The Scioto Hopewell - and Their Neighbors

This book presents, for the first time, a detailed, holistic synthesis of the lifeways, culture, history, and material record of the ceremonially and socially rich Hopewell peoples who lived in the Scioto valley and neighboring areas in Ohio in the first centuries A.D. The Scioto Hopewell built monumental, 80 acre earthworks aligned precisely to astronomical events, masterfully worked glistening metals and semiprecious stones into elegant designs, and honored their dead with these vocal artifacts in community burial houses two-thirds the size of a football field. The Scioto Hopewell’s intricate social order and religious concepts of alliance afforded them three centuries of intercommunity peace. 

The first half of the work, written in the vein of classic ethnographies that focus on a local group in context, thickly describes the local, natural and symbolic environmental setting, subsistence and settlement pattern, community and sociopolitical organization, ceremonial organization, intercommunity dynamics, and world views of Scioto Hopewell peoples. By taking an encompassing and historical view of Scioto Hopewell life, both its origins and ending are revealed.