The Adena mounds
Ohio valley communities build conical burial mounds and enormous earthen effigies.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 500 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
From around 1000 BCE, Adena communities in the Ohio valley construct conical burial mounds, circular earthworks and elaborate log tombs, trading copper from Lake Superior, mica from the Appalachians and marine shell from the Gulf. They are not agriculturalists in the maize sense — they cultivate a distinct set of native seed crops. The Great Serpent Mound, an earthwork over 400 metres long, is associated with them or their successors.