Ancient civilizations can be found all over the old world. The ancient Egyptians are known for their pyramids and beautifully crafted gold artifacts, and the Aztecs in Mexico are known for their pyramids, gold, and human sacrifice. Northern Europe boasts places like Stonehenge and Newgrange, but what about North America? North America was home to many ancient civilizations, although they are less known, perhaps because the building materials most readily available to them, wood and earth, are not as well preserved.
Over two thousand years ago, a culture emerged that laid the foundations for the Ohio Valley’s first ancient civilization. When Europeans first started exploring the North American continent in the 16th and 17th centuries, they noticed the large earthen mounds and earthworks that dotted what eventually became the eastern United States, particularly in the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys. Large mound sites such as Cahokia in Illinois, the Grave Creek Mound in Moundsville WV, and practically the entire landscape around Chillicothe, Ohio as well as the monumentally large Earthworks Complex in Newark, Ohio provided evidence that there was once an ancient civilization in North America, long forgotten and unknown that had created these large earthen works. Throughout most of our history it was thought impossible that the ancestors of the then-present Native Americans could have been responsible for such feats of architecture that displayed a high degree of planning and design.
Throughout the late 1830s and 1840s, Edwin Davis and Ephraim Squire, both of Chillicothe, began traveling the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, studying and recording the various mound sites dotting the landscape. Even then, many mounds and earthworks had been destroyed or reduced to nothing more than lumps and bumps in fields by decades of agricultural practices. Their work would prove to be significant and, in many cases, the only record of some sites still available. The Smithsonian published their body of work titled “Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley” in their first edition of “The Smithsonian Contributions of Knowledge” in 1848.
The work conducted by Squire and Davis opened the door for further research. Scientists began to realize that the mound builder cultures were the ancestors of present Native American tribes. Cyrus Thomas would further this idea with research into mounds and mound building cultures published in the 12th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology in 1891. When he began his research, he was operating under the common belief that the mound building cultures were a people different than the present Native Americans. But his studies showed that many of the tribes that were currently living shared common themes and beliefs with these ancient peoples.
Over the next several decades, science advanced and more archaeological work was completed, and the wild theories associated with the mound building cultures would be completely discredited. Later in the 20th century, DNA evidence would confirm that the present Native Americans were descendants of the ancient mound building cultures.
Throughout the early 20th century, archaeologists learned enough from various sites to classify specific mounds and artifacts related to them into specific groups. In the Upper Ohio Valley, throughout most of southern Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania the Adena Culture was the earliest group of mound builders to live in the region, first appearing around 2,500 years ago.
Adena, however, was not a name this group of people would have called themselves or would have known at all in fact. We know nothing about the language the Adena people would have spoken, as it appears that they did not have any sort of writing system – at least not one that has survived in the archaeological record. The name Adena comes from the name of Thomas Worthington’s estate near Chillicothe that contained a large Adena mound explored in the early 20th century. It became the “Type Site” that gave its name to the culture. Some argue that the Grave Creek Mound in Moundsville, West Virginia was the “Capitol” of the Adena Culture but that remains unproven.
Greene County is on the western fringe of the Adena Culture, and many Adena mounds and sites are known. Projectile points, or arrowheads typical of the Adena People can be found all over the area. No Adena earthworks survive other than mounds. In Andrew Waychoff’s “Local History of Greene County Pennsylvania” first published in 1925, he lists several instances of “Indian Racetracks.” Waychoff describes: “The playground or race track on the Charles Keener farm in Greene Township, the ring formerly on the John Shane’s Farm at Brave, the Evidence of a ring on the John Lapping Farm in Franklin Township, and at several other places in this county, show a different mode of living than was noticed with the Later Indians.”
All the sites that Waychoff describes are now gone, but based on his descriptions it seems that he was referring to small circular earthworks that were, and still are, common at Adena sites throughout the Upper Ohio Valley. Studies have shown that these circular rings were formed by a bank and a ditch and most likely used to study the phases of the moon, and the rising of specific stars in the same fashion that Stonehenge would have been used by the prehistoric peoples of the British Isles. These circular earthworks often included timber circles and marker poles, and this would have been how the Adena people kept track of their calendar. Being one of the earliest groups in North America to start planting crops, it would have been critical to know when to plant and when to harvest. It Is also likely that these circular sites also had a ritual component.
Though the circular earthworks are now gone, many small mounds survive, perhaps most notably the two small Adena Mounds on the former Crow Farm in Richhill Township. Both of these mounds were explored multiple times between the 1920s and 1960s and were shown to be typical small Adena burial mounds. Other mounds survive near Garards Fort and New Freeport. It is impossible to say how many mounds once stood throughout Greene County and how many still do, lost in the rolling hills of our scenic wooded landscape.
The land we live on is not new, nor were we the first people to inhabit it. For thousands of years different peoples have called this region home. Many traces of these earlier civilizations still survive, in the mounds they left behind, in a few scattered stone artifacts found in creek beds and plowed fields and in museums throughout the area. The Adena Culture laid the groundwork for the larger and more advanced Hopewell Culture, and later the Mississippian Culture that would be responsible for the large, complex earthen pyramid at Cahokia, Illinois and other sites throughout the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys.