Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Being Scioto Hopewell breathes fresh air empirically, methodologically, and theoretically into understanding the rich ceremonial lives and the impressive material feats, knowledge, and societal and labor organization that define the American Indians who lived in central Ohio during the first centuries C.E.. The book invigorates anthropological archaeology generally. Following a vision of an anthropology authentic to native logic and motivation and skeptical of the imposition of Western world views and categories onto native peoples, the authors of this book explore the world views, ontologies, eschatologies, cosmologies, ethics, and other philosophical-religious notions and meanings of Hopewell peoples in the Scioto valley and elsewhere across the Midwest in comparison.

Parts or much of 14 ritual dramas that Hopewellian and other Woodland-period peoples performed in their charnel houses and other mortuary facilities are documented and compared. Layouts of human remains and unique artifacts were used by Hopewellian religious practitioners to help audiences visualize the dramas' plots about the journey to an afterlife taken by soul-like essences of the deceased, the landscapes traveled, and the helpful and challenging persons and creatures met along the way. The motives of Scioto Hopewell peoples for performing the rites and for building their huge earthen theaters likely included guiding souls of the deceased, emphasizing familial ethics at wider social scales, and creating cooperative intercommunity alliances. Understanding what motivated and facilitated Scioto Hopewell peoples' collective actions is deepened by revealing facets of their ontology: their concepts of the self in terms of the ethical quality of the relationships one has with other beings (the "relational collective self" in distinction from the Western "individual") and their notions of the multiple soul-like essences that compose a human being and the ways in which they could be harnessed by the living to create familial-like ethical bonds of social cooperation among communities.

These contributions to understanding Hopewell peoples and their awe-inspiring creations from a native perspective are accomplished through rich contextual archaeological analyses; three huge surveys of narratives told by historic Woodland and Plains Indian tribes about the nature of human soul-like essences, their journeys to an afterlife, and creatures of their cosmos; the bioarchaeological method of anthropologie de terrain, introduced here to North American archaeology; building ten formal cross-cultural models of personhood; and systematically and cross-culturally defining for the first time the ritual drama as a genre of social performance.