Category: Archaeology

I took a break from writing fictional prehistory so my husband and I could tour a real, live archaeological site this weekend. And, of course, I came away awash in facts and guesses about what made these ancient people tick.

The site in question is Hopeton Earthworks, located just across the river from the contemporaneous Mound City Earthworks in Chillicothe. In fact, our guide — Dr. Bret Ruby — suggested that we should really think of these two areas as facets of the same site. Mound City was used for burials while Hopeton appears to have been used a “World Center shrine.”

That analysis is based on the work of modern Native Americans, who speak of sites like this as being models of the universe. Specifically, the long double line at the bottom of the picture above represents two quarter-mile earthen walls that point to sunset on the winter solstice. This seasonal focus is common at similar sites, like the Calendar Mounds at Fort Ancient. Dr. Ruby suggested that Hopeton Earthworks may have been built as an “earth naval” meant to capture or channel the power of the solstice sun.

That part is guesswork, but there was plenty of rock-hard data present…quite literally. This summer, the archaeologists are excavating the remains of earthen ovens, which are currently found via machinery that senses magnetic anomalies in soil. In the past, these same ovens were often discovered by walking across tilled farmland and looking for fire-cracked stones like the one shown above.

What’s a fire-cracked stone? Let me back up and explain about earthen ovens. Hopewell people dug pits in the soil, filled them with wood, lit fires, then piled stones on top. The stones sucked up the fire’s heat then released it more slowly, often cracking along weak points in the rock in the process. The result is stones with multiple flat faces like the one pictured above. You don’t usually find this shape in non-human-impacted areas.

At the Hopeton Earthworks, fire-cracked rocks are very common, but they aren’t found everywhere. Instead, people appeared to keep their cookfires at the edge of the raised terrace that encircles the site, out of the floodplain but far enough away from the earthworks so they weren’t muddying the sacred with the profane. In other words — no trash in church!

There was, however, trash in the ovens…and archaeologists were excited to find it! The flint bladelet above was found the same day of our tour, the prismatic cross-section proving that the knife was knocked off a core using a very specialized Hopewell technique. This particular blade never got utilized, but our leader said that similar blades were used to shave hair into elaborate hairstyles. Fashion was a thing in Ohio in 0 BC.

So was art. The reflective shard on the other side of the deer bone in the image above is a chip of mica that might have been discarded while making ceremonial objects like images of birds and hands. Mica isn’t commonly found in Ohio, however, so this shiny rock would have been carried in from the mountains of North and South Carolina.

How did mica — and other distantly sourced materials like shells and obsidian — make its way to Chillicothe? I’d always understood that the Hopewell people had a farflung trade network. But Dr. Ruby made the excellent point that materials clearly moved to Ohio, but none seemed to make their way back out. Wouldn’t trade result in Ohio flint and other materials being discovered in North and South Carolina (among other places)?

Instead, our guide suggested two hypotheses for how this mica arrived in the Hopewell epicenter. Possibly Hopewell people went on long journeys, bringing home materials like mica to be incorporated into their ceremonial sites. Or perhaps Native Americans from other parts of the continent traveled to Chillicothe just like my husband and I did, bringing gifts of their local mica in exchange for viewing the sun through Hopeton’s quarter-mile earthen tunnel.

There’s so much more to share (like wood-henges purposefully dismantled and mounded over to hold power in the earth). But I’ll end with one last factoid:

• The clear quartz crystals sometimes found at Hopewell sites were tied as the hardest materials in the Hopewell world. What was the other material in first place? Beaver teeth!

Okay, now back to work on my novel. Olivia was in quite a bind when last I visited her. I guess I’d better help her out.

My husband, my mothers-in-law, and I spent an illuminating afternoon at Fort Ancient yesterday. Unfortunately, our brains grew saturated before we made it halfway through the museum, and we didn’t get to spend nearly enough time walking through the astonishing earthworks either. But I saw enough to get my mind whirring, which will have to do for now!

This two-thousand-year-old site was created during a 400-year period then was used for another hundred years after that. Up on a bluff above the Little Miami River, the first step in construction involved moving tons of earth to fill in ravines like this one…using hand-woven baskets, elk antlers, deer shoulderblades, clam-shell hoes, and wooden digging sticks.

Then a 3.5-mile-long undulating curve of wall was created, along with indented ponds on the inside. To give you an idea of the scale of this endeavor, the amount of earth moved at the Fort Ancient site amounted to 221,000 full-size pickup-truck loads. If construction was ongoing throughout all four seasons every day of the 400 years in question, that amounts to 1.5 pickup-truck loads moved daily. A serious undertaking for a society in which people lived in small family groups!

Early European settlers assumed these walls were fortresses, but scientists now think they may have been sites of religious ceremonies, athletic competitions, or other cultural events. The Calendar Mounds and the newly discovered Moorehead Circle are evidence of one potential use.

Used in conjunction with intentional gaps in the encircling earthworks, the Calendar Mounds line up with sunrise at the solstices and with various astronomical events. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Fort Ancient people built bonfires at the site of these mounds, perhaps to create balance with the rising sun. The Moorehead Circle was a woodhenge (like Stonehenge, but built out of wooden posts) that may have had a similar function.

Unfortunately, everything we decipher about two-thousand-year-old people who left no written record is guesswork. Could the Fort Ancient earthworks relate to earlier evidence of shamanism in which bear and wolf skulls were carved into ceremonial masks? Were the ponds part of the ceremony or simply inevitable depressions that resulted from moving so much earth? How many people came to Fort Ancient, how often, and why? Why do Fort Ancient’s earthworks take on such an organic shape while contemporaneous sites in valleys enclose perfect circles and squares?

It’s easy to ascribe deep spiritual significance to people we will never meet or know. But walking through a different park the next day and coming across modern cairns created by bored college students, I had to wonder how much of the stunning Fort Ancient earthworks is mystical…and how much is simply the result of humans with time on their hands wanting to leave their mark on the landscape.

After all, hunter-gatherers tend to have more leisure time than the average modern American. Without television and facebook to fill that time, did Fort Ancient people naturally gravitate toward building undulating walls and limestone-capped mounds?

Unfortunately, we will likely never know. Still, the Fort Ancient earthworks is well worth a visit…or two, or three!

One of my favorite things about Ohio is the remnants of Adena and Hopewell cultures protected as parks or just waiting to be stumbled across in the woods. Yes, I’m talking about the 10,000 mounds scattered across the state, all dating from one to three thousand years ago.

What we mostly don’t see unless the mound is connected with a museum is the beautiful art hidden beneath the dirt. Mounds cover the sites of ceremonial buildings which in turn cover the sites of cremations…and funerary objects are often cached nearby.

Jarrod Burks of Ohio Valley Archaeology, Inc. was interested in the fact that about half the figures on Hopewell creations were birds. And not just any birds — the species portrayed tend to be large, colorful, and/or powerful like hawks, vultures, and owls.

Nowhere is this more true than on the tobacco-smoking pipes broken and cached together in two nearby sites — Mound City in Chillicothe and Tremper Mound about thirty miles away.

The two mounds in question were created within one hundred years of each other (which means the pipes could have all been made by the same artist or family). But it’s impossible to know why birds dominate the pipe landscape and why hundreds of pipes were purposefully broken then buried beneath a newly formed mound.

Archaeologists can guess, of course. They think that birds might have been revered because of their ability to visit the heavens, a realm humans can’t reach. Specifically, they suspect the many different types of birds portrayed on the Hopewell pipes were personal power symbols — a totem spirit that you’d peer at every time you smoked tobacco during a ceremony.

And why would everyone’s spirit animals be ceremonially smashed and buried at the same time? Your guess is as good as mine!