CHAMPAIGN, lll. — In the early 1900s, an archaeologist, William
Mills, dug up a treasure-trove of carved stone pipes that had been
buried almost 2,000 years earlier. Mills was the first to dig the Native
American site, called Tremper Mound, in southern Ohio. And when he
inspected the pipes, he made a reasonable – but untested – assumption.
The pipes looked as if they had been carved from local stone, and so he
said they were. That assumption, first published in 1916, has been
repeated in scientific publications to this day. But according to a new
analysis, Mills was wrong.
In a new study, the first to actually test the stone pipes and
pipestone from quarries across the upper Midwest, researchers conclude
that those who buried the pipes in Tremper Mound got most of their
pipestone – and perhaps even the finished, carved pipes – from Illinois.
The researchers spent nearly a decade on the new research. They
first collected the mineralogical signatures of stone found in
traditional pipestone quarries in Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota,
Missouri and Ohio. Then they compared the material found in those
quarries to the mineralogical makeup of the artifacts left behind by the
people of Tremper Mound.
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IMAGE:
Researchers tested the mineralogical
profiles of stone from sites across the upper Midwest to determine the
origin of stone pipes found at Tremper Mound in Ohio, a Hopewell site.
Click here for more information.
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Less than 20 percent of the 111 Tremper Mound pipes they tested were
made from local Ohio stone. About 65 percent were carved from flint clay
found only in northern Illinois and 18 percent were made of a stone
called catlinite – from Minnesota.
The researchers are still puzzling over how most of these materials
made it to Ohio from Illinois, and are baffled by another new discovery.
Pipes from a site only about 40 miles north of Tremper Mound, an
elaborate cluster of immense mounds known as Mound City, were carved
almost entirely from local stone. Mound City was inhabited at about the
same time or shortly after Tremper Mound, and the pipes found there are
stylistically very similar to the Tremper pipes. (See a
slideshow of some pipes.)
The researchers describe their findings in a paper in
American Antiquity.
These results should remind archaeologists that things are not as simple as they sometimes appear, said Thomas
Emerson, the principal investigator on the study and the director of the
Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS) at the University of Illinois.
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IMAGE:
This Hopewell era platform pipe was
discovered in Adams County, Illinois, in 1928. It is made of catlinite
from Minnesota. Similar pipes were found in Tremper Mound, Ohio.
Click here for more information.
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"This is how mythology becomes encased in science," he said.
The study also confirms that the people who produced these pipestone
artifacts, known today as members of the Hopewell tradition, were more
diverse and varied in their cultural practices than scientists once
appreciated, Emerson said.
The Hopewell people, who lived in the region from about 100 B.C. to
roughly A.D. 400, have long been the subject of speculation, as the
artifacts they left behind and the manner in which these goods were
disposed of are not easily understood. Those living in southeastern
Ohio, especially, seemed to be "conspicuous consumers and connoisseurs
of the exotic," Emerson said.
The Hopewell people from that area collected "massive assemblages of
obsidian from Wyoming, mica from the Appalachians, and caches of
elaborately carved pipes," Emerson said. They also collected shells from
the Gulf Coast, along with the skulls of exotic animals (an alligator,
for instance).
"Strange animals, strange minerals, strange things were really a focus," he said.
Most of the carved stone pipes from that era have been found in
Ohio, where very large caches often containing more than 100 pipes were
ritually broken, burned and buried, Emerson said. The same style of
pipes are found in Illinois, but many fewer have been uncovered in
Illinois to date, he said, and they are dispersed, not heaped together
in giant hordes as in Ohio. (Watch a
videoabout the Hopewell pipes .)
There is evidence of stone carving at the Illinois sources where the
stone was gathered, but none at Tremper Mound, suggesting that the
Illinois stone was carved into pipes before it was transported to Ohio.
The team used a variety of techniques to analyze the material in the
quarries and the artifacts. One method, called X-ray diffraction (XRD),
produces a distinct signal that reflects the proportion of minerals in
different types of stone. The stone must be pulverized, however, to
subject it to XRD. To analyze the intact pipes, the researchers used a
non-destructive portable technology, called PIMA, which illuminates a
specimen with short-wavelength infrared radiation and records the
refracted (unabsorbed) wavelengths, allowing investigators to identify
the minerals present. They verified the accuracy of the PIMA by
comparing its results to those obtained with XRD on quarry specimens and
broken pipes.
The new findings should challenge archaeologists to look more
carefully at the evidence left behind by the Hopewell people, Emerson
said.
"This study really says to the archaeological community, you need to
go back to the drawing board," he said. "You've been telling stories
for decades that are based on essentially misinformation."
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The research team also included Kenneth
Farnsworth, ISAS research associate; Sarah Wisseman, the director of
the Program on Ancient Technologies and Archaeological Materials at
ISAS; and Randall Hughes, a senior scientist at the Illinois State
Geological Survey.
The National Science Foundation supported this research.
The ISAS and ISGS are units of the
Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois.
Editor's note: To reach Thomas Emerson, call: 217-244-7476; email:
teee@illinois.edu.
The paper, "The Allure of the Exotic: Reexamining the Use of Local
and Distant Pipestone Quarries in Ohio Hopewell Pipe Caches," is
available from the U. of I. News Bureau.
Contact: Diana Yates, Life Sciences Editor, U. I. News Bureau
diya@illinois.edu
217-333-5802
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
