Sept 6 am Grave Creek Mound

The first image is inside the archeological park museum.  The museum is free.  Ann is shown with a likeness of an Adena woman.  The Adena culture inhabited this area for at least a thousand years and built the mound over a hundred years about 200 BCE.  

The second image shows me as I am about to walk up to the top of the mound.  The mound is currently about 62' but when it was first completed it was probably about 70' high. The mound was completed in stages. There is a burial site at about 10' above plateau level and another at about 40' above plateau level.  Estimated completion of the mound took about 100 years with several million baskets of dirt being carried up to the top. 

The 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th images were taken from the top of the mound.

The 3rd image shows the Moundsville Penitentiary which we saw after visiting the mound. 


The fourth image shows the Ohio River valley with Moundsville in the foreground and hills on the Ohio side of the river. 

The blue structure is the super structure of a bridge that connects Ohio Route 7 with West Virginia Route 2 and was completed in 1986.

The fifth image shows Ann (in orange) at the base of the hill.

The camara image makes the hill seem 200 feet high but it was really about 62' although still a pretty good climb up for me.  The mound is the tallest conical Indian mound in the world. There are mounds in Illinois (the Cahokia Mounds) that are higher but they are linear and multilayer.  The Moundsville people seem to have had a diet of fish, game, cultivated vegetables (about 50' to the right of Ann in that image is what the archeologists think the Adena people grew in this area) and edible wild plants. The Cahokia people, whose mound building was about 1000 years after the Moundsville people, was based mostly on cultivation of maize.

 The sixth image looks out over the roof of the museum and toward the hilly part of Moundsville where Grand Vue Park is located



 


The seventh image shows a copy of a tablet that was discovered in the lower burial mound in 1838 by several people who excavated the lower part of the mound.   This tablet, whose location is currently unknown (copies of the tablet were made soon after it was discovered), is the most controversial archeological find in West Virginia. One theory is that the markings on the tablet are letters and are a semitic right to left Iberian script used about a hundred years before the time of Hannibal (i.e. about 300 BCE). Another tablet from another mound in the vicinity has similar markings. 

Other theories are that they are glyphs made by the Adena people. Another theory is that the tablets are a fraud placed by the 1838 team or someone they knew.

When Europeans first came to settle this area, there were Indians in the area but they didn't know anything about the mounds.