Ohio History Connection archaeologists excavated many of the most iconic examples of Hopewell culture regalia from the ceremonial deposits at the base of the Seip Mound. The largest of these deposits was the so-called Burnt Offering, which contained more than 5,000 objects, including thousands of shell beads, copper breastplates, canine teeth of bears and mountain lions, alligator teeth, shark teeth, flint points, ceramic sherds, charred fabric, and fragments of leather. The “most interesting of all artifacts in the offering” were five steatite spheres engraved with various unique designs. Archaeologists Shetrone and Greenman interpreted these as marbles. Brad Lepper and Ben Barnes, Chief of the Shawnee Tribe, based on traditional Shawnee traditions, now think these stones were used to attach a leather drumhead to the shell of a water drum. This would make them the oldest direct evidence for a drum in eastern North America.
Brad Lepper is the Senior Archaeologist for the Ohio History Connection’s World Heritage Program. Initially, his research focused on the Paleoindians of midcontinental North America, but that focus quickly shifted to studying the Hopewell culture and especially their crowning achievement - the Newark Earthworks. His most recent research incudes collaborative work on the fraudulent but fascinating Newark Holy Stones and the Serpent Mound. Lepper is the author of Ohio Archaeology: An Illustrated Chronicle of Ohio’s Ancient American Indian Cultures, published in 2005, which received the Society for American Archaeology’s Public Audience Book Award.
Host Jim Reed. Contact me at: mayaman@bellsouth.net to receive free monthly issues of the Aztlander e-magazine. Please subscribe to our Aztlander RU-vid channel.
2 мар 2023
