Meteorites honoured in ancient North America
Meteorites buried with care and their iron worked into treasures.
Key facts
- People and tradition
- Hopewell culture of Ohio and the Sinagua of Arizona
- Region
- North America
- When
- About 100 BC to AD 1300
The story
The Hopewell culture flourished in what is now Ohio and nearby states from about 100 BC to AD 500, building great earthworks and trading materials over thousands of kilometres. In their burial mounds, archaeologists have found beads, ear ornaments and other objects hammered from meteoritic iron, and pieces of a pallasite, a meteorite of metal and olivine crystals.
Further west, the Sinagua people of Arizona appear to have treated a meteorite with special care. At Elden Pueblo, near Flagstaff, a stony meteorite was found in 1928 buried in a stone box, wrapped in the way a person might be buried.
What science says
Studies of the Hopewell pallasite pieces show they most likely come from the Brenham pallasite, found in Kansas, more than 1,000 km away, showing how far such objects were traded. The Arizona stone, named Winona, turned out to be unlike most meteorites known at the time, and it gave its name to a whole group, the winonaites. We cannot know exactly what these meteorites meant to the people who honoured them, but the care taken over them is clear.
Did you know?
Meteoritic iron was the only metallic iron available to people in the Americas before European contact.
Pieces of Canyon Diablo iron from Meteor Crater have also been found at ancient sites in Arizona.