Smoking Pipe Compositions and Styles as Evidence of the Social Affiliations of Mortuary Ritual Participants at the Tremper Site, Ohio

Abstract

Hugging the western slopes of the Scioto valley, amidst the heavily dissected countryside of the Appalachian Plateau in southern Ohio, is a modest Hopewellian construction—the Tremper mound and its encircling earthwork. At first glance, Tremper seems an unlikely site for understanding the internal workings of Scioto Hopewellian societies, for it lays some 35 miles south of the concentration of large Hopewellian earthworks and cemeteries around Chillicothe, Ohio. It also has a very small enclosure—only 3.5 acres—compared to the large 40 and 78 acre earthworks around Chillicothe. However, if we are to understand “that which is Hopewell” by contextualizing it in local cultures and histories and personalizing it with human actors, Tremper has a key role to play. In particular, Tremper is the earliest of the excavated Hopewellian cemeteries in the Scioto drainage that had large burial populations. It may have recorded the beginning of the Scioto Hopewellian tradition, in which multiple communities in a region gathered together at an earthwork to bury their dead together, in an effort to establish and maintain alliances among them (Carr, Chapter 7; Carr et al., Chapter 13). These practices stand in contrast to previous Adena ones, in which local social groups individually built their own mounds and earthen enclosures for their own use (e.g., Clay 1987:48; Aument 1990). From Tremper onward, the Hopewellian mortuary and alliance-making traditionmatured. The system shifted from one where alliances within and among communities were worked out largely through the economic and social relations of commoners as individual agents, who were then buried together, as at Tremper, to one where alliancemakingwas focused through leaders as representatives of their communities, as at Hopewell, Seip, and Liberty. These changes in alliance-making strategies were recorded archaeologically in several ways. The total size of burial populations processed and placed within charnel buildings decreased through the Middle Woodland. The amount of co-mingling of human remains decreased. The proportion of persons