Insights into Central Kentucky Adena Moundbuilding Drawn from Tom Dillehay’s Research on Mapuche Moundbuilders of Southern Chile

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Upon arriving as a visiting professor at the University of Kentucky in 1980, Tom Dillehay took an immediate interest in the mounds and geometric earthworks that dotted the Bluegrass landscape of central Kentucky. As he drove the country roads and walked the rolling hills around Lexington, Dillehay immediately saw parallels with his archaeological, ethnographic, and ethnoarchaeological work among the Mapuche moundbuilders of southern Chile, despite the obvious differences in environment and regional cultural histories. Throughout his career, Dillehay’s work has always sought to explore big ideas, patterns, and processes in the places he lives and works. The parallels he observed included: the possibility that the large, accretional Adena burial mounds served as boundary markers; the significance clay may have played in Adena mound construction; the removal of ritually charged Adena symbolic materials at the conclusion of rituals; and the maintenance of sacred places by later generations. These observations, his descriptions of Mapuche mound rituals performed at night, and the Mapuche’s characterization of their mounds as standing in “mother-daughter” relationships has had a profound influence on how many Ohio Valley archaeologists interpret Adena sacred places.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36348.0