A 62-foot Adena mound, a museum dug inside it, and a hoax tablet
One of the largest conical burial mounds in America rises in the middle of Moundsville, West Virginia: 62 feet high and 240 feet across today, raised by people of the Adena culture, who moved more than 60,000 tons of earth to build it in stages around 250 to 150 BC. A ditch 40 feet wide once ringed it, crossed by a single causeway. In 1838 two local amateurs, Abelard Tomlinson and Thomas Biggs, drove shafts into it and found a burial chamber 111 feet in and a second chamber above, with more than two thousand shell and ivory beads and five copper bracelets, then opened a museum inside the mound and charged admission. Their tunnels destroyed evidence nobody can recover. Inside the mound researchers also found a small sandstone tablet, the Grave Creek Stone, which modern scholars believe to be a hoax. Local women of the Daughters of the American Revolution saved the mound from demolition in 1908, and the Delf Norona Museum beside it explains the Adena and how they built it.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours of here.
