Mineral Resources and the Hopewell Culture in Licking County
Tim Jordan (Newark Earthworks & site manager at
Flint Ridge State Park, Ohio, USA)
29 January 2018
Native American uses of
flint - used to make points.
Flint points have a variety of
shapes and sizes for different purposes/uses.
Smaller points are probably
arrowheads in the traditional sense.
Larger points are for larger
weapons such knife blades or spear points.
Flint points were used for
hunting animals from deer to mastodons and mammoths.
Flint scrapers were used for
cleaning animal hides.
Flint drill bits were used
for boring into various materials.
European uses of flint
- gunflints for flintlocks (= guns).
The flint makes a spark which ignites a reservoir of gunpowder.
Also Danish daggers - need
multiple techniques to fashion these.
Also millstones - used for
grinding corn and wheat.
Chips of flint were used as
road fill along Route 40 (= National Road), which is 3 miles south of Flint
Ridge, Ohio.
Lots of uses for flint. Made into various tools - not just
weapons.
Flint Ridge
Getting flint - Flint Ridge
has a flint lens - a layer of flint - a big slab - that is 2 to 3 feet thick
throughout the ridge that is 8 to 10 miles from west to east. In the Flint Ridge park area, the flint
is a few inches down from the surface.
There are also outcrops with no cover.
Otherwise, flint is obtained
by digging downward.
Shells or deer scapulas
could be used to dig through the dirt to get to the flint lens.
Hammerstones - granite
clasts (small boulders) were ground down to make hammerstones. They look like cheese wheels.
Granite hammerstones were
used to pound flint to obtain workable samples.
Pre-forms - semi-processed
flint pieces. They can be further
worked into tools and weapons.
Flint knapping - requires
intimate knowledge of the material.
Flint ideally breaks along
Hertzian cones. Compare this to the
cones of damage after a BB is shot into glass. Flint predictably breaks like this. So do glass and obsidian.
Conchoidal fracture - smooth,
curved fracture surfaces. They are
a consequence of breaking along Hertzian cones.
Flint knappers know how to
estimate the angle of a Hertzian Cone when flint is struck.
Can control the angle of the
shock wave when flint is whacked.
Methods used in flint
knapping: percussion flaking and pressure flaking.
Can use parts of a deer
antler to break flint along curved fractures.
Deer antlers or copper are
used by modern flint knappers.
These are preferred because they have enough give (are slightly soft) to
result in flint breaking along Hertzian cones.
Harder objects just shatter
flint.
Natural resources are
feeding the usage of minerals - flint weapons are used to hunt deer, and deer
antler is used to process flint.
Licking County, Ohio is
named after natural salt deposits along rivers and streams.
Animals are attracted to
such sites. Deer lick the salt
deposits and get other minerals into their bodies as well. Licking County deer get larger
antler racks as a result.
Non-Flint Ridge flint
types: Arkansas novaculite, Coshocton chert,
and Indiana hornstone. All three
are shades of gray. The display
sample of Arkansas novaculite is black-and-white. The Coshocton chert sample is
blackish-gray in color. The Indiana
horstone sample is gray-and-white with a bullseye pattern.
In contrast, Flint RidgeÕs
Vanport Flint has red and turquoise greenish-blue. The latter colors show up especially
well after the flint is heated in a kiln.
Flint heating makes the
material more brittle and makes shock waves propagate better through the rock,
allowing for the development of Hertzian cones.
Mythology & stories
ThereÕs a Lakota Indian
story about Flint Ridge - lightning struck a site and the spot had strange,
brightly-colored rock that sparked when struck. Flint could be used to make fire.
Flint sites were places of
power.
Newark Earthworks
ThereÕs 4 to 4.5 miles of
earthen walls in the Newark area.
Great Circle Mound is one
portion of the complex. It is
easily accessed - itÕs a park.
Octagon Mound is part of a
country club - a golf course. It
has open houses a couple times each year.
Some of the Newark
Earthworks no longer exist - they have been flattened and built over.
Octagon Mound has built-in
lunar alignment markers - 8 of them.
One needs an artificial
horizon for such markers to work.
Example:
northern maximum moonrise. Example:
southern maximum moonrise.
Artificial horizons are
created by making 5 feet high walls of earth (earthen walls).
Octagon Mound has an
Observatory Circle Mound next to it.
Its wall varies from 3 feet high to 7-8 feet high.
The artificial horizon,
however, is level.
Making such mounds required
careful study of the dirt used to make the structures.
The mound-making people
probably had familiarity with the angle of repose.
Great Circle Mound has an
interior moat, or ditch. Octagon
Mound lacks a moat.
One hypothesis: the dirt
used to make Great Circle Mound came directly from the ditch/moat. Actually - no it didnÕt.
The walls of Great Circle
Mound have two to three times more dirt than would fit in the moat/ditch.
A cross-section made through
the mound by an archaeologist (Brad Lepper) showed that the mound had layered
dirt. Darker-colored topsoil and
yellowish-brown subsoil were used. Dirt
as a building material - different types have different properties/qualities.
More earthworks occur in
Chillicothe, Ohio. That site had
more than Newark ever had. However,
the Newark Earthworks have more connectivity than ChillicotheÕs mounds.
A modern Indian remarked that
the yellowish-brown soil may be representative of the yellowish-colored corona
of the Sun. (?)
Octagon Mound is a pinnacle
of achievement.
Shaman of Newark figurine -
carved from schist, a metamorphic rock, possibly derived from the
Carolinas. When carved, the rock
was possibly bright yellow-colored.
It is now earthy tones of brown (= an aged color). The figurine has copper ear spools. Copper was obtained from the Great Lakes
area [Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near Lake Superior].
Granite hammerstones were
obtained from granite clasts in Pleistocene glacial deposits here in Ohio.