Enigmatic 2,000 -Years-Old Carved Stone Owl Pipes – An Ancient Unsolved Secret Of Illinois

A. Sutherland - AncientPages.com - The fascinating animal effigy platform pipes have been found mainly in ceremonial deposits at Mound City and Tremper Mound.

Most of the carved stone pipes from that era have been found in Ohio, where very large caches often containing more than 100 pipes were ritually broken, burned and buried. Photo credits: L. Brian Stauffer

Most of the carved stone pipes from that era have been found in Ohio, where very large caches often containing more than 100 pipes were ritually broken, burned and buried. Photo credits: L. Brian Stauffer

The animals may represent the spirit guides of shamans who smoked the pipes to induce a trance state to assist with healing rituals. Notice how the animal would face the shaman as they smoked the pipe.

In the early 1900s, an archaeologist, William Mills, dug up a treasure trove of carved stone pipes buried almost 2,000 years earlier.

Mills was the first to dig the Native American site called Tremper Mound in southern Ohio. And when he inspected the pipes, he made a reasonable – but untested – assumption. The pipes looked like they had been carved from local stone, so he said they were. That assumption, first published in 1916, has been repeated in scientific publications until today.

But according to a new analysis, Mills was wrong.

There is evidence of stone carving at the Illinois sources where the stone was gathered, but none at Tremper Mound, suggesting that the Illinois stone was carved into pipes before it was transported to Ohio. Photo credits: L. Brian Stauffer There is evidence of stone carving at the Illinois sources where the stone was gathered, but none at Tremper Mound, suggesting that the Illinois stone was carved into pipes before it was transported to Ohio. Photo credits: L. Brian Stauffer

In a study, the first to test the stone pipes and pipestone from quarries across the upper Midwest, researchers conclude that those who buried the pipes in Tremper Mound got most of their pipestone – and perhaps even the finished, carved pipes – from Illinois.

The research took more than a decade, and during this time, the researchers collected the mineralogical signatures of stone found in traditional pipestone quarries in Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Ohio and compared the material found in those quarries to the mineralogical makeup of the artifacts left behind by the people of Tremper Mound.

Less than 20 percent of the 111 Tremper Mound pipes they tested were made from local Ohio stone. About 65 percent were carved from flint clay found only in northern Illinois, and 18 percent were made of a stone called catlinite – from Minnesota.

Less than 20 percent of the 111 Tremper Mound pipes they tested were made from local Ohio stone. Photo credits: L. Brian Stauffer Less than 20 percent of the 111 Tremper Mound pipes they tested were made from local Ohio stone. Photo credits: L. Brian Stauffer

The researchers are still puzzling over how most of these materials made it to Ohio from Illinois and are baffled by another discovery.

Pipes from a site only about 40 miles north of Tremper Mound, an elaborate cluster of immense mounds known as Mound City, were carved almost entirely from local stone.

Mound City was inhabited at about the same time or shortly after Tremper Mound, and the pipes found there are stylistically very similar to the Tremper pipes.

The researchers describe their findings in a paper in American Antiquity.

According to Thomas Emerson, the principal investigator on the study and the director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS) at the University of Illinois, these results should remind archaeologists that things are not as simple as they sometimes appear.

Locations where the owl pipes were discovered

Locations where the owl pipes were discovered

“This is how mythology becomes encased in science,” he said.

The study also confirms that the people who produced these pipestone artifacts, known today as members of the Hopewell tradition, were more diverse and varied in their cultural practices than scientists once appreciated, Emerson said.

The Hopewell people, who lived in the region from about 100 B.C. to roughly A.D. 400, have long been the subject of speculation, as the artifacts they left behind and how these goods were disposed of have yet to be easily understood. Those living in southeastern Ohio, especially, seemed to be “conspicuous consumers and connoisseurs of the exotic,” Emerson said.

Locations where the owl pipes were discovered

The Hopewell people from that area collected “massive assemblages of obsidian from Wyoming, mica from the Appalachians, and caches of elaborately carved pipes, ” Emerson said. They also collected shells from the Gulf Coast and the skulls of exotic animals (an alligator, for instance).

“Strange animals, strange minerals, strange things were really a focus,” he said.

Emerson said that most carved stone pipes from that era had been found in Ohio, where huge caches, often containing more than 100 pipes, were ritually broken, burned, and buried. He said the same style of pipes are found in Illinois, but many fewer have yet to be uncovered in Illinois to date, and they are dispersed, not heaped together in giant hordes as in Ohio.

There is evidence of stone carving at the Illinois sources where the stone was gathered, but none at Tremper Mound, suggesting that the Illinois stone was cut into pipes before being transported to Ohio.

The Hopewell Culture's remarkable animal effigy platform pipes are among the most delicate and naturalistic of these sculpted effigies.

The team used various techniques to analyze the quarry material and artifacts. One method, X-ray diffraction (XRD), produces a distinct signal that reflects the proportion of minerals in different types of stone. The stone must be pulverized, however, to subject it to XRD.

To analyze the intact pipes, the researchers used a non-destructive portable technology called PIMA, which illuminates a specimen with short-wavelength infrared radiation and records the refracted (unabsorbed) wavelengths, allowing investigators to identify the minerals present. They verified the accuracy of the PIMA by comparing its results to those obtained with XRD on quarry specimens and broken pipes.

The new findings should challenge archaeologists to look more carefully at the evidence left behind by the Hopewell people, Emerson said.

“This study really says to the archaeological community, you need to go back to the drawing board,” he said. 

“You’ve been telling stories for decades that are based on essentially misinformation.

Written by – A. Sutherland  - AncientPages.com Senior Staff Writer

Updated on Aug 14, 2023

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References:

Ohio History Central

"The Allure of the Exotic: Reexamining the Use of Local and Distant Pipestone Quarries in Ohio Hopewell Pipe Caches," American Antiquity.

Hopewell tradition