The Hopewell culture saw a great elaboration of the burial rituals that had developed in Adena times. Communities now maintained communal crypts, often on high ground, in which the dead and their grave goods were stored.
They also had charnel houses, large post-built structures with flat roofs in which the dead were prepared for burial and where other rites, probably including feasting, also took place. After a while a charnel house would be deliberately burnt down and a mound constructed over the remains.
Within the charnel houses, log tombs were constructed in which the elite were buried, with an array of grave goods far richer than anything seen before. These included jewellery of copper and bear's teeth, effigy pipes, silhouettes of mica (a laminated stone) and conch shell vessels. Such prestige commodities were also deposited in separate caches within burial mounds.
