The Woodland Era

By Ronan Thompson, GVS Research and Archives Coordinator
Welcome back to our journey through German Village history!
This week, we’re stopping our time machine in the Woodland Era (800 BCE-1000 CE) to explore some of the Village’s favorite things: art and architecture. German Village architecture today is synonymous with one thing: bricks. Many of the bricks used in the streets and buildings in the neighborhood were created in Columbus with local materials in the mid 19th century; however, that wasn’t the first time people had sculpted the land itself into something magnificent.
As we travel back about 2,000 years, we find 95% of the land covered in dense forest. A herd of bison traverses a well-worn path through the trees, their broad heads clearing away the new-grown brush. Between the gaps in the branches, we catch sight of something glittering under the midday sun. As we go closer, we notice it is not just the bison on this path and us. There is a parade up ahead, hundreds of people following the distant light. Their shell and bone beads jingle as they walk, almost drowned out by the music of drums, flutes, and singing. We follow them across a bridge into a clearing, and finally we see it. A massive conical structure, six stories high and surrounded by a circular moat. Polished copper and mica ornaments hang from wooden posts and reflect the light of the sun and cooking fires as the smell of roasting fish and vegetables fills the air. Crowds of people gather around; distant relatives and old friends exchange greetings. Our eyes stretch over the crowd, and we realize there are more of these massive structures on the horizon, surrounded by circular wooden houses, flourishing gardens, potters, and stone carving workshops.
Life has changed for the people living along the Scioto since we last visited. Populations are larger, villages are more permanent, and people have begun selectively modifying local flora to produce larger and larger amounts of food. This surplus in food and labor means that people have the time and energy to devote to building large-scale monuments, creating art, and gathering together with the communities around them to exchange goods and ideas. These are the Adena people, an Early Woodland (800 BCE-500 CE) culture most well known now for their large burial mounds. These structures acted as cemeteries as well as gathering grounds for rituals, celebrations, and trade. Burials were interred in layers, with between 10-80 people being laid to rest together. Often bodies were placed in wooden coffins alongside grave goods such as decorative clay pipes or copper jewelry. Natural copper deposits along the Great Lakes were being mined at this time to create decorative art “at an almost industrial scale,” according to archaeologists E.J. Neilburger and Sarah Shulman in Central States Archaeological Journal. These pieces traveled to Central Ohio along the waterways, and were also traded with other nations as far as the Rocky Mountains and the Florida Gulf in exchange for luxury materials such as obsidian.
The Adena Culture is just one of the many distinct cultural groups that inhabited Central Ohio during the Woodland Era. It’s important to note that the names we use to refer to these groups of people today are not what they would have called themselves, and mostly derive from the names of the people who owned the land on which important archaeological sites were discovered. Different cultural groups are distinguished by things like pottery styles, tool shapes, and architecture, but it is clear that these nations interacted with and influenced each other. One of the most well known of these groups are the Hopewell (1 CE-400 CE), who constructed massive geometric earthwork structures during the Middle Woodland which incorporated complex astronomical alignments and remarkably consistent geometry.
As we move into the Late Woodland Era (400 CE-1000 CE), things continue to change dramatically. It is, seemingly, a time of contradictions that paint a confusing archaeological picture. If we could actually travel back in time, perhaps we could explain why the large, highly organized cultures such as the Adena and Hopewell seem to abandon their massive monuments and return to smaller, more isolated settlements. While these changes are often characterized as a “decline” from the golden years of the Hopewell, it is impossible to assign such judgments without a better understanding of what led to these cultural shifts. At the same time, they also incorporated maize agriculture to great success, introduced the technological innovation of the bow and arrow, and continued to improve the durability of their pottery. The Cole Culture (800-1300 CE), seemingly descendants of the Hopewell, continued to thrive with a multitude of villages along the Olentangy and Scioto, building mounds though at a lesser scale.
As we watch the time go by, we feel a pang of melancholy as we look out on the lush landscape dotted with mounds and villages. Here in the present, German Village has fought long and hard for some of the best historical preservation standards in the country; that wasn’t always the case. As more and more European settlers begin moving across the Appalachians and men like McGowan are granted parcels acquired through violence and coercive treaties, hundreds of earthworks in Franklin County will be destroyed, leveled to create farmland, and the clay turned into bricks. The villages will be burned, the fields razed, the descendants of Ohio’s great ancient civilizations killed or forcibly removed.
Only a handful of mounds still remain in Franklin County due to development and the use of “Indian Clay” bricks. The original Ohio Statehouse (located at High and State Street) was constructed with bricks made from mounds, as were some of the bricks used in the earliest buildings in German Village. These sacred burial sites, which took generation upon generation of hands to build, were not only flattened, but looted. Items deemed valuable, such as the Adena pipe state artifact, were kept by collectors or museums while the people whom they were buried alongside were discarded. Many of the early archaeological surveys that describe excavations at these sites do not even bother to mention where the human remains within them ended up. Some made their way to institutions such as Harvard’s Peabody Museum or even the British Museum in London, thousands of miles from home, while many others were simply destroyed.
In German Village, bricks represent many things. They are a cornerstone of our legacy and the result of tireless preservation efforts, but they can also serve as a reminder of what came before. They are the mud and clay of the land we live on, which has seen and heard more stories than we can ever know. The fight to claim Central Ohio as part of the United States and remove the people who were so deeply rooted to the land was long, brutal, and difficult to discuss with the necessary gravity and complexity in our short journeys together. However, I think it is a crucial and often overlooked part of our history, and so on our next stop we will delve deeper into the settlement of German Village and ask how a Scotsman was able to claim 328 acres right in the heart of “Indian Territory.”
It may be a difficult read, and likely longer than many of the other installments in this series, but I hope it will inspire you to learn more about the many rich and diverse indigenous cultures that have called Ohio home across the centuries. While many people lost their lives or were forced to cede their land and relocate westward, indigenous people continue to live in Central Ohio to the present day. These cultures and peoples did not disappear, but endured centuries of hardship and continue to evolve and thrive. I believe that both learning about the history of these cultures as well as supporting their futures can help us build stronger and more welcoming communities. If you’re interested in learning more about the Hopewell Culture in Ohio, I would recommend checking out the Indigenous Wonders of our World exhibit at the Ohio History Connection, which was curated in partnership with representatives of the modern indigenous nations which descend from the Hopewell. If you’d like to support indigenous people in Columbus working to preserve their cultural traditions, you can explore the Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio (NAICCO) website.