Adena trade in Ohio pipestone ran from New England to the Gulf Coast

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Key facts

• Adena villages lay away from the burial pyramids and typically held 10-30 circular houses with center posts, bark roofs and outward-sloping walls; some housed up to 50 people, with hearths, pottery and textile production evidence
• The Adena farmed the Eastern Agricultural Complex, growing sunflowers, pumpkins and squash plus goosefoot, amaranth and pigweed, and they grew tobacco
• Hundreds of pipes have been recovered from Adena graves, some containing nicotine residue, carved from Ohio pipestone in straight-shaft and animal effigy forms
• Ohio pipestone occurs only in Ohio, so its distribution from New England down to the Gulf Coast serves as a marker of Adena trade networks
• Adena sites yielded Gulf of Mexico shell, copper from the Great Lakes, and sheets of mica from North Carolina
• Adena carved hundreds of works of art into stone, shell, bone and copper, with birds of prey, circled crosses, faces with weeping eyes, and a mica hand with long fingers
• Thirteen Adena tablets are known (18 counting fragments): flat stones 3-5 inches across and about half an inch thick, each carved with fluid geometric patterns; some interpret them as aquatic animals, while a colleague proposes the Cincinnati tablet encodes an astronomical calendar

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