Crossroads, p. 21
Mound building also began again, 1,500 years after the collapse of the Poverty Point culture, only this time the stimulus came from the remarkable Hopewell culture of Ohio and Illinois. The Hopewellians built thousands of dome-shaped burial mounds to cover the remains of important people, most of them probably powerful religious leaders of a special type that anthropologists call shamans. The Hopewellian religion, which may have originated in part among mound building peoples of northern Asia hundreds of years earlier, gradually spread over most of eastern North America. Under its influence people from western New York, to east Texas, to north Florida built burial mounds, probably 20,000 of them. Hundreds were built throughout Arkansas by Hopewellian converts among the Fourche Maline people, the ancestors of the Caddo in western Arkansas, and among the Marksville people of southeast Arkansas and most of central and eastern Louisiana, the ancestors of the Tunicans. Some particularly elaborate mounds near Helena may have been built by Hopewellian invaders from the north. In the mounds at Helena, the honored dead were placed in underground tombs built of oak logs, some of them three to four feet in diameter. Among the objects placed in these tombs were copper covered pan pipes made of reeds, conch shell drinking cups from the Gulf of Mexico, and necklaces and bracelets of shell beads and wolf teeth. Although the Hopewellian religion faded around A.D. 500, no one knows why, the ancient custom of burying important people in mounds persisted among some Arkansas tribes, particularly the Caddo, and possibly the Tunicans, down to A.D. 1600.
( An artist's reconstruction of the Hopewellian style log tomb like that found beneath one of the mounds near Helena, Arkansas. The logs in this tomb were oak, some of them almost four feet in diameter.)
(Somehow, the Hopewellians
also managed to influence the style of pottery decoration over most
of the Eastern Woodlands during the middle part of the Woodland era. This
pot, made about A.D.200 by people of the Marksville culture, has a distinctive
design technique---called "zone rocker stamping"---developed
by the Hopewellians. This pot was found in the Ouachita valley east of El
Dorado.)
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