall, heated beneath by hot rocks placed in low basins. Out back was a yard, perhaps maintained by sweeping, that hosted various daily activities while also serving as a buffer from earth ovens that were located nearby but further south.
Approximately 100 m northwest of Brown's Bottom, Pacheco and colleagues (Volume 2, Chapter 3) report an additional habitation area, known as Lady's Run, that includes two more structures of very similar scales and designs. Hill and colleagues (Volume 2, Chapter 4) analyzed the lithic and ceramic (composition and style) assemblages of both areas, finding remarkable similarities between them. They argue that the slight distinctions in these assemblages demonstrate that households were the basic organizational unit of production and use and that these households were differentially engaged in exchange networks. Nolan and colleagues (Volume 2, Chapter 5) utilize similar analyses to interrogate broader Hopewell networks in the central Scioto Valley. They note a homogeneity of attributes across non-earthwork sites in the region, but a distinction when comparing these sites to earthwork sites that tend to have larger lithic artifacts and ceramics with both finer tempering and finer or more decorative surface treatments. Utilizing principal component analyses of data about sherd color and chemical composition, they too point toward households as nexuses for interaction and exchange, finding that communities across the region used similar production methods to make vessels with diverse local clays.
When it comes to evaluating extant models of Hopewell settlement systems, Pacheco and colleagues’ data from Brown's Bottom is among the most significant to date. Carr and Smyth (Volume 1, Chapter 6) also speak to Hopewell settlement systems, offering an ontological foundation to support Carr's previously developed model of a third- and fourth-century AD alliance between the three localized communities of the “core” (or tripartite ceremonial alliance). Here, Carr and Smyth draw from a rich and vast ethnohistory of Indigenous groups from the Plains and Eastern Woodlands to argue that the formation of intercommunity alliances was fundamentally a spiritual process. Pairing this dataset with evidence of multicommunity ceremonies, they identify three soul-based metaphors of social cooperation upon which these alliances were structured. Byers (Volume 1, Chapter 7) also takes up the topic of Hopewell souls. Citing a widespread Native American dichotomy of soul categories (personal souls and living souls), he structures a framework of collective burial locales (CBL): cemetery CBLs and world renewal CBLs, which have corresponding mortuary rituals emphasizing funerary or world renewal ceremonialism. Regardless of one's opinion of Byers's conception and the larger cultural apparatus in which he situates it, it is worth reflecting on his explicit challenge to Western-derived notions often implicit in our considerations of precolumbian mortuary practices.
Patton and Fahey (Volume 2, Chapter 8) along with Wymer (Volume 2, Chapter 9) harness robust datasets to demonstrate that Hopewell in the Hocking and Scioto valleys were food producers with complex and intentional agrarian practices. Patton and Fahey document an increase in domesticated plant use, sedentism, and landscape modification from the Late Archaic through Middle Woodland periods. In the same way that Pacheco and colleagues do, they provide a remarkable glimpse of life at a Middle Woodland homestead with intriguing evidence of seasonal burning of garden plots. Patton and Fahey also provide experimental data on Chenopodium propagation. This, taken with Wymer's chapter, adds to the growing literature detailing complex knowledge systems that Hopewell people employed to produce rich and diverse diets.
Encountering Hopewell takes us to three regions beyond the “core”: northeastern Ohio, western Michigan and northern Indiana, and northern Georgia, offering glimpses of the interregional diversity of Middle Woodland lifeways and ceremonialisms. The Heckleman site, reported by Redmond (Volume 2, Chapter 1), hosted residential occupation and ritual practices associated with crafting and caching. As such, Heckleman starkly deviates from models of Hopewell domesticity elsewhere in Ohio, and in some ways, it resembles civic-ceremonial centers of the Southeast. One such example is the Leake site in Georgia, which Keith (Volume 2, Chapter 6) demonstrates was an important regional center that included three earthen mounds, a ditch enclosure, and thousands of features containing evidence of communal feasting, craft production, and possible world creation rituals. The Leake site also served as a hub for interaction between communities in the Southeast and Midwest, notably for the exchange of Swift Creek pottery. Chivis (Volume 2, Chapter 2) examines cooperative interactions of Middle Woodland communities in western Michigan and northern Indiana by creating a new chronological model and employing petrographic analysis. He describes a series of seasonally mobile residential communities interacting fluidly while converging in extra-local gatherings for mortuary ritual at burial mounds.
The chapters by Giles (Volume 1, Chapter 9) and Yerkes and colleagues (Volume 2, Chapter 7) provide rich artifact-based analyses. Through analyses of particular platform pipes, plummets, boatstones, and copper plates, Giles documents iconographic continuities—namely avian surrounds and ceremonial coiffure and regalia—from Hopewellian to Mississippian anthropomorphic representations. This continuity has many important implications, although Giles correctly challenges assumptions that these design tropes maintained consistent significance and meaning across time. Yerkes and colleagues’ Indigenous perspective on large bifaces recovered from Mound 25 at Hopewell Mound Group is especially appreciated. They harness this perspective to present compelling life histories of these hypertrophic bifaces—from their production and hafting to their use, and finally, to their intentional fracturing and thermal alteration.
Ruhl (Volume 1, Chapter 8) brings light to a series of perplexing copper strips recovered from a feature just west of the famed structures at the Seip Earthworks. She interprets them as staple-like, having been hammered into a hard substrate before later being removed and deliberately deposited in a pit that intrudes into a capping stratum installed to decommission an activity area. Whereas their form adds to our understanding of the diversity of craft objects produced by Hopewell craftspeople, their deposition adds to the known complexity of nonmortuary practices happening at earthwork sites in the “core.” Ruby (Volume 1, Chapter 4) also reports on a host of nonmortuary features recently excavated and reported from the Hopewell Mound Group. Most notable is his research and interpretation of the Great Circle, which makes it one of the best understood Hopewell enclosures. Within the ditch, embankment, and timber-post circle were four large magnetic anomalies, one of which excavation revealed to be an earth oven. A line from the center of these earth ovens through the enclosure's northwest gateway aligns with the summer solstice sunset. Ruby concludes that the Great Circle hosted summer solstice feasts, while it also perhaps served as a cosmogram analogous to historically recorded World Center shrines.
Riordan (Volume 1, Chapter 2) reports on his meticulous, decade-long excavations of a collection of features at Fort Ancient Earthworks that have come to be known as the Moorehead Circle. The Moorehead Circle is, in many ways, Hopewell ceremonialism writ small (although not that small), given that it is a complex ritual landscape that animated and entangled mostly familiar elements—large post-in-ground structures, timber-post circles, mounding of red soil, and construction and use of a crematory—in novel and constantly evolving ways, ultimately appearing unique in the archaeological record. By conducting landscape-scale geomagnetic survey, Komp and colleagues (Volume 1, Chapter 3) offer a new and more complete perspective on the ritual landscape of Seip Earthworks. The results are remarkable, documenting more than a dozen new enclosures (both wooden-post and ditch-and-embankment) and three extensive pit clusters. Similarly, Davis and Burks (Volume 1, Chapter 1) employ different remote sensing techniques (lidar and aerial imagery) in western Indiana to record many new enclosures while correcting the recorded designs of others. In so doing, they refine our understanding of the distribution of Middle Woodland earthworks, and they hint at a region-specific tradition of monumentality that shares similarities with some sites in the “core.” So too do Hively and Horn (Volume 1, Chapter 5) who, working from within the “core,” demonstrate that a common set of geometric ideas were employed to compare and standardize the dimensions of earthen enclosures. These earthworks share alignments to the sun at solstices and to the moon at lunar standstills, sometimes utilizing topographically prominent hilltops as backsights.
The volumes conclude with Seeman's (Volume 2, Chapter 10) reflections on Hopewell archaeology in the twenty-first century, and he eloquently outlines major trends and advances in the field. Especially appreciated is Seeman's centering of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. Hopewell archaeologists are fortunate to have a conduit to convey research findings to large and interested public audiences, which—with anticipated UNESCO World Heritage status—are growing considerably. From Seeman's telling, Hopewell scholars have made progress in investigating Hopewell communities, interactions, and monumentality, and the diversity of opinions on these topics speaks to the vitality of the research community. Further evidence of the health of this community is the volumes’ coeditors themselves, which include a museum curator, NPS archaeologist, and CRM professional. They embody the many places where this scholarship is happening, offering assurances that important investigations will continue toward better understandings of Hopewell people, places, and practices. Encountering Hopewell is successful in that it both presents a wealth of new data and provides, in a more limited way, new approaches to collect and interpret this data. As such, these volumes are essential reading for any scholar curious about the “Hopewell phenomenon” and anyone else interested in the craft production, monumentality, and organization of small-scale societies.
