Hopewell Mound Cache from a long time ago....

[1320]

This image is courtesy of fellow member trevmma, thought some of you would find this interesting. Can you imagine?

 

[WV sifter]

I remember seeing this posted somewhere else a few years back,thats an INSANE amount of blanks! ...thanks 4 the flashback!

 

[all_atv]

Ive seen that pic her before, anyone know if these are still somewhere in a museum or collection together. Maybe sold off individually? They look like the size of dinner plates!

 

[Neanderthal]

This is one of my favorite, and one of the most recognized, artifact pictures. Another is the Cahokia Mound 72 cluster-o-birdies.

 

[Th3rty7]

If I remember correctly most of if not all the artifacts excavated went across the pond to England, some of it is displayed in a museum there.

 

[1320]

So these were buried in a mound? If so, I don't understand why. Was this a burial mound?

 

[Th3rty7]

" Between the 1840?s and the 1920?s and from the various excavations of Squier and Davis, Warren Moorehead and Henry Shetrone, upwards of 11,000 large, crudely flaked Hornstone bifaces or ?discs? were recovered from a single deposit in Mound #2 at the Hopewell Earthworks in Ross County, Ohio. Considering that a single item could average a pound or more, the entire deposit might weigh in at greater than 6 tons! Whatever the motivation was to expend the energy needed to travel to the quarry area, extract the raw material and reduce it to disc form and transport it all several hundred miles back to the Hopewell site just to create a relatively small feature in a 110 acre earthwork complex can only be imagined. Bill Pickard "

Scroll down

http://ohio-archaeology.blogspot.com/2010/01/cache-and-carry.html

Close up pics of a few of the blades. Fairly crude blanks.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_d6LkI_NfaxM/S1C5TIFwqkI/AAAAAAAAAZI/gBSt8JO_L7Y/s1600-h/6+Discs.jpg


And a thread from last year on the subject. There's alot of interesting info in it imo.

http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php?topic=295896.0

 

[1320]

Great links 37, thank you. I wasn't following this forum back then, glad you responded, you've help answer a ton of questions that I had. Hopefully you've done the same for other "newer" followers of this forum.

 

[catherine1]

What a stack of blades! The first time I saw this pic was when I was researching my cache blade find. I do not know where these blades are but the Tremper Mound blade/artifacts I believe are in England. Tremper Mound is about 40 miles south of the Ross county mounds. Here is a pic of the largest hornstone blade (5.5 inches) that I found in my cache which was found about 40 miles south of Ross Mound along Brush Creek. I would say it is very similar to the ones in the pic.

 

[joshuaream]

If I remember correctly most of if not all the artifacts excavated went across the pond to England, some of it is displayed in a museum there.

EH Davis, of Squire & Davis fame, ended up keeping a lot of the relics from the time they were out mapping mounds in the Mississippi Valley. He also ended up with very significant collections from Central America and Peru. He offered his collections to museums here in the US, and no one took him up on the offer. He sold over 1000 pieces from Mound City to what would become the British Museum for $10,000 in 1864 (that was a very significant amount of money in 1864.) His Pre-Colombian material went to a University in England for $30,000 and contains some of the most widely photographed pre-colombian art today.

Aside from the pipes, they took a lot of beads, copper, teeth, mica, stone work, etc. I don't think they bothered to take flint disks like this. They found them, took a couple and reburied them. It took several different diggers to take them all. (What would you do with them all?) There was another big cache dug by a WPA team in Southern Indiana, they sat in the field for several years before they finally disappeared.