hopewell and adena question

[cole]

ok i have seen many presentations/shows about the adena and hopewell and ive come to feel that they were a mainly peacfull culture, my dad feels that they were very war driven and killers, i think that if the were to meet someone new they would insticivly want to trade and be friendly tward them not kill them, what do you all think?

[comanche]

Cole,,You know that's a good question.It really boils down to this.There were good Indians and bad Indians.Just like we have always had when it comes to People.When The Native Americans were being Pushed they pushed back.So in answer to your question It would depend on when you might have encountered these People.Comanche

[Steve Valentine]

If you want to read up on the Hopewell and the Adena go to this link. This takes you directly to the Hopewell link and then you can scroll down and the links on the right will take you to other great pages.


Hopewell Culture - Ohio History Central - A product of the Ohio Historical Society

[uniface]

Adena and Hopewell, because they were so big and elaborate, have always been like Rorshach tests in a way -- different people have always "seen" different patterns in them, the same way they do in cloud shapes.

You almost have to go back 50 years or more to find archaeologist looking at the big picture rather than the little details where these are concerned. The one guy who did, and did especially well, was Don Dragoo. His Mounds for the Dead, though it's dated by now, is probably where you'd want to start into the question.

Without much doubt, the Hopewell people (or influence sphere or however else you want to characterise it) moved in from the West, driving the Adena people out. Some went South, down the Mississippi and up the Tennessee, re-establishing themselves there as the Copena culture. Others went West (there was a large, late Adena mound complex in Delaware) and North from there, up the coast into Massachusitts.

Culturally, Hopewell has a lot of features in common with its contemporaries in Mexico -- probably by way of the Crystal River Complex in Florida. This might be of suggestive value in trying to estimate what they were like.

What muddies the waters in this area is that the Europeans who settled the Adena & Hopewell areas naturally (given their Biblical background) saw their remains as self-evident proof that they had been a mighty civilisation (like Assyria and Babylon) that must have been destroyed by God for their sins. The post-"Enlightenment" era archaeology that followed has never tired of scoffing at this idea as hopelessly ignorant. Anthropology (as formulated by Franz Boas), which includes archaeology as one of its branches, insists that all people, everywhere are born as blank slates that become what they are from being written-upon by their environments. I.e., there are no human analogues of German Shepherds, Labrador Retrievers or French Poodles with different mentalities and temperaments. This being the case, anything that even suggested that they may have had a national character would be tidied out of the way. So I wouldn't expect to find anything bearing on whether they were warlike (if they even were, and I have no idea if this were the case or not) in the official account.