Hopewell [ca 50 BC-AD 200] is one of the names given to an important prehistoric farming culture in the American middle west, centered on the Ohio River, but with intersecting trade connections eastward to New York, south to the Florida panhandle, west into Iowa and north well into Saskatchewan. Pipestone played a significant role in Hopewell trade networks, in that platform pipes such as that illustrated above found in the large Hopewell centers of Tremper and Mound City earthworks were believed to have been created there and distributed outward.
If that were the case, said archaeologists, craftsman at the Hopewell centers of Tremper Mound and Mound City likely would have used the locally-available cream-colored kaolinite-rich flint clay from southern Ohio to carve the pipes, firing them to achieve the red coloration. However, Wisseman et al (2011) found that the majority of the Hopewellian pipes from Tremper Mound and Mound City in Ohio are from a quarry in northwestern Illinois, another 15% from Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota, with only 15% or so from local sources.
Sources
Emerson TE, Farnsworth KB, Wisseman SU, and Hughes RE. 2013. The allure of the exotic: reexamining the use of local and distant pipestone quarries in Ohio Hopewell pipe caches. American Antiquity in press.
Wisseman SU, Emerson TE, Hughes RE, and Farnsworth KB. 2011. Provenance studies of midwestern pipestones using a portable infrared spectrometer. Proceedings of the 37th International Symposium on Archaeometry, 13th-16th May 2008, Siena, Italy: Springer. p 335.
Wisseman SU, Hughes RE, Emerson TE, and Farnsworth KB. 2012. Refining the identification of native American pipestone quarries in the midcontinental United States. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(7):2496-2505.
