MARIEMONT — At the village swimming pool, on a bluff high above the Little Miami River, an Ohio Historical Marker recognizes one of the most important archaeological sites in eastern North America.
It’s long been known that American Indians buried more than 1,000 of their dead at this place, which archaeologists call the Madisonville site. The historical marker says it is “the largest and most thoroughly studied” site of the late Fort Ancient culture, which spanned the years from 1450 to 1670.
And yet, since 1879, when physician and archaeologist Charles Metz began excavating the burial grounds and identified an earthwork built by the Indians, major mystery has lingered: Where, exactly, did those people live?
Two weeks ago, on the flood plain below the bluff, students of University of Cincinnati anthropology professor Ken Tankersley dug up what they believe is the answer. Read more.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Authorities are seeking people they say vandalized an ancient snake-shaped Serpent Mound by burying what may be hundreds of small muffin-like resin objects at the southern Ohio earthworks.
The Columbus Dispatch reports that the objects buried at the 63-acre Native American site in Peebles were embedded with aluminum foil and quartz crystal. Three have been found so far.
The Ohio Historical Society says a YouTube video posted by a group calling itself Unite the Collective shows people running across the earthworks. It includes comments by individuals describing themselves as “light warriors” who say they planted the objects to “help lift the vibration of the earth so we can all rise together.”
Authorities say those responsible face misdemeanors punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $5,000 fine. (source)
TOLEDO, Ohio — The Toledo Museum of Art says it will return an ancient water jug to Italy that investigators believe was probably illegally dug up from that country years ago.
The 2,500-year-old water vessel, or kalpis, has been on display at the Ohio museum since 1982, when it was purchased from an antiquities dealer out of Switzerland. It will be displayed in the museum’s Libbey Court until it leaves for Rome, probably in late summer.
“The right thing to do is to return this object,” museum Director Brian Kennedy told The Blade newspaper. “We knew we’d likely lose this. We’ll miss it.”
Italy has pressed an aggressive campaign to win back ancient Roman, Greek and Etruscan vases, bowls, statues and other artifacts prosecutors contend were looted from the country. Read more.
A Canadian scientist’s analysis of ancient animal remains found in Ohio — including the leg bone of an extinct giant sloth believed to have been butchered by an Ice Age hunter more than 13,000 years ago — has added weight to a once-controversial argument that humans arrived in North America thousands of years earlier than previously believed.
The discovery of what appear to be dozens of cut marks on the femur of a gargantuan, 1,300-kilogram Jefferson’s ground sloth is being hailed as the earliest trace of a human presence in the Great Lakes state.
But the find also represents a significant new piece of evidence in support of the theory that the first inhabitants of Canada, the U.S. and the rest of the Americas were not the so-called Clovis people — known from distinctive tools they left at various archeological sites from about 12,600 years ago — but a much earlier wave of Ice Age migrants ancestral to many of today’s New World aboriginal populations.
A close-up view of stone tool cut marks on the lower front surface of the left femur of a Jefferson’s Ground Sloth.
CLEVELAND, March 1, 2012 — Cut marks found on Ice Age bones indicate that humans in Ohio hunted or scavenged animal meat earlier than previously known. Dr. Brian Redmond, curator of archaeology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was lead author on research published in the February 22, 2012 online edition of World Archaeology.
Redmond and researchers analyzed 10 animal bones found in 1998 in the collections of the Firelands Historical Society Museum in Norwalk, Ohio. Found by society member and co-author Matthew Burr, the bones were from a Jefferson’s Ground Sloth. This large plant-eating animal became extinct at the end of the Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.
“This research provides the first scientific evidence for hunting or scavenging of Ice Age sloth in North America,” said Redmond. “The significant age of the remains makes them the oldest evidence of prehistoric human activity in Ohio, occurring in the Late Pleistocene period.” Read more.
A five-year battle over the ownership of a prehistoric Native American tablet might not have ended yesterday when a Franklin County jury ruled that the archeological treasure belongs to the Ohio Historical Society.
The widow of Edward Low, a Reynoldsburg man who discovered the object as a boy but died after filing a lawsuit to reclaim it, wept outside the courtroom and said she’ll appeal the verdict.
“This was my husband’s legacy,” Dorothy Low said. “I can’t let it be over.”
The Common Pleas jury voted 6-2 in favor of the Historical Society, the defendant, after deliberating for about six hours. The jurors had told Judge Richard A. Frye that they were deadlocked and didn’t think they could get the six votes required for a verdict, but he instructed them to keep working. Read more.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — A group of students from Hocking College and their teacher, archeologist Annette Ericksen, spent some time this summer at the old English trading post in west-central Ohio near present-day Piqua.
The students found a blacksmith’s hammer at the English post that was built in territory claimed by the French. A a subsequent attack on Pickawillany in 1752 would be the unofficial beginning of the French and Indian War (1754-63) to resolve a territorical dispute.
Nature American artifacts along with trading tools are on display at the Ohio Historical Center on 17th Avenue near the Fairgrounds. (source)
It was an archaeological cold case. Placed on the back burner, it remained unresolved for years.
In 1977, the University of Toledo, under the direction of David M. Stothers, conducted excavations at what was called the “Strzesynski site” (33Wo50) on the Maumee River, just below and upriver of Fort Meigs State Memorial near Perrysburg, Ohio. Fort Meigs, a National Historic Register and Landmark site owned and administered by the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus, is the largest reconstructed wooden fort in the United States, originally built during the War of 1812 by Major-General William Henry Harrison, commander of the U.S. Northwestern Army. Excavations of 33Wo50 revealed the structural remains and material culture of an early nineteenth-century log farmhouse. A preliminary (unpublished) report on the excavations, material culture, and site history was completed, identifying Aurora Spafford and Olive Spafford, his mother, as former owners of the farmhouse and property from 1818 to 1823. Read more.
