Hopewell Culture Galena

A box filled with cuboidal pieces of galena, from the park's resource collection.

NPS Photo / Tom Engberg

Written by Park Guide Sarah Hinkelman

Galena’s unusual properties have made it a commonly used mineral throughout human history. It’s shiny, breaks apart into perfect cubes, and way heavier than it looks- no, it’s not a silver Rubik’s cube, it’s an octahedral mineral, galena!

Known as lead-sulfide (PbS), galena is a common mineral found throughout the world. Silver sometimes accompanies galena, offering a shine that is quite eye-catching. As the most common source of lead ore, galena has been used in eastern North America for about 8,000 thousand years by American Indians!

For the people of the Hopewell culture, galena was found at many of their sites- Hopewell Mound Group contained 200 pounds! Because galena is known for its high density, here’s a way to picture how heavy a small piece would be. If you had some galena that was about the size of a baseball, that galena-ball would feel more than ten times heavier! A typical baseball is almost one-third of a pound, the galena-ball would be about 3.4 pounds!

Galena was rarely found as intricately worked artifacts from 2,000 years ago. At most, the pieces were ground, showing shiny surfaces, probably from grinding into powder. In more recent history, American Indians had been known to use powdered galena as body paint or to throw into the sun, while some were known to have carried these silver stones. Similar to other exotic materials found at Hopewell sites, galena was not a locally mined material. Sourcing studies have determined much of the galena was from near Galena, Illinois--in the Upper Mississippi Valley. Nearby, pipestone sources have also been found, which strengthens the connection between this area and the Scioto River Valley.