The broad area between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian crest is rich in early American history, but the human story here goes back way beyond Daniel Boone and Abraham Lincoln to an era not often discussed in textbooks. From around 800 bc until ad 1500, this region was home to two successive prehistoric cultures which were roughly simultaneous with the legendary Mayans and Aztecs of Mexico, but are now all but forgotten, remembered solely for the massive earthen mounds they left behind.
The older of these two prehistoric peoples is known as the Hopewell culture, since the first scientific studies were conducted in 1891 at a farm owned by a man named Hopewell. Some 50 years earlier, the mounds had already become famous, as stories spread tracing their construction back to a “lost race” of mysterious origin, not unlike the Anasazi of the desert Southwest. As the Hopewell culture began to decline, around ad 500, another culture, called the Mississippian, came into being. Similarities between these two hunter-gatherer cultures, with their far-flung trading networks and hierarchical societies, are much greater than their differences, but archaeologists consider them to be completely distinct from one another. A key difference: Almost all of the Hopewell mounds were rounded or conical, and built as burial sites, while Mississippian sites tended to be more rectilinear, with the mounds serving not as interments but as bases for long-vanished wooden structures built atop them. In Hopewell sites, buried along with the usually cremated human remains, archaeologists and treasure hunters have recovered a compelling array of artifacts—obsidian tools (from the Pacific Northwest), shell beads (from the Gulf of Mexico), and silver and copper objects (from the Great Lakes)—which give some hint of the quality of ancient Native American life.
Ohio is particularly well-provided with these enigmatic earthworks; at the Hopewell Culture National Historic Park near Chillicothe, over two dozen burial mounds have been preserved by the National Park Service. West of Chillicothe, the low-lying Serpent Mound stretches for a quarter-mile along a river, and over 100 other sites have been identified across the state.
Further west on US-50, along the Mississippi at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, the remnants of the largest prehistoric city in North America now sit across the river from St. Louis. North along the river, the Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa across from Prairie du Chien preserves yet more burial mounds, while down south, the Natchez Trace Parkway features the prehistoric Emerald Mound. Macon, Georgia, has the major mounds of Ocmulgee National Monument; and in Louisiana, perhaps the most extensive site of all is being excavated at Poverty Point, north of Monroe.
