Brian Redmond Lectures on the "Archeology of American Indians"

Dr. Brian Redmond, John Otis Hower Chair and Curator of Archaeology, examining prehistoric pottery

Cleveland Museum of Natural History

More than 500 generations of people inhabited Northeast Ohio before contact with Europeans. The first were the Paleoindians about 13,000 years ago. The last were the Whittlesey Tradition people who disappeared from the archeological record by 1650. Dr. Brian G. Redmond of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History is an expert on the prehistoric cultures of this region. His research includes doing archeological fieldwork as well as studying objects from earlier “digs.”

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History led excavations in Cuyahoga Valley mostly from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. They have many artifacts from here in their collection.

In 2018, National Park Service and the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park hosted a lecture by Dr. Redmond as part of the Lyceum Distinguished Speakers series. We invite you to listen to the audio below or read the formatted transcript. We did some light editing for clarity. The slideshow is not available.

• The Archeology of American Indians in the Cuyahoga Valley and Northeast Ohio

  
  

  Lecture by Dr. Brian Redmond at Happy Days Lodge on February 16, 2018.

  Credit / Author:

  Brian Redmond, Ph.D.

  Date created:

  10/22/2020

  Audio Transcript

  This is a transcript of the Lyceum Distinguished Speakers lecture at Happy Days Lodge in Cuyahoga Valley National Park on February 16, 2018. Minor editing had been done for clarity. The lecture slides are not available.

  Chris Auerbach-Brown: My name is Chris Auerbach-Brown. I’m the director of programs here at the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park and I wanted to welcome you to tonight’s wonderful lecture featuring Dr. Brian Redmond from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He’s got a great topic he’s going to talk about tonight about the prehistory of our Cuyahoga Valley. I just want to say that the Conservancy is very fortunate and thankful to be working with the National Park Service—not only for the presentation of tonight’s program, but for all of our programs and with everything that the park service does in the national park to preserve it for future generations, current and future generations, and kids of all ages. The Conservancy is glad to take part in that to support the park service and then in its activities to keep this park alive and running. So without further ado, I actually wanted to introduce somebody from the park service, the amazing Rebecca Jones Macko. Thank you.

  Rebecca Jones Macko: And I am not Chris, but I am Ranger Rebecca Jones Macko. As we’re starting this evening, I’m gonna ask you to please be courteous to those around you and check your phones. If you would please dim the phones—turned them down to vibrate—so that doesn’t disturb other people around you. And in the event of an emergency landing, there’ll be no oxygen mask dropping down from the ceiling. However, there are exits: one here, one here, one here, here, and one up front (just so you know). Oh, and don’t forget the way you came in—in the back. Just so you know to be safe.

  So with that, so who here cares about history? Anybody? How about who cares about the park? Hey, there’s a few hands! Chris, take notes. You should be like a catching these people for the Conservancy. The National Park Service cares deeply about its history. We are responsible for thousands of archeological and cultural sites throughout the National Park Service and there are several here in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We take that responsibility very seriously. We are bound by the Organic Act written way back in 1916 and by Sections 106 and 110 of the National Historic Preservation Act to protect these archeological resources in our care.

  With that, how many of you know about the new Boston Mill Visitor Center? A few folks here. Now that new visitor center could potentially affect two different aspects of Boston. It might potentially affect the Boston Mill Historic District. And the Valley Railway Historic District. So our work there could alter some of the things that qualified those areas to be on the National Register. So, on one hand, we’re charged with protecting them, but sometimes we have to alter some things. So, what we gonna do about that? We actually know that that area where the new visitor center is going to be built has some potential to have evidence of precontact occupation as well as some historic disturbances. So, we work with the Midwest Archeological Center. We affectionately call it “MWAC” for short. And in close consultation with the State Historic Preservation Office. We refer to them as “SHPO.” Acronyms. It’s all about acronyms. So, our park superintendent and various park staff and resource management have worked out agreements to protect those areas and to mitigate any potential effect. And, believe it or not, you all tonight are part of that mitigation. Tonight‘s program, about the archeological significance of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, is the first step. And part of my introduction here is also a second step towards making people aware of the many things that are here in Cuyahoga Valley National Park and making that information available to you, the public.

  Now Chris is with the Conservancy and I have to say the Conservancy has been very proactive in protecting those archeological resources. First of all, they retained the services of a professional archaeologist to conduct a survey of the site. For those of you that are familiar with archaeology, they did the traditional everyday “shovel test.” But they also did some 21st-century technology stuff and went in and did some “geosensing” of the area. We call it an innovative approach, maybe, to use remote sensing technologies to locate subsurface anomalies. Those anomalies—those unusual disturbances beneath the surface—might indicate an archeological site. So as the project has proceeded, architects and planners have committed to avoiding those anomalies—including moving some things every now and then. So, working with the SHPO, the Conservancy and the National Park Service, we are trying to minimize the impact on those sites. We are gonna be monitoring ongoing construction in the area. We have four paraprofessional archeologists here in the park working under the Midwest Archeological Center and we’re really watching for any unusual areas and avoiding things—and looking for things that might “oh wait, but this might be a new discovery.”

  The National Park Service and Cuyahoga Valley National Park protect our many archeological sites throughout the national park actively. Our own visitor and resource protection law enforcement rangers are regularly patrolling sites and investigating any disturbances. Whether you know it or not, the Archeological Resource Protection Act provides legal authority for the national park to protect the archeological sites that really belong to all of us.

  Now, if you have questions about what we’re doing for archeology or what we’re doing to mitigate these actions that we’re having, please feel free to see me after the program. I’ll be in the back.

  Part of our agreement with the State Historic Preservation Office includes a public presentation about the past peoples who inhabited the valley before we did. And that brings us to tonight’s speaker, Dr. Brian Redmond. Brian Redmond is a curator and the James Otis Hower Chair of Archeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He is a native Clevelander and joined the museum in 1994. Dr. Redmond received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Indiana University in 1990, but he began his studies in anthropology at the University of Toledo. (Go Rockets!) He maintains appointments as an adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, and he’s also adjunct faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Cleveland State University. He began doing fieldwork in 1978. He’s carried out surveys and excavations at numerous precontact (what we used to call prehistoric) Native American sites of the Midwest and Great Lakes regions. His major research interests include pottery analysis, development of settled village life, community reorganization in the Midwest, and Woodlands ceremonialism in the Great Lakes region.

  It is in his doctoral days where I found a connection with Dr. Redmond. Prior to Cuyahoga Valley National Park, I worked at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park where one Dr. Brett Ruby also worked. Now Dr. Ruby had high words of praise for Dr. Redmond. Remembering classes back with him and I quote “in the neo-terrific era of the late 1980s.” Both worked on precontact settlement patterns throughout the Ohio Valley. Now here in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, we have a number of precontact settlement sites. I look forward to learning more about those precontact settlement sits and peoples this evening from Dr. Redman. Please join me in giving that warm Cuyahoga Valley National Park welcome to Dr. Brian Redmond.

  Brian Redmond: Well, thank you Rebecca. It’s a pleasure to be here tonight. Can everyone hear me okay? I’ll try to speak—I speak rather loudly but with the microphone sometimes I speak too loudly so just tell me if I overdo it.

  So tonight, as you heard, I’m going to tell you something about the archeology of all the Cuyahoga Valley and the greater Northeast Ohio region. Now I have to admit that I’ve not done archeology actually in the park. I’ve done projects outside the park, very close to the park, and in Northwest Ohio, and north-central Ohio—places like that. And so I’m gonna come and give you an overview of the pre-contact history of this region and specify things about that the valley and related subjects as we go along to give you some of an idea. And you are only going to hear a very small percentage of information about, as you’ll see, 13,000-year-old timeline because that’s at least how long people have been in this region.

  I will start at the end. I will begin at the end—here, as my benchmark, is kind of the arrival of Moses Cleveland. Because a lot of you folks are probably more affiliated with Akron, but let’s just say we’ll talk a bit about Moses Cleveland when he came to this region as kind of a historic benchmark. Who was there before that? Well on this map I just placed just five different tribal groups that are known to have been in this, in Ohio, around 1760 or so. And you’ve probably heard of all these groups I’m sure: Miami out of Northwest Ohio, the Ottawa Wyandott north-central, the Delaware in the east (who are rather late comers to this region), and the Shawnee in a good part of southern Ohio. That’s not surprising. What about Northeast Ohio? We can kind of see the Cuyahoga River up there in Northeast Ohio. There’s nothing in that.

  Where is the Erie, the Erie tribal group? I know you’ve all heard of the Erie. And (when) you talk to most people that grew up in this area to ask about (where) Native Americans were even when we call pre-contact archeological sites and artifacts, there’s a general understanding or really now misconception that these were all Erie Tribal Nation sites. In fact, we know today that the Erie were not in Northeast Ohio historically. They never were really resident in Ohio at all. Their territory was more from Erie, Pennsylvania to Buffalo, New York. And these were Iroquois and speaking groups that really went extinct or absorbed in the 1650s, so don’t think about the Erie anymore. We think about Northeast Ohio, there’s a lot of things to talk about. But as we’ll see at the end of this talk, the historic or the very late pre-contact residents in this area probably left the state before contact with Europeans and aren’t related to any of these groups listed up here.

  So here’s Moses Cleveland arriving at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in 1796. On the sandbar that used to be there and (if you look closely) it was Moses there is pointing to the east to where the city of Cleveland will be established. You’re looking basically upriver towards Whiskey Island and I just put in here to kind of talk about this at the endpoint of my talk but also in terms of Native Americans living in this region at the time. And in the lower right there is a map of the Western Reserve as you can see and essentially in 1795 in the Treaty of Greenville the area in which the Native Americans were allowed to still exist and live was essentially from the Cuyahoga River westward. So everything east of the Cuyahoga after 1795 was basically open for settlement and in 1796 Moses Cleveland showed up with his surveyors.

  So who lived to the east? Well, nobody permanently apparently at this time. There were groups that moved through, but basically Northeast Ohio was not home to a resident Native American population for most of this historic period. Even though native people were here, but not resident long-term tribal groups in this area. So there are a lot of question marks about the historic era and then, as we’ll talk about tonight, what came before that. And I guess the lesson in all this is that until Europeans showed up (the French primarily) by the mid-1700s or maybe early-early 1700s, the really is no written record of the native peoples living in this region. And, as it turns out, it’s only because of archeology (the study of prehistoric societies of the past through their material culture) that we can say anything about who was here. Now we know (people were here) much, much longer in the past from what we thought before.

  But tonight we’re going to talk about the archeology of this region, because that’s where our information comes from, that study. This is Colonel Charles Whittlesey which some of you may have heard of—though in my field he’s a bit of a legend in terms of his accomplishments. He was a lawyer, he was a geologist, he served in the Civil War. He did a lot of things, and also doing some archeology, or what we call today archeology. He participated in a couple of the State of Ohio geological surveys. In the process, he ran across mounds and earthworks that he knew belonged to the people that lived here in the past. And, in 1871, he published a book called Ancient Earth Forts of the Cuyahoga Valley and a map from that is on the right. It’s hard to see, but there’s basically little marks for mounds and different earthworks that he recorded on an actual map. He was a pretty good surveyor as well and we still use some of his maps of these sites today. So he’s kind of the first archeologist (even though he wouldn’t have called himself that) to be in and work in this area. But it’s been a whole slew of institutions involved in the valley from at least 1930 in terms of what we would call the Modern Era, perhaps up to the present. So institutions like Cleveland State University, The Ohio Historical Society (which is now called the Ohio History Connection), the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, of course the Midwest Archeological Center of the National Park Service, the University of Akron, and also I want to mention a few very dedicated occasional amateur archeologists. People like Joe Jesensky and others that knew this valley like the back of their hand, at least I know Joe did, and provided lots of information about the native societies and really the archeology of the park which a lot of us still depend on today.

  And this is kind of my simple timeline of northern Ohio archeological history or chronology. And it starts out basically to show you our archeological record goes back to the time at the end of the Ice Age. The most notations I use here are AD and BC because that’s a convention still in my field and most archeologists working in this country use A.D. and BC as benchmarks. So we go back to the Paleoindian period. In the real time, we’re going back to about 13,000 years ago at the very beginning of this timeline in terms of archeological information and we can divide up in these very (kind of) coarse stages here.

  The Paleoindian probably only lasted maybe for (a few) thousand years or so or less. Then we have a long period of time called the Archaic which is the time of hunting and gathering people. This is 7- or 8,000 years. Ironically, we know probably the least about the Archaic even though it’s the longest time frame. Then the Woodland, which is the time of the mound building groups. The earthworks-building groups in Ohio. The native peoples that probably most Ohioans have heard about maybe in fourth grade or something like that, about the “mound builders” quote un-quote. Then we have a Late Precontact just before the arrival of Europeans which becomes the Historic Period. So, as I take you through this timeline, I’ll just hit some highlights and tell you about what native people are doing at those different times. And also I’ll show you a bit about the archeological sites that are in the park—but more specifically the artifacts and collections that come from some of those places. And lastly I tend to make—this is kind of a wedge. This figure in on the right—you can kind of see (you know) this axis kind of represents population growth—just to show that over time populations increased and at times they might’ve decreased temporarily, and it wasn’t perhaps as coarse as this but basically by the Historic Period (probably just before Europeans arrived) we have probably the largest population density in this region.

  So let’s start at the way back at the end of the Ice Age, the late Pleistocene, when people first came to this region. This is probably how the environment looked at the time, this is a shot of Alaska on the subarctic. There are no mountains like this in Ohio, right? So let’s just get rid of those. That’s probably closer to what it looked like 13,000 years ago in Ohio. This is what’s called a spruce parkland. It’s basically a spruce fir tree forest. It’s only semi-open, that’s why it’s called a parkland as opposed to a dense, closed forest. This would have been an environment with lots of wetlands, sedges, and other plants thriving. Little bit of upland where you have more tree growth. And near Lake Erie, there probably was tundra. Open or barren ground, tundra habitat from about 13,000 to maybe about 12- or 11,000 years ago.

  And this is a rendering actually from Wisconsin, but it’s one very comparable with what this area would have looked like. These are some of the creatures that you know and probably heard of or think about when you think about the Ice Age. This is the American mastodon that you see in the foreground. Notice they’re standing in water. And if you would’ve walked around this landscape back then, most time you would have been standing in water. Very wet, soggy habitats. Glacial ponds that turned into peat bogs eventually. But (in the back) you can see some other interesting creatures: a giant ground sloth, a Pleistocene camel (of which we don’t have any fossil remains of those in Ohio but apparently did on the upper Great Lakes), and some kind of scrawny looking spruce and fir trees. A semi-open habitat with sedges and grasslands available. Again, this would have been an environment that humans walked into at about 13,000 years ago.

  You can make a living in the spruce forest—in the parkland—but there’s not a whole lot to eat for people. It’s somewhat desert-like in the sense of availability of food for people to eat. In fact, you probably had been more hunting some of these creatures. And then—also at this time—I should point out that there were lots of animals that exist today—like white-tailed deer—and other what we call a woodland species that were also around at this time as well.

  This is a rendering of a Paleoindian family at about 11,000 BC which is about 13,000 years ago. And you can see it basically takes a family and they look like they’re just skinning remains of a caribou.They have a little hide-covered tent in the background. They have wooden pegs and bone pegs they’re using to track it down there. This is probably pretty much the case. These renderings or paintings I’m gonna show you—some for the other time periods—these were part of what’s called the Ancient Ohio Art Series that was done a number of years ago. (Actually, these images and information are able to teachers at the website on the bottom there, voyagermedia.org.) But these are based on archeological evidence, as best we can tell. It’s the most sketchy for the Paleoindian period because pretty much everything you see in here we don’t have any archeological remains of. It’s all gone. It’s all been rotted away. It’s really just the stone tools of which I don’t think they’re maybe using stone tools in this picture. I don’t see too many of them, but very likely this is the case. And it shows that probably, of all the animals around, caribou was probably the primary prey species based on analogy to what hunting and gathering groups in similar environments like the subarctic did in historic times.

  Okay, the Cuyahoga Valley. What kind of Paleoindian sites do we know about? Well, not too many that have been recorded. In fact, not too many artifacts that are in collections that have been published that I know about. As you see in a minute, there’s a typical type of artifact called a Clovis Fluted Point. And this is probably a pre-form: this is a broken artifact. Imagine a teardrop-shaped piece with the pointy tip removed and broken off. Why do we think this maybe is a Paleoindian artifact? It’s because it has a fluted, it has a place where the flake has been removed from the length of the piece. And if you think about what finished Paleoindian artifacts looked like, this is the classic Clovis Fluted Point which (you’ll see in another minute) is typical of sites of this type of this age in this area. They have this place where they removed a large flake from one or both sides, makes kind of a groove in the face, possibly for hafting it to get it tied into a wooden handle for a knife or maybe a spear-point. But the thing on the right there is probably a pre-form. It’s an earlier stage of working this chert (or flint) down to do an artifact like that. And doing this early fluting is pretty typical of Paleoindian technology. This is (and most of the artifacts I’m going to show you also are) from the collection of our museum who was very involved in the archaeology of the valley from the 1970s and perhaps to the mid-1980s or so. So we do have collections from the valley even before it was a national recreation area.

  But there is a site—it’s not quite in the valley but it’s just west of the valley—that we know quite a bit more about that’s probably one of the best representations of Paleoindian archeology in the area. It’s called the Paleo Crossing site. It’s in eastern Medina County in Sharon Township, and this is the site that our museum excavated from 1991 to 1993 under the direction of my predecessor Dr. David Brose. Turned out to be quite a site. All they found were stone tools. As I said before, there’s no bone preserved or other objects, but they found a good assemblage of Paleoindian tools and possibly some features—pits and some things that might’ve been used during the time people lived there.

  On the right is just a map showing you the site area and this green crescent shape form there in the middle is where they found the most stone tools. And little blocks there, the little squares and checkerboard there in the long trenches represent excavation units. This site is probably almost 2 1/2 acres in size in terms of the scatter of archeological materials. It’s still there. It’s surrounded by a housing development now, but the developers kindly agreed to preserve the lots where this site still exists. So it is being saved.

  My colleague, Metin Eren, who’s an archeologist at Kent State University, just went back to the site this past summer to renew excavations of the site. He’s finding some very interesting things there. What do they find there? Well, they find fluted points and clovis points. Right on the ground like the one you see there. In terms of surface collections but also really a whole assemblage stone tools, this is just a sample some of these. There’s actually hundreds of stone tools from this site (including these fluted points)—but the larger ones are probably knives, butchering knives—they are probably not spear tips, they are just too large. But the smaller ones might’ve been the spear tips as well. They all have this distinctive flute in them, or groove on one or both sides. And then these are hide scraping tools. These are large flakes of flint that would’ve been worked along the edges to make hide scrapers. Some have these little pointed tips on them or there’s flakes that have these points—we call them “gravers.” They’re probably engraving tools or tools used for working bone and antler. There’s several hundred scrapers that have come from the Paleo Crossing site. Many more than fluted points. And this is a part of a blade core. They actually made their tools sometimes of this long, narrow blades are made for prepared flint cord. That technology is really a Paleolithic technology that’s very similar in the Old World, although they didn’t come from the Old World. They didn’t come from Europe, they came from northeast Asia. But that’s a technology that’s very typical late Pleistocene technology you see quite a bit.

  There’s a few radiocarbon dates from the site and they average out to about 10,970 BC. So again, in the earlier part of the late Pleistocene occupation of the area.

  One other thing about this assemblage, this is a hunting toolkit. And more of what you would call a big-game hunting toolkit because the size of the five faces—the large scraping tools for large hides. And again, most of the game is probably things like caribou, not mastodon or mammoth, but occasionally they might’ve run into a dying mammoth or mastodon and butchered it.

  Now the really interesting thing about Paleo Crossing—and, again, I didn’t excavate this site. It was David Brose. But me and some colleagues (including Metin Eren) have spent a lot of time working with the stone tool collection. And, again, there’s hundreds of tools from this site. And one really important aspect (is that) most of the tools (and certainly 65% of the stone tools) are made out of this type of flint or chert which is called Wyandotte or Harrison County, or it’s been called Indiana hornstone. It doesn’t come from Ohio, but a good percentage of the stone tools from this place at Paleo Crossing are made of this material. As you can see in the freshly flaked piece on the right there, it has kind of like a blue-gray color. It’s a very unusual cast. That may’ve been why Native Americans were attracted to it, but it’s also very high-quality stone. You can make—you can flake—it well. You can get sharp edges. It’s very useful, but again it isn’t found at all in this region. In fact, it occurs way down here in southern Indiana—in Harrison County, Indiana—which is something like 350 miles straight-line distance (as the crow flies) from Paleo Crossing, way up here in Medina County.

  Of course, people didn’t move in straight lines, okay? And the question is: how did these people way up in northern Ohio have all this Wyandotte chert? And again, I say “chert”—it’s basically flint, same type of material. So, it’s about 350 miles if you walk straight from place to place. Very likely they didn’t do that. They moved along the best accessible route to walk. The black line you see here kind of shows the least-cost path that a computer mapping program gives you, at least based on the terrain. It’s what would be the most efficient way to walk across the landscape. That route lettered “A” there was the one and that’s about 513 miles of walking.

  So, we have all this stuff up in northern Ohio and the question is: well, where did they come from and how did they get it? Well, we don’t think they were going back-and-forth to Indiana every year to pick up this stone. In fact, if that was the case, it will be by far the longest travel that Paleoindians did anywhere to get their stone tool material. It’s good stuff, but it’s not that good. In fact, what we think it represents (having this high percentage of this material up at this site we have a Northeast Ohio) is that the people that settled here, at least for short time, are traveling probably from this area. In fact, this chert—this Wyandotte chert they’re using—is the material they’re used to in their original homeland where they came from. We think it means they came from down here and they used it and brought it with them as they traveled this route. And ended up here in Medina County. And used up most of it, not all of it, but most of the tools are made of this material and probably I don’t think they went back. I think this is a one-way travel and movement. And the fact that we see this Wyandotte chert at this particular site we have kind of a snapshot, I think, of the first people or some of the first groups to come to northern Ohio at the end of the Ice Age. That’s the significance of Paleo Crossing with maybe some of the very first people to show up in this region and after a few years or less they probably started using local stone like Flint Ridge, and upper Mercer, things that were closer and easy to get. In fact, there’s some of those Ohio cherts there in the assemblage of Paleo Crossing, but they probably weren’t going back to Indiana to get more material.

  Well, the next major period is the Archaic. And again, this is about 8000 years: a long period time. Essentially, it’s a hunting and gathering time period. This is when people are coming out of the Ice Age. You can see it in this rendering. An environment—this is more like we see today. This is supposedly the Northwest Ohio, probably the Maumee River in the fall. So by (let’s say) 6 - 7000 BC, the environment becoming much more like we would recognize today: a temperate, deciduous forest. And it shows in the artifacts people are making, how they’re making a living, and (after a short time) they become very adept woodland hunters, gatherers, fishers making a good living in this region. And here you can see what looks like a just a group of people: probably one or two small families, nuclear families, of native peoples building a little dome, maybe bark-covered lodges, something like that. Making a dug-out boat here down below. There fishing out of the river with the fish weir, catching fish. All very recognizable subsistence. No more mammoth, no more mastodon, none of these Pleistocene animals, and the spruce forest has gone away.

  Also these groups are probably very mobile. Most of their sites, with a few exceptions, are not very big. There may be a scatters of flint flakes and stone tool debris, and maybe half the size of this room in many cases. They didn’t stay a long time at one place. They moved quite a bit because the way they made a living was based on the seasonal availability of things. You know if you’re just a hunter and gatherer and you want to stay in one place all year, you’re probably going to starve to death. Why? Because the foods that occur seasonally aren’t available all your round. You have to go to the nut groves in the trees in the fall to get the nuts. You have to go in the warm season to get fish. Or if you’re going to get clamshells. Or if you’re going to get turtles and aquatic animals. You can maybe move back-and-forth on the lakeshore up and back in the river valleys. Which is what they probably did. So, they’re seasonal.

  They had a seasonal round, or a seasonal movement. So it does make the archeology kind of hard to see. It’s rather thin and scattered for most of Ohio, including the Cuyahoga Valley. But there are sites, there’s lots of Archaic sites, in the Cuyahoga Valley. I don’t know, hundreds probably—if not more—and usually they have very distinctive artifacts. This is an example of some earlier Archaic points, about 8200 BC from this Norman P site in Summit County, near Tinkers Creek. And you can see that those don’t look like Clovis fluted points, do they? The technologies—there’s a drastic change in how they make their stone tools, particularly what we call projectile points (which were either spear points and/or knives, depending on how they’re using them). In fact, they have all sorts of forms with notches, split bases, some have serrated edges (kind of like a steak knife).

  This tells us either (you know) it’s the descendants of the Paleoindians drastically changing their technology or (which maybe more likely the case) this may represent other people coming in. Possibly from the southern area, the Southeast, moving into Ohio as the temperature warms, as a deciduous forest spreads out. That maybe what we’re seeing here.

  Another big innovation, believe it or not, was ground stone tools, like stone axes. We don’t see any Paleoindian stone axes. They’re not making and using them. We start seeing that in the Archaic. By the middle Archaic, we start seeing this full-grooved axe and you can see that the bit end has been broken off. But you can see where it’s been ground around in kind of a ring. That was so it could have been tied to a handle, kind of like maybe what you see in the upper left corner there. It’s a method of hafting which means tying into some kind of a handle or shaft. It was probably a big innovation and tells us that they’re depending a lot more on woodworking, either making dugout boats, house posts, whatever they would need to do. They’re doing more of that than in the Paleo Indian period. Because if [the Paleo Indians] needed stone axes back then, they would’ve made them—but they didn’t do it.

  Along with this we see a lot of ground stone implements that are for plant processing like pestles and mortars, like slab mortars or matadis. More evidence of processing plants and lots of different plants than the Paleoindians ever used (but again the remains of plants is very scarce). We find no plant material in most of the archeological record unless it’s been carbonized and didn’t burn completely. And that kind of goes on. Life was conservative and changes slowly during this period in time.

  And then we see some pretty significant changes with what we call the Woodland period. By about 1000 BC. This is the famous time of the mound- and earthworks-builders of Ohio. The Adena and Hopewell cultures and a lot of you probably know those terms. And today they’re kind of just generic terms for groups of societies that started doing other things rather differently which happened to do with building earthworks and burial mounds, and practicing really elaborate mortuary behaviors, and making special kind of artifacts that were used in rituals and ceremonies. Again, something that’s new that started up at this time that didn’t occur before. Not because people couldn’t do it before, but because there was just socially no reason or a need to do that.

  And this is another one of those renderings, you can see this is down in the Ohio Valley. Circular enclosure earthwork embankment with an opening here, with your people carrying out some kind of generic ceremonialism (which really is just a guess by the artist). But they did use these enclosures demarking sacred space and used it for certain things, building walls of earth to do that. In the backyard, you can kind of see a group of huts, a little settlement. We do see the beginnings of not really villages in the early Woodland, but larger settlements with a few more families coming together and probably staying for larger parts of the year, although not all year round by any means.

  Artifact-wise, another big change of technology is the beginning of ceramic production—making fireplace ceramics like this reconstructive pot we see here from 0-E.C 1 site. This is actually a site we worked on in 2000 and 2001. This is along the Cuyahoga River in Independence. You can see a partial reconstruction. This was actually found (the remains of this pot) was found in the pit. It has a flat bottom—kinda looks like a crockpot perhaps—and that may have been how to use it, for boiling—that type of thing. This is a nice piece because it actually has very fine cord impressions on it, almost looks like textile was impressed in the wet clay. And (unfortunately) we couldn’t actually date this specimen, but it probably dates back about 1000 - 500 BC. It’s beginning pottery making. Again, not because people really couldn’t do it before but because it wasn’t necessary or a need to do that. This is still rather crude pottery. It’s basically earthenware. It’s low fired, 7- or 800 Celsius. You could get a hard-clay ceramic. If you filled it with water, the water leaks out after a few hours. It isn’t really high-grade ceramics, but it worked for the people. They probably just used local river clay to make these. They probably added crushed stone temper and that’s basically a very functional, suitable type of earthenware. Most of them are jars like this, or pots, not plates or bowls to any great degree.

  And in the Cuyahoga Valley, there’s one particular type of pottery that was found from the Stanford Knoll site. You could see it: a partial reconstruction, a part of the pot here. It might have been shaped like the one I just showed you, but this is thicker. It has rather crushed stone or grit temper, and it’s been dated from an excavation of that site to about 1100 BC. So with some of the earliest pottery in the region that’s been found, and it is probably pretty typical of what earliest pots look like. Imagine that with the side or a big chunk of the side of a crockpot, that’s probably what you’re looking at.

  Also at this time we do see a little bit of evidence of what you might call horticulture or agriculture, more like garden farming. Squash and gourd. We find sometimes the carbonized seed of these plants and also some very tiny seeded plants—native plants like quinoa pod or Lambsquarters and others—that were starting to be cultivated maybe very informally by people, but added to the diet. So they start to become, in some way, farming begins.

  Now that we get into the Woodland Period, we talked about earthworks, we talked about mounds. In the Cuyahoga Valley, there’s kind of a unique type of earthwork construction that I call hilltop enclosures. Charles Whittlesey called them “ancient earth forts,”if you remember the 1871 publication I mentioned a minute ago. These are earthen enclosures. In other words, what they’re doing is building earthen walls to close off the entrance or maybe the narrow neck of a high promontory, a high shale outcrop that kind of outcrops into the valley of the Cuyahoga and other rivers of this area. They use different methods to enclose these, but (you know) these represent earthen walls and ditches. So, they would have to dig a ditch, then they’d take the soil and pile it up next to the embankment next to the ditch to enclose or cut off an entryway into maybe a large, flat area of these bluff tops. And there’s different forms. Some had two or three embankments.

  Some of these were mapped by Charles Whittlesey as well. And I’ve been to a few of these and measure things and it’s pretty accurate, his surveying, he really did a good job. So, the point was in enclosing just really small areas—1 acre, maybe 2 acres, in size. These are not big areas that are being enclosed. There’s another one up here. Whittlesey thought these were forts and they kind of look like—I think he was thinking of the iron age forts that you see in Europe and western Europe that are very common and well known. Which, of course, is much, much larger than these things.

  And he had this idea that these were not built by the Native Americans, that these were built by a lone race of mound building people which was a very common idea at this time. There was this conception of a lost race, usually white, of 10 lost tribes of Phoenicians, take your pick, that came here in ancient times with an advanced civilization and were accosted by the, as they said, the “savage Indians” that they knew from historic times. They believed these culturally advanced people needed to build fortifications and try to defend themselves on these blufftops.

  Most archaeologists don’t buy that, and no archeologist that I know buys that explanation. In fact, I don’t think these are really forts at all anymore. I think they were actually ceremonial enclosures in a similar vein of the things we find in a larger scale in southern Ohio among the Adena and sometimes Hopewell cultures in southern Ohio. They’re just the northern/northeastern Ohio version of these enclosures. And again, the whole idea (no matter what the shapes of these things are) is to enclose this space which was probably used as dance grounds, as gathering places for social events, and also probably for ceremonies and rituals. The idea of building walls and of joining ditches was probably more of a symbolic barrier. When these things were new, they were probably no more than five or six feet high. And the little ditch was probably no more than three or four feet deep. So, if you really want to attack these places, this is not gonna keep people out. It’s possible, in the later times, when warfare was very common, some of these might have been used temporarily for that type of thing, but I think they were built much earlier. I think most of these were built around 300 BC based on some work we’ve done it at a couple of other sites outside the valley. They were ceremonial enclosures.

  Probably the best preserved one, if you want to see a really well preserved one, you want to go to Indian Point Park in the Lake Metroparks, near Painesville. You can go and park in the Indian Point Park. At the parking lot is a kiosk that tells you about the site. You take this wonderful hike back out a trail on this blufftop—this very narrowing blufftop—with this wonderful Eastern hemlock forest all around. They have preserved walls and you can see still perhaps four or five feet above the grade here. And this is the ditch full of leaves. There’s another one back here. There’s two parallel walls of the side of the ditches. So this is really nice to see because it's one of the best preserved that I know about in the area. Most have been plowed away. The ones in the valley—you can still see them, but they’re pretty reduced.

  Now, some of these sites have been excavated, and investigated a little more than others. One is this site called the Soldad site. (Oh, by the way, I was going to mention, these numbers that I keep putting up here, these are the state registry or site numbers for each. Once a site is recorded, the state archives it. It basically gets a number. 33 is Ohio, CU is the county “Cuyahoga.” 20 means it’s the 20th site recorded. So that’s just a little reference for you.) The names change. Some of these sites have two or three different names, but Soldad is the one name. This is one of the early maps, I think a Whittlesey map. Out of this, again, a high shale on a flat blufftop. With at least one earthen wall that was built. Apparently, there was a little mound there at the end at one time. This is another one of these enclosures.

  This has been excavated a couple times, most recently by Dr. Fred Finney at Cleveland State University. He was there briefly in the early 90s and did some work up there. They found a lot of different kinds of artifacts from different occupations over time, including what you would call this projectile point or maybe a knife with a rounded base. This is more typical at what they would call Adena points, which are very common in southern Ohio. They date from this time from 7- to 500 BC to maybe about 100 BC.

  This is another interesting artifact this is called an expanded center gorget and it’s actually complete, which is really rare. These are not from Fred Finney’s excavation; these are from earlier collections in the valley. But has two holes, it’s called a gorget and I can’t tell you what a gorget was really used for. It was something that was tied on to something else and that’s about all we can tell you about them. But they are made from usually very pretty, high-quality colorful slate or gray-banded slate was selected. And the forms, the shapes take all different forms. This one has expanded center is the name of the case with two holes. It’s just typical of the time period and typical of the Adena culture in southern Ohio.

  This from our collection as well, and also in the collection. I found this little interesting object here: the actual stone is a stone concretion. That’s a little kind of a lime- or iron-stone concretion. That’s a common geological formation in the shale bedrock of this region. Just a little thing, but I noticed it had this red material in the middle of it and I think what this is is these concretions are kind of like geodes. They form around things. And some concretions have silt with a lot of iron in the center. When it’s exposed or heated, it turns red. I think it is like red paint. What I think—this is a little paint pot. A little pigment. And there’s a close up of it. It even has a little lines and streaks across it. I don’t know if that’s from a Native American finger or some earlier curator who would say, “What is that stuff?” But I like to pretend it’s actually a Native American fingerprint there. Look how small it is. But that was found at the site as well. It could relate to ceremonies which were going on out of the site. We don’t know for sure. But it's an interesting object. It is very rare.

  And then there’s really large objects like this it’s what we would call a cache blade. It’s a large kind of a pre-form for earlier middle Woodland point which came later. This is from a cache of over 100 that was found in the area of Tinkers Creek. Most of the other specimens were sold or given away, but an amateur archaeologist actually donated this to the museum a number of years ago. It’s the only one that I’ve seen that’s known to exist. Just looking at this the other day, and you can see how big it is—that’s my hand there. It’s a large, nicely made bi-face, it’s really thin. This could’ve been used as an artifact itself as a big cutting tool, but more often to get these things occur what we call caches which means just deposits of 1 to 3 or maybe 100 of these things that were buried in pits in the ground. Sometimes in very remote locations or between river valleys. They seem to be ritual deposits, ceremonial deposits, or maybe offerings of what were probably pretty valuable objects to the people that made them and probably had some significance.

  I looked at the slide again actually yesterday. I remember looking at this in the collection and it has this weird gray color to it. I think it’s been heated. I think it’s been burned, but not sure what kind of raw material it’s made out of. Most of these are made of Flint Ridge material that comes from near Newark, Ohio. Very colorful material but when you burn it, it turns to this greyish, whitish color. And there’s actually fractures in it that look like they could be from heating. Sometimes these cache objects were actually burned first and then buried and this may be an example of that. It’s just a wonderfully made piece.

  Now as we get into the early Woodland and we look at one other aspect that’s starting to start up at this time. It’s got to do not just with earthworks and mounds, but mortuary behavior. Across the Midwest there’s lots of examples of what would be early Woodland cemeteries and a lot of these represent burial places that were established before earthen mounds were made. This is kind of before people made artificial mounds. Because you noticed on the upper left-hand corner, that thing that looks like a mound is not a mound. It’s actually what’s called a glacial cave. It’s a natural geological feature. It’s got to do with deposits that are out-washed from glacial advances or melting back or retreats. It’s usually sand and gravel. And they have these nice conical shapes. But in the early Woodland and at the very end of the late Archaic, people started establishing cemeteries on top of this and putting individuals in sometimes rather deep shafts. Some that I’ve seen documented are honestly more than 3 or 4 meters deep down into the sand and gravel fill. And it’s very likely that this practice of using these natural promontories (or “eminences”) to make cemeteries on or in maybe was the precursor of actual burial mounds. In fact, if you think about what burial mounds look like, they look like that. The conical mounds, the Adena mounds in southern Indiana. This may be what they were doing before mounds. Somebody said “let’s build a mound” and “if we can’t find a cave then let’s build a mound.” In fact, there’s more of these in northern Ohio than southern Ohio as well. So that may be what they were doing.

  Some remains were found with more gorgets: these drilled, slate pieces of different shapes. This is called a “bird stone” which (again) we don’t know quite what it was used for. It could be used on a spear thrower shaft—we don’t know. Made out of slate, very well-crafted items that are put in sometimes with burials. And this is a what’s called a sandal-sole gorget. Basically made of marine shell, a saltwater shell from maybe a conch or either a whelk shell. Basically a marine gastropod, a big one, that comes from either the southern Atlantic coast or the Gulf of Mexico, which had been harvested down there and probably traded eventually up to northern Ohio and included with this burials. The shell itself, the color of the shell, is of great significance and also probably they knew it was an exotic object that came from a long way away.

  We have larger mounds in the valley OK. This is the Gleason Mound, which is near Valley View. This is on private property but this is one of the better preserved probably Middle Woodland mounds, although no one’s really done any systematic excavation in it. There are some collections from around the mound area done by our museum, but it is well preserved and it’s probably what a lot of these mounds may have looked like at one time in the valley. Many of them are gone. But again, on average, they’re not this big. Most mounds I’ve seen are maybe only a foot or two high. And even some of those are in woodlands and been plowed away. So the northern Ohio mounds aren’t to the same scale as the ones we see to the south.

  And this brings us to the time (the Middle Woodland period) of the Hopewell Culture. This is the most elaborate kind a flamboyant mortuary ceremonialism/ritualism that we see across Ohio and a good part of the Midwest. This is another one of those the renderings showing you a shamen, a Middle Woodland shaman, decked out in all sorts of Hopewell-type artifacts: copper effigy spearpoints, a bear cloak. He’s got ear spools on, some freshwater pearl jewelry, and some of these other folks have these on. And you can see they’re on a bluff top. He’s ministering to this poor, sick person here, and down below you can see one of the large geometric earthworks that are common in southern Ohio.

  We don’t really have much like this in northern Ohio. We do have the hilltop, earthwork enclosures that are most common. And the Hopewell made certain types, very distinct types of artifacts (and again) that aren’t at all common in northern Ohio. There’s not many “Hopewell sites.” There’s Middle Woodland sites, but they all look like the early Woodland sites: with coarser pottery, typical stone tools, that type of thing. There’s a few places in northern Ohio, including parts of certain locations of the Cuyahoga Valley. There’s a cluster of these types of sites near the village of Everett that have been fairly well-known and excavated by park archeologist over the years. Usually salvage projects.

  These are some of the artifacts in our collection from the Everett Knoll site, in Everett, that show you to some of these typical type of artifacts. Just a corner knot spearpoint made out of Flint Ridge material from near Newark again. Some bone ornaments drilled out of canine teeth, some blade tools, different types of really rather thin, finely made pottery, and another gorget that's been broken in two places. This looks like a limestone gorget. Even cubes of galena. This is a mineral that was often used and put in the burials. They were found in deposits around this area. These are all much more common in southern Ohio. But when they turn up in northern Ohio, they represent local people I think taking on the Hopewell belief system, the religion, and probably the ceremonialism. And when we find them, they’re quite significant and important. These are different examples of the excavations the park did in that area, showing you a fire pit or fire hearth, at the Szalay site.

  There are other earthworks that are known near these hilltop enclosures that probably extend to the Late Woodland—almost to the very end of the Woodland period. Much later than in other places. This is the place called the Greenwood Village. This was Charles Whittlesey’s “Fort Number Five.” He gave everything numbers. But it’s now known as the Greenwood Village site. It’s a little different. It’s a big, flat blufftop area and you notice it’s enclosed on three sides by rather elaborate earthen walls and ditches. This site was actually excavated by our museum back in the 1990s.

  Here you can see a photograph of the report of the wall there, one of these earthen walls; and for scale they used a backpack. That’s what this big arrow is pointing to: a backpack. I don’t know why someone didn’t stand there. I usually have someone stand there. Ok, so you know what a backpack looks like. So, it’s not huge—just a few feet high with adjoining ditches. It’s very hard to see in the woods sometimes, but they basically enclose a large rectangular space a little bit differently than these other earthen enclosures I’ve shown you. It’s quite an interesting site. There’s been artifacts, of course, that came from it but most of these are projectile points and stone tools which really aren’t that great looking, I have to admit. They’re surprisingly crude-looking for the Late Woodland period in northern Ohio. I don’t know why that is. Maybe they had a special purpose. But these are some of the stone tools they needed. Fine pottery—by that time the pottery is getting rather refined. It’s nicely cord-marked on the outside. They all like to cord-mark the pottery. Not sure why. It may have made it look more like a basket perhaps, something like that. And even a few vessels that could be partially reconstructed, like this one on the left. It has kind of a conical or rounded bottom, a little bit of an out-turned rim on the top there, and it’s tempered with crushed stone grit. Probably just glacial rocks that are burned and pulverized. And, on the right, you see how we usually find pottery: always in little fragments of pieces.

  And the last period is the Late Prehistoric period. This is the time when things changed quite a bit. This is the time when people become really true farmers. You start growing maize, beans, and squash in the gardens. And here you can see another one of these renderings that shows you what a village might’ve looked like. And these are probably true villages. People aren’t living there all your round, but they’re coming in groups of 50, 100, maybe 150 and living in these villages. We wonder why did things change? Populations were getting larger by about 1000 or 1200 AD. But also the fact is that—if you notice, this was running along the outside behind those houses: that’s the stockade or a palisade. That’s a fortification, that’s a true fortification. That’s a wall that’s been made out of post and interwoven saplings to keep people from probably shooting arrows into your village. We know this was a time of warfare, which was much more prominent at this time. And everything you see in here is based on archeological data. This is the time when the bow and arrow is finally begins to be used. Up to this time, people weren’t using the bow and arrow. They’re probably using the atlatl spear thrower and long darts or spears. And you can see the houses are pretty well made. These are covered with cattail mats. This is all by analogy to other historic houses in the Great Lakes primarily. People were making pottery of different kinds and decorating it, making bulrush mats. The woman on the upper left is making a bulrush mat which was probably used on the floors of the houses. And we know probably more about this time period than really any of other ones.

  The site that is the best known is called the South Park Village site, which some of you may have heard of in the Cuyahoga Valley. This is the map showing you the distribution in two different colors, of Late Prehistoric people across northern Ohio. And the ones on the right (I never know what that color is called but the purplish color there) are Whittlesey Tradition sites. So, most of these people that lived at this time in Northeast Ohio we call the Whittlesey Tradition after Charles Whittlesey. On the left are these blue triangles of their neighboring group, the neighbors to the west are called the Sandusky Tradition, who in most of their lifeways were very similar but they probably were different ethnic or linguistic groups as best we can tell. And you notice that right in the middle there is the Rocky River. So far, we don’t have any really documented village sites in this drainage. It may be that it’s kind of a territorial boundary. Almost like a no-man’s-land between the group to the east (the Whittlesey) and the group to the west (the Sandusky Tradition). Again, we don’t know what they called themselves. We don’t know what their tribal name was at all. So that’s kind of the distribution.

  The South Park site is one of the kind of “type sites” for the Whittlesey Tradition because it’s been so heavily investigated. This is what it looks like today. It’s kind of this island on a blufftop of trees surrounded by this industrial quarrying and devastation essentially here. But this is where a lot of archeology went on from 1968 until about 1981, a lot of it done by our museum. In upper right is a rendering of what the village might’ve look like. It’s a little fanciful. It shows this really sheer cliff. Well that’s not quite what it was like, but it’s nice to look at. But these houses in the forms are based on archeological evidence.

  This site was heavily excavated by Dr. David Brose because they really thought this whole blufftop was going to be destroyed. Companies were mining the shale bedrock out of this area and it really looked like it was going to be destroyed. So, they came through and used the tool which we usually don’t use—which is a bulldozer—to strip off the “overburden” (the upper soil that’s been disturbed) and expose what’s below. Here you can see just the different trenches that were dug with machinery and some by hand. Lots of things going on inside. I’ll give you a close-up of one of those areas. What you’re seeing here (all those weird shaped things—ovals in circles and squiggles and things)—those are pit features. Storage pits, cooking pits that are below the ground surface, below the area that was scraped off the top. There’s hundreds and hundreds of those that were found and exposed at this site.

  But all those little dots (you see all those dots there)—those are post molds. Those are little stains on the ground from where wooden posts were set in the ground. At South Park we have evidence that if you connect the dots on some of these, like David Brose did and others, there actually are structural outlines there. There’s actually a real rectangle there of a longhouse-like structure: probably a multi-family dwelling. That’s one of many on this blufftop. There’s probably a lot of them out there, but they’re only partially exposed by the testing that was done out there. They didn’t dig the whole blufftop, but they tested a good sample of it.

  This is a re-creation we made for an exhibit we had back in 1996 of the South Park blufftop. Might’ve been what it looked like back then. And, again, these house forms: these bark-covered lodges with the gabled roofs are based on Great Lakes Native American historic buildings that were either bark-covered or mat-covered. We think these people were closely related to Great Lakes groups as well. You can see women using a wooden mortar and pestle to grind corn. A good implement to use but not at all preserved in the archeological records. We don’t have any of these wooden tools preserved unfortunately. I wish they had used stone, but they didn’t. People digging storage pits in the background and living a pretty sedentary life, as we’d say, on this blufftop.

  The artifacts are amazing. We have literally thousands and thousands of pot cherts and probably tens of thousands of flint flakes and stone tool fragments from the site. This is one of the reconstructed pottery vessels (probably a storage vessel) from South Park. This occupation (there probably were three occupations there) dates back to around 1500 AD. Lots of animal bones. Again, thousands of pieces of animal bones. Most of it is deer, but pretty much any other woodland animal you could think of is represented in there—plus fish, turtles, and lots of freshwater clam shells which they were harvesting as well. And we do have some plant remains. We do have some carbonized ears of maize, and even things like American plum. Wild foods they would have been collecting. There’s also a little bit of the common bean (Phaseolus was used) and squash remains as well. And then a range of other seeds from wild plants. Just in 2000, our museum (in one of our projects) did a study of a piece of property just outside the park down river from South Park in Independence. We call it OEC-1 site. It was probably related to the village of South Park. Now it’s a nicely wooded area owned by the Independence Board of Education. We found what I think is another Whittlesey village back in 2000 - 2001. You can see it’s located on one of these promontories on the left there—on one of these pointed landforms. But it’s actually a terrace of the Cuyahoga River. It’s perched a little bit above the river.

  On the right (on the upper right), you can see that round stain at our excavation unit. That’s what these pits looked like when we expose them. This site had a large number of storage pits that were almost about 6 feet deep when we excavated the fill. You can see the young lady in the lower right there working one of our profiles, and the layers of dark-and-white soil you can see banded in there. Those are different fill layers as well. These were serious maize agriculturalists. They were storing and harvesting lots of maize—storing it through the winter probably. You can store things in pits pretty well (if you know what you’re doing) for at least a few months so you can consume the remains of your large harvest during the year.

  On the upper right is just our excavation plan. Not at all as extensive—this is not a South Park excavation—this is all-hands excavation over about eight weeks total time.

  Another partially reconstructed pot on the right. This is a good late Whittlesey Tradition type called Tuttle Hill Notched. Upper left, you can see a close-up of the storage pits and (on the right) you can see some pieces of the pot on the right being excavated from the bottom of one of these pits. And eventually, partially reconstructed.

  And then there’s the stone tools. These are true arrowheads. By this time the stone tools get very simple. They’re basically triangular shapes that are made into the arrowheads. Some of the triangles are worked into drills. Some are worked into knives. That’s the major basic technology. Probably some of the best stone tool technology was during the Paleoindian Period. Everybody thinks things get more refined and better as you go along, but by this time they’re making very simple—what we call “expedient”—stone tools. It’s not because they can’t make very nice tools or do flint work. It’s because for their time and for what they’re doing, they don’t need to have nice, big formal tools. They are not moving around as much. They’re using local gravels and flint that they find in the rivers and using those for their technology.

  We even found things like this earth oven. This is a pit that was used probably for communal cooking events. It’s an earth oven where they would basically make a fire at the bottom. You can see at the bottom there are some charred logs and then lots of burned rock on top that was used to hold heat. Then they would put food on top. Next, they’d probably put vegetation over the top and then fill the pit back in and let it bake down. This could be used for anything from meat, fish, to the whole range of natural plant foods such as tubers (things like that would have been cooked). When you find these, that tells you these are communal: these are for lots of people. Special ceremonies. This is not every-day cooking.

  Some artifacts kind of speak to maybe artistic expression to some degree, but probably to ceremonialism or ritual. Like (on the right) is an effigy bird pipe. That’s a pretty typical of the Whittlesey Tradition of Northeast Ohio. They’re rather well known for the pipes they made. Very elaborate stone pipes. The lower left is an engraved of piece of slate. It might’ve been a little celt (a little grooved ax). We don’t know what this little crosshatch design, if you could see it, means. It may have been the scale of a serpent or something like that. We find these occasionally in pits and they’re always broken. We think they were basically used like amulets by maybe a shaman, and then broken and discarded. Ritually killed and then discarded. We don’t know much more than that.

  On the upper left is one of the most unusual artifacts we’ve ever found which is a drilled dog skull. They had domesticated dogs that the Paleoindians probably brought over from Siberia long ago. And this is just the brain case of maybe a medium-sized dog. But they drilled this pattern of holes in it with a flint drill. It’s actually polished and been ground quite a bit. I don’t know exactly what this is because it’s a one-of-a-kind artifact. It was discarded in one of these storage pits. If I had more time, I’d ask you what you think it is, but I’ll tell you what I think it is. I think it’s a rattle. I think when it was used it had probably little seeds inside. We didn’t find any stones in it though, but there might have been little seeds or something. And maybe attached to a dance costume—something like that. Don’t know for sure, but that’s my best guess. Some kids say it’s a pencil holder or something, but I don’t think it is.

  And then (just to finish off): What happened to the Whittlesey? Well, the big thing about the archeology of Ohio is that by 1650 A.D., all this ends. The archeological record pretty much just goes cold by 1650. People apparently leave Ohio (and definitely northern Ohio) by 1650. And the big questions are: Where did they go? This map on the left is a 1687 map of the Great Lakes and it shows basically not much in northern Ohio. It mentions (in French) “la nation du chat” (“the cat nation”) which is the name for the Erie Indians. But they were not in our part of Ohio. And there is not much else in there. So, there’s a lot of questions about what happened to people. There’s a bunch of different scenarios: Were they destroyed? Did they go extinct? Did other groups chase them out? Did they go to find the French and trade? We don’t really know. But we do know there was a lot of warfare going on in the Northeast among the (New York State) Iroquoians, the Huron (across the St. Lawrence by Lake Ontario), and their European allies. The Dutch and the British for the Iroquois, and the French with the Huron. By the 1600s, by 1650, there began this enormous warfare, kind of conquest warfare.

  All this was over beaver furs, by the way. There was a huge market for beaver furs in Europe. Beaver-fur felt hats that men and women wore. The European powers are trying to entice the Indian allies to go out and get more and more beaver pelts for them and there’s a huge commercial endeavor.

  So, we turned into really open warfare, where groups like the Iroquois in New York basically conquered and dispersed a lot of these groups. They dispersed the Huron by 1650; their allies the Petun and the Neutrals by 1651. Even the Erie, who were an Iroquois-speaking group and were closely related, were also disbursed by 1656 and essentially were erased from the historic record. Most of these groups disappeared after 1650. And did they move out of northern Ohio.

  Is that why people left Northeast Ohio? That’s one of the big questions we have. We don’t know for sure, but basically we did find one historical reference in the Jesuit Relations that talks about the people that might’ve lived where the Whittlesey Traditions lived. This says, “For our Iroquois have discovered beyond the cat nation [meaning west to the Erie] other innumerous nations that speak the Algonquian language more than 30 villages whose inhabitants have never had any knowledge of Europeans. They still use only stone hatchets and knives and the other things that these savages used before they began to trade with the French. The Iroquois carry fire and war thither.” Okay, so is this a reference to warfare that finally dispersed the Whittlesey people and everyone else living in northern Ohio? Very possibly.

  I think the other possibility is that, by this time, the French were moving because of this warfare up to the upper Great Lakes to places like Green Bay, Wisconsin, and trading to the native people that lived in Wisconsin, the Native Americans. Brass kettles, iron knives—all the things these people coveted and wanted. When they met people (some of the people in Wisconsin, groups that were known historically as the Sauk, and the Fox, and the Kickapoo, and the Mascouten), they told the French “we’re not from here, we’re from across Lake Michigan,” meaning eastward towards at least Michigan or southern Michigan. I don’t know for sure. This is a problem that we’re researching and working on. It could be that people like the Sauk, and the Fox, and the Kickapoo may be the descendants of some of the Whittlesey people. Right now, it’s difficult to make that connection archeologically. History may be pointing in that direction. So, with that, I will leave it to you that we don’t know what happened to them, but they didn’t go extinct completely. Their descendants are probably still alive today. Thank you.

Dr. Redmond sifts soil looking for prehistoric artifacts.

Cleveland Museum of Natural History

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Explore this topic further through related NPS articles. There are also descriptions of Dr. Redmond’s research and fieldwork on the museum’s website and blog.