The Hopewell Network: Trade Routes Before Europe Arrived

Two thousand years ago the people of the Ohio Valley were engaged in a continental trade network that stretched from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes.

The Hopewell culture, which flourished from roughly one hundred before the common era to five hundred of the common era, maintained exchange routes that moved obsidian from Wyoming, copper from the Lake Superior region, mica from the southern Appalachians, shark teeth and conch shells from the Gulf Coast, and grizzly bear teeth from far west of the Mississippi. These materials were worked into objects of extraordinary craftsmanship and deposited in burial mounds and ceremonial earthworks across southern Ohio and beyond.

The earthworks at Mound City, now part of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park near Chillicothe, contain dozens of burial mounds within a square enclosure of about thirteen acres. The objects recovered from these mounds in early excavations, and studied by archaeologists since, represent some of the finest pre-Columbian craftsmanship in North America. They also represent the endpoint of a supply chain that reached two thousand miles in every direction.

The Hopewell tradition is not a single nation with a single name. No living people claim direct, continuous descent from the Hopewell builders as such, though the descendants of the Hopewell people are among the many nations of the eastern woodlands. The mounds belong to a past that has no single heir and therefore, in some sense, to all of us who stop here on the way through Ohio.