Edgington Mound: Three Thousand Years of the Dead

The Edgington Mound is a conical burial mound rising from the surrounding ground, built roughly two thousand years ago by a people archaeologists associate with the Adena culture. The Adena were among the earliest mound-building societies in the Ohio Valley, constructing thousands of earthworks across what is now Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Conical mounds like this one typically served as burial sites for important individuals, sometimes containing copper ornaments, shell beads, and other grave goods traded from distant regions.

The Adena shared the landscape with later groups including the Hopewell culture, and together these societies built one of the most elaborate ceremonial landscape systems in ancient North America. Most mounds in Ohio were destroyed by farming and development over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ones that remain, like Edgington, are rare survivors of a world that shaped this land for millennia before European contact.