Burial Mounds

Figure 1: Big Mounds and Small
Figure 2: Sealed Pit Burial, the Simple Solution
Figure 3: The Log Crypt, the Expensive Solution

The burial mound was the very essence of Adena, and the archetypical Adena site was the mound excavated by Mills (1902) in Ohio on Governor Worthington's estate called "Adena". The choice of the name was fitting, for there were many examples of mounds in the Ohio Valley, and Webb relentlessly honed his interpretations of them beginning with his pre-professional excavations of the 1920s (Webb and Funkhouser 1928:72-121), through two phases of work at the Ricketts Mound, in effect his education in systematic Adena archaeology (Funkhouser and Webb 1935, Webb and Funkhouser 1940), through Wright (Webb 1940), Morgan Stone (Webb 1941a),Riley and Landing (Webb l943b), and many others, ending with his anti-climactic excavation and skimpy reporting (by his own standards) of the Dover Mound (Webb and Snow 1959) in the 1950s just prior to his retirement.

Webb demonstrated that Adena mounds were structurally variable by identifying 90 "traits" associated with them and the burials they contained (Webb and Snow 194S:32-82). The implications of this classificatory exercise, perhaps a case of taxonomic overkill, have always been problematical. Variability obviously reflected the underlying complexity in Adena burial customs. No one denies this fact, but there is little agreement about its significance.

If mortuary habits are viewed as highly symbolic, with deep cognitive significance, this variability is a product of how burial ritual was conducted, perhaps with changes through time or different burial programs for different individuals. Whatever, the variation itself will have considerable significance for other aspects of society. For example, in what proved a surprisingly early sociological explanation, Webb concluded that only special persons were buried in mounds while commoners were cremated and disposed of in the village; that is, in the inhumation/cremation dichotomy Webb (l942: 358-362) saw evidence for the existence of Adena social classes.

Other archaeologists, treating this variation more simply as variation in cultural "traits" lacking the social overtones, have suggested that Adena cremation was an early form of burial (or a late form) followed by (or preceded by) inhumation in log tombs. The significance of the distinction between mortuary treatments which Webb was getting at with his trait list was hardly simple, but despite the best efforts of more than one archaeologist, a fully acceptable scheme of variation incorporating the contrasts it generates has not emerged.

Because of this failure, and after conceding that material traits will never explain themselves, it is appropriate to question some underlying assumptions about the programmatic nature of Adena burial ritual. Current opinion tends to view variation in burial practices as indicating important differences in status. By this view, life status determined treatment after death. Similarly it is also generally assumed that the higher the status, the more elaborate the burial. If such were the case, variation in Adena burial would suggest that Adena society was complex and highly stratified and had many gradations of wealth and influence. In fact, in this respect, Adena society may have been more complex than any other prehistoric culture in the Ohio Valley.

I find the conclusions of this reductio ad absurdum improbable and, instead, a strong argument for the proposition that variation in mound burial was probably not the product of programmatic choices made by Adena leadership in response to the status of the deceased. The observed variation among burials may have been more accurately the outcome of largely open-ended mortuary ritual negotiated between social equals with variable or possibly unpredictable outcomes. Few have considered this possibility, certainly not Webb. However, it is one which I will emphasize as part of my own view that Adena societies were perhaps far more egalitarian than has heen supposed thus far. This position does not deny that differences between burials coded status differences among the living, but it emphasizes that burial choices in Adena were negotiable, open, and permissive of several possible outcomes. A theme in my approach to Adena is that we have perhaps been misled by the size and complexity of the mounds in interpreting the culture. From my perspective, Adena burial mounds become less monuments to the dead than the tangible records of social interaction. The change in emphasis is not subtle but constitutes a considerable ''demystification'' of archaeological interpretation. I sense that a similar process of reevaluation is currently working its way through the interpretation of Ohio Valley Hopewell (Greber and Ruhl 1989:271-293), and is expectable, given the certainty that Hopewell was descended from Adena.

While we have long recognized the interpretive failures of early writers who saw mounds as the products of an ancient and superior race of Mound Builders, no doubt white skinned, we are perhaps only now critically developing alternative explanations. For all his importance in developing Adena as an archaeological concept 50 years after Thomas's (1984) debunking of the Mound Builder hypothesis, it must be kept firmly in mind that Webb in 1945 (Webb and Snow 1945:328-332) could still plausibly argue that Adena originated in the Valley of Mexico. He believed it drew from the same historical hearth as its high cultures, and his interpretation was seconded by younger archaeologists (cf. Spaulding 1952) with more orthodox professional training. This interpretation was not simply a product of a failure to find Adena antecedents in local Archaic culture history; it was also a product of the complexity of Ohio Valley Woodland cultures and their perceived superiority to local manifestations.

There are three related major dimensions of mound variability: size, grave accessibility, and permanence of mortuary facilities. Of these, the obvious and seemingly critical characteristic of mound size is, I believe, an irrelevant factor, one which has been consistently misinterpreted by one or another of the various explanations which take the form of "the larger the mound, the greater the importance of those buried within."

Adena mounds were accretional, not planned. Every large and complex burial mound had simple beginnings in mortuary ritual conducted for a limited few. In a sense it was those initial burials in their "minimalist" mound structure which may have been the most significant in mound formation; it was they who triggered subsequent burial additions. Yet uniformly the initial mound structures were small and simple.

I would argue that no one had any idea when a mound was started how big it would ultimately become. At any point during its use the size of the mound was incidental to the more basic but less striking fact that the structure was a precinct for burial. Sheer mound size no doubt reflected social-environmental factors and implicitly was a comment upon the intensity and continuity of local mortuary ritual; the size of the mound, however, was not a characteristic inherent in the structure or a factor in ritual organization.

The second factor, grave accessibility, was a major source of variability in Webb's trait list. At one end in complexity was the sealed internment, at the other the elaborate log crypt. How the grave was built at either end tended to vary, and involved earth pits, puddled clay, stones, logs, bark, and combinations of each, but the accessibility of the body, once the grave was constructed, had considerable significance.

In discussing Hopewll, James Brown (1979) has drawn an important distinction between charnel houses and burial crypts, seeing them as mortuary facilities entailing very different costs (in labor expended) and responding to social systems of differing complexity. The "high cost" charnel houses are best known from Scioto Valley "great houses," products of a local Hopewellian society with considerable complexity; the "lower cost" crypts occurred widely in the Eastem United States in socially less complex contexts.

Charnel houses, in which a specialist maintained and manipulated the remains of the dead in mortuary-related ritual, did not occur in Adena [although Seeman (1986) has argued for the existence of Adena "mortuary camps", he has never considered them "charnel houses"]. Although Brown defined them only for Hopewell, his crypts are excellent characterizations of Adena log tombs. The low cost burial alternative in Hopewell (the log crypt) also existed in Adena as its most complex or costly type of burial.

Perhaps the most common Adena burial form was some variation on the sealed grave. Thus a burial type not noted by Brown for Hopewell was the Adena mainstay. In contrast to Brown's crypts, and certainly his charnel houses, most Adena burial mounds were a low cost mortuary system with notable, scattered and largely late exceptions (e.g. the Wright Mound,15Mm6). This low cost choice I consider to be a comment on the relative simplicity of Adena societies.

The third aspect of variation also relates to the nature of the grave. Closed graves and log crypts represent basically different types of internments. Quite unlike the former, the latter was an intentional investment in a reusable facility, essentially a burial vault, rather than a closed grave which could have been no more than an individual act of burial.

The fact that a crypt had a high probability of reuse explains the disparity in numbers of individuals buried in a mound with closed graves, like Robbins (15Be3), and one with log crypts like Wright. At Robbins, where all graves, although of considerable variety, were closed, 100 individuals were excavated (Webb and Elliot 1942:447). At the much larger Wright mound (lSMm6),in which all burials were recovered from log crypts, only 21 individuals were recovered.¹ In contrast to Robbins, labor was invested at Wright in semi-permanent mortuary facilities. The burials recovered from the excavated crypts may, in fact, only be the last individuals buried in them.

The significance of this difference between accessible and inaccessible graves raises an important question in Adena archaeology. Because they are highly visible landmarks, burial mounds have generally prompted the interpretation that they contained the graves of high status individuals: in fact, the more specific assumption has been that the larger the mound, the higher the status of the dead within. Many mounds were large because they contained log tombs (e.g. the large Wright Mound). Some authors (e.g. Shryock 1987) have seen their size as a comment on the developing political complexity in Adena culture, perhaps due to an increasing importance of agriculture.

It has also been argued, in a more sophisticated line of reasoning, that the mounds certainly could not have contained all Adena dead; thus, they held an upper class sample. In one way or another this argument stems from Webb's interpretation of the C and O Mounds and usually involves the assumption that lower class individuals were cremated and disposed of in the village.

There clearly were multiple ways to bury the dead in Adena, and mound burial represents only one of them. I will emphasize the possibility that the path to a mound burial for certain individuals was a product largely of the negotiation between burial parties and not simply a status marker. Other types of burial took place, perhaps where the factor of negotiation was not as important.

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1. It should be noted that there were parts of other individuals which, thus far, have not been adequately inventoried (Webb 1940:111).