The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

the ‘Hopewell Interaction Sphere’, a network with its epicentre in the Scioto and Paint Creek river valleys of Ohio. Between roughly 100 BC and AD 500, communities participating in this network deposited treasures under burial mounds, often piled up in extraordinary quantities. The treasures included quartz-crystal arrowheads, mica and obsidian from the Appalachians, copper and silver from the Great Lakes, conch shells and shark teeth from Gulf of Mexico, grizzly-bear molars from the Rockies, meteoric iron, alligator teeth, barracuda jaws and more.13 Most of these materials seem to have been used for the manufacture of ritual gear and magnificent costumes – including metal-sheathed pipes and mirrors – worn by shamans, priests and a host of minor officials in a complex organizational structure, the precise nature of which is fiendishly difficult to reconstruct.