Adena

Named after an Ohio mound group dating from ca. 1000 B.C., Adena represents
the earliest known civilization in the American Midwest and along the eastern
seaboard. Its people built colossal ridge-top or linear burial mounds of stone,
often longer than 100 feet, and great conical structures; the greatest, at 66 feet
high, is West Virginia’s Creek Grave Mound. The Adena people also laid out
sprawling enclosures oriented to various celestial phenomena. Their prodigious

feats of ceremonial construction imply high levels of labor management, astronomy,
and surveying. They were able metalsmiths who worked copper on a large scale,
and they demonstrated carving skills in surviving stone effigy-pipes.
Their sudden, unheralded appearance after the previous and primitive Archaic
Period represented a major break with the immediate past. Such a transformation
can only mean that the Adena were newcomers who brought their already
evolved culture with them from outside the American Midwest. Their starting
date coincides within two centuries of the final destruction of Atlantis and the
abrupt closure of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula copper mines, which had been
consistently worked for the previous 1,800 years. Given these parallel events, it
appears the Adena were former Atlantean copper miners, who settled throughout
the Middle West to the East Coast, following the loss of their distant homeland
and the abandonment of copper mining in the Upper Great Lakes.
A majority of the Adena monuments were dismantled and their stone used
by early 19th-century settlers to build wells and fences. Only a few examples still
survive, because they were naturally concealed by their obscure locations, such
as those at the bottom of Rock Lake, in Wisconsin, and in the wooded areas of
Heritage Park, Michigan.
(See Bronze Age, Rock Lake)