About
Christopher Carr is an archaeologist with primary interest in the prehistory of eastern
North America, especially the social organizations, rituals, and belief systems of tribal
peoples of the Midwest from about 1000 B.C. to Contact. To reconstruct these aspects
of their lifeways, he focuses on their mortuary practices and art. His research makes
strong use of anthropological theories about the causes of development of tribal and
rank social organization from simpler social systems. It also has involved the development
of archaeological theory about how mortuary practices and artistic style reflect social
and political structures and processes.
Within this range of subjects, Carr's work over the past decade has aimed particularly
at revealing the nature of Hopewell society, ritual, and religion in the Ohio area, between
50 B.C. and A.D. 350. He and a team of archaeologists under his direction (Carr 2005)
have been able to make very fine-grained descriptions of the lifeways of Hopewell peoples,
including their diverse and complementary forms of leadership, its sacred shaman-like and
secular power bases, and its formalization over time; their animal-totemic clan organization
and the relative sizes, prestige, and leadership qualities of different clans; variation in kinship
structures among Hopewell societies; several sodalities, which had complementary ritual
functions; differences among genders in their roles, prestige, work loads, and health; the
organization of Hopewell communities; intercommunity alliances that involved burying of
their dead together in common cemeteries in each others territories; and interregional travels
of Hopewell peoples in the quest of power in nature, healing, tutelage in knowledge and
rituals, and when making pilgrimages.
Carr also is making extensive reconstructions of the religious beliefs, and especially the
cosmologies, of Adena and Hopewell peoples of the Ohio area, with continuities and
changes in them over time into the Mississippian and Historic periods. Some aspects
of the Adena and Hopewell cosmoses that he has revealed through art works and mortuary
practices include different, vertically positioned worlds of existence; the natural and
nonordinary creatures that inhabited those worlds; the nature of the pathway (axis mundi)
among the worlds; directional systems; and pathways to one or more afterlives.
Carr works extensively with the analytical technologies of material science in studying the art
and artifacts of Hopewellian peoples for social and religious reasons, and has played a
leading role in adapting some technologies to archaeology. The techniques and materials
include electron microprobe, X-radiography, petrography and AMS carbon dating of
ceramics; EDX spectrometry, microprobe, and Raman microspectrometry of metals and
pigments; and color and infrared digital imaging and image enhancement of art works.
Currently, he is renewing the details of portraits of Hopewell leaders and images of
creatures that Hopewell artists patinated on copper artifacts.
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Select Publications
Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case (2005)
Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction. Kluwer Academic Press,
New York. 807 pp.
Carr, Christopher, and Jill E. Neitzel (1995)
Style, Society, and Person: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives. Plenum
Publishing Corporation, New York. 471 pp.
Carr, Christopher, and Jean-Christophe Komorowski (1995)
"Identifying the Mineralogy of Rock Temper in Ceramics with X-Radiography."
American Antiquity 60(4):723-749.
Carr, Christopher (1995).
Mortuary Practices: Their Social, Philosophical-Religious, Circumstantial, and Physical Determinants. Journal of Archaeological Method and
Theory 2(2):105-200.
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Contact:
Christopher Carr
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