The C. and O. Mounds at Paintsville

On the floodplain of the Levisa Fork (opens in a new tab) of the Big Sandy River (opens in a new tab) at Paintsville (opens in a new tab), people of the Adena culture (opens in a new tab) raised two burial mounds about 1,600 feet apart. Adena is the name archaeologists give a way of life in the Ohio Valley during the Early Woodland period (opens in a new tab), not a tribe, and the builders left no name for themselves.

Their mounds were part of a tradition that stretched across central and eastern Kentucky. In the Depression years, University of Kentucky crews working under the Works Progress Administration excavated the two mounds, recorded as sites Jo 2 and Jo 9. William S. Webb published them in 1942 as The C. and O. Mounds at Paintsville (opens in a new tab), one of the long series of Kentucky reports that made Adena a household word among archaeologists.

Both mounds had been built over circular rings of paired posts. Webb had first recognized that pattern under the Wright Mounds in Montgomery County and then found it at site after site, archaeologist R. Berle Clay writes in The Essential Features of Adena Ritual (opens in a new tab). Overlapping post lines under the C. and O. mounds suggest the spot was used again and again over a long time.

Webb read the post circles as houses. In his view each mound was the grave of an important person, raised over a home, while small family hamlets were spaced along the river and lesser dead were cremated in the villages. Clay calls this the “C&O pattern,” and it shaped decades of thinking about how Adena people lived.

Later work has revised it. Modern digs have not found the villages Webb expected beside the mounds, Clay notes, and he argues the paired-post circles were ceremonial or mortuary structures, not everyday homes. Webb himself later leaned toward a different model, prompted by the Crigler mound and by enclosures like Peter Village near Lexington, and he never fully reconciled the two.

Kentucky today

Paintsville is the Johnson County seat, and the Levisa Fork still runs past town on its way to the Big Sandy. The C. and O. Mounds are not a public site, so this pin is placed only near Paintsville. Visitors can see Adena earthworks in public parks at Ashland and the Mount Horeb Earthworks near Lexington.