ANDERSON VILLAGE SITE

ANDERSON VILLAGE SITE

LOCATION

Prehistoric Anderson Village site and burial ground is located on the east bank of the Little Miami just north of the bridge on State Route 350. Located at the foot of a bluff on which Fort Ancient Earthworks is also situated. The main area of the village is bounded by the road on the south, the Pennsylvania Railroad on the east and Randall run on the north, the site may be seen from the North Lookout Point in the South Fort of Fort Ancient.

This site is exciting to the archaeologists as they have found burial mounds with human skeletons, lodge sites with their fireplaces and storage bins with grains, post-holes with remains of poles representing stockades and perhaps house structures, tools, implements, ornaments, pottery in tact, water vessels and bones of animals that were used for food and domestic purposes. The site was occupied over a considerable period of time, as the refuse is over four or five feet deep in some places. Over one hundred and fifty burial sites have been excavated and many more are marked for later research. Most opened graves showed their owner, his personal belongings - (such as shell spoons, hairpins, flint knives, shell disks, necklaces of shells or teeth, pipes, axes, arrow points, bracelets of shell), along with pottery vessels of foods (grains) for the life after, some in flexed positions and many in an extended position. One adult had an arrow point in a lumbar vertebra, causing death, showing no evidence of healing. In this area animals not only furnished food for these people, but bones, skins and teeth supplied materials for tools to ornaments or clothing. Bones were found of anything from a small dog to deer, birds, hawks, reptiles, fish and even a painted turtle shell.

THE PEOPLE

The Anderson Village people belonged to a group known to archaeologists as the Fort Ancient peoples, living along streams in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, southeastern Indiana and western West Virginia. Most customs varied to a small degree, but basically they were one people. The Anderson Village people were much like the early people in Fort Ancient, they had no contact with whites and were passed on to another world before the white man arrived, approximately 1650 A.D. was the end of their site according to latest discussions.

What we found interesting was found near their homes (wigwams - dome shaped) was storage pits (circular in shape), filled with pottery vessels containing corn, corn flour, nuts, berries, honey, maple sugar, grapes, acorns and dried meat of small animals up to deer. Tobacco and herbs were found to be very common, again stored in pottery vessels. These people had a very good diet when considering the time period and having to do with what was at hand, talk about surviving and doing well at it, this was at its best.

Little can be said of the social grouping of these people, other than they were divided into clans, good evidence shows they had shamans or medicine men. In a bundle (medicine) was found to contain; cut wolf jaws, a cut human jaw, a quartz pebble, small flint scrapers, doubled pointed awl, small bone fish hooks, shell spoon, mussel shell, tobacco pipe, beaks of parakeets (once common in Ohio, now extinct). All the contents believed to be a "medicine bundle" used by medicine men of the historic tribes for curative and magical purposes.

SUMMARY

Two distinct prehistoric Indian tribes lived at different times within the area now set aside as the Fort Ancient State Memorial Park, the Hopewell peoples and the Fort Ancient peoples. Of these two groups, the Hopewell's were the first to settle in the area, and were the builders of the great Fort Ancient Earthworks. Long after the Hopewell Indians had disappeared, peoples of the Fort Ancient Culture came into the area and established their stockade villages. One interesting difference was the Fort Ancient people work with stone, bone and shell, they never developed the high degree of craftsmanship shown by the tools and ornaments of the Hopewell. peoples

SOURCES
Fowke, Gerard, "Archaeological History of Ohio" (Columbus, 1934)
William's Bros., publishers, "History of Ross and Highland Counties, Ohio", Cleveland, 1880.
Squier, Ephriam G., and Edwin H. Davis, "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley" (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, I, Washington, 1848)
Smith, Vernal B., "Forgotten Forts of Ohio" Historical Society Publication, Spring 1978.