3D PRINTING OF AMUNET'S SKULL

Thanks to the careful work of Mallory Busso, a biomedical engineering student at Case Western University, and the Technology House in Solon, Ohio, we now have a 3D representation of Amunet's skull. 

 

Mallory was able to use the CT-scan data obtained by the Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center to create the digital model and the Technology House used its 3D printing capability to make the physical recreation of Amunet's skull.

 

We now can use this model as a teaching tool as well as the basis for a forensic reconstruction of Amunet's face – a face which the world has not seen for more than 2,700 years!

 

Brad

ODOT Project near U.S. Grant Birthplace at Point Pleasant, Ohio

From May 6-9, 2013, the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) was recently performing some repair and replacement of Works Progress Administration (WPA) gutters with a more modern gutter and drainage system as well as upgrading a sidewalk.  The work was located near the Ulysses S. Grant birthplace in Point Pleasant, Ohio in Southern Ohio. 

During recovery efforts, nearly 100 artifacts were recovered, including pipe fragments, ceramics, a glass medicinal bottle and sagger fragments.  Saggers are defined as large cylindrical fired ceramic vessels, with or without holes in the sides, used to contain unfired pots (especially glazed ware) or other kinds of ceramic products (e.g. clay pipes).   All of the materials, while postdating the Grant's occupation of the home, came from a few of the pipe making factories that played an important part of industry in the town of Point Pleasant, Ohio.  A number of different pipes had been recovered previously back during the replacement of the Original Grant Memorial Bridge in 1984 and during archaeological investigations by ODOT on Lot 37 in 2011. 

Many of the pipe fragments resemble the Milled Chesterfield Diagonally Ribbed type and the Ribbed Elbow type.  According to previous research, these two types of pipes were produced by the Lakin-Kirkpatrick-Davis-Peterson (LKDP) Pottery, which was the longest operating pottery plant in Point Pleasant, Ohio.  While many of the pipes are only fragments, approximately four pieces were complete.  However, it appears that the complete pieces (and likewise the fragments) were discards due to a warped shape or other abnormality during the firing process. 

Of special interest were sagger fragments and a medicine bottle that were recovered near the Grant Birthplace.  The saggers, like a majority of the clay pipes, were found in fragments. 

The final artifact of interest was a medicine bottle that was recovered during trenching efforts in front of the Grant Birthplace home.  The medicine bottle had embossing on it that read: “Peter Nodler Pharmacist, Covington, KY.”  Nodler was a prominent druggist in Covington during the last third of the 19^th century with a store at Fifth and Madison Streets in that city. He was also well known as a dealer in all sorts of lamps and accessories as well as doing a good trade in ginger ales and soda waters that he supplies to retail dealers. He seemed well established in Covington about the same time the LDKP Pottery was in business.  Stay tuned for more discoveries!

Chandler Herson

 

"FOOTPRINT ROCK" FROM CLINTON COUNTY

In March of 1941, the Ohio Historical Society's Curator of Archaeology Richard Morgan received a remarkable letter. Employees of Ohio’s Department of Highways had made what they felt was a momentous discovery. According to a report enclosed with the letter, workers repairing a bridge on State Route 350, near Clarksville in Clinton County, had uncovered “a rock that is evidently the handiwork of prehistoric civilization.”

This rock appeared to be in the shape of “the bottom of a mocca-sined foot,” estimated to be about a size six. The shape of the foot was said to differ “from our present civilization in that there is a distinct curve in the foot at the point we know and call the instep.”

The proximity of the Fort Ancient Earthworks suggested to the author of the report that “this piece of work” might be “a remnant of the Mound Builders’ art.”

Morgan looked over the pictures and immediately realized the discovery was not what it appeared to be.

In his reply to the Highway Department, he tried to be diplomatic:

"In my opinion, the object is not the work of the prehistoric Indians but is a natural rock formation. Such formations are known to geologists as concretions. …

We appreciate your interest and courtesy in bringing the object to our attention and wish to thank you for your co-operation."

The Footprint Rock sure looks like a human footprint, but it surely is an entirely natural formation. It's a good example of how easy it is to for your brain to fool you by finding apparent meaning in the seemingly infinite variety of nature. There's even a word for it – pareidolia. It's why we sometimes see a man in the Moon or camels and whales in the clouds.

Brad Lepper

OHIO'S NATURAL HISTORY: Introducing Our New Natural History Curator

Introducing Our New Natural History Curator

This Blog is an introduction and a welcome to the Ohio Historical Society for our new curator of natural history, David L. Dyer. Dave brings to our museum an enthusiasm and energy for natural history, museums and wild, natural landscapes such as the natural history sites OHS operates.

Most recently, Dave was curator of the zoology collections and herbarium at the museum of the University of Montana in Missoula, where he worked with their collections for twenty years. He has a master’s degree from the University of Nebraska in museum studies, with an emphasis in natural history. Prior to working on his MS, Dave spent four years working as a museum preparator for the Ice Age Exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center. Somewhat serendipitously, prior to that Dave spent 12 years right here at the Ohio Historical Society, first as a high school student intern and part-time while working on his BS at Ohio State, then full time as our Collections Manager. While Dave, his wife and two sons loved the wilderness hiking opportunities of Montana, roots in Ohio and family still living here motivated Dave to apply for the position here at OHS.  I am excited about “turning over the reins” to such a passionate and dedicated natural history museum person. You’ll get a small sense of Dave’s commitment to this sort of work as you read his own introduction below. As you get the opportunity, welcome Dave back to Ohio and to the Ohio Historical Society.

Bob Glotzhober, Senior Curator of Natural History

David Dyer: In His Own Words.

As a school child I loved museums. The most anticipated days of the year were the annual spring tours to various Columbus museums.  It was a chance to get out of the classroom, to see exciting objects on exhibit, and to have new experiences. Most memorable were the trips to COSI, when they were at their old location on East Broadway, and of course the “Ohio State Museum” in Sullivant Hall at 15^th and High. That, as you may know, was the home of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society before it changed its name to the Ohio Historical Society and then moved to 17^th Avenue.

The exhibits were fascinating of course. Who doesn’t want get out of school and get to see the huge swinging Foucault’s Pendulum at COSI or the grizzly bear diorama and rooms full of artifacts at OHS!? Yet it was the doors from the exhibit halls to the unknown back rooms that fascinated me. What was going on behind those doors?!  What were those people doing who came and went through those “Staff Only” doors? What amazing things were back there that we could not see? I knew there were large rooms that we could not access and that they MUST have held the coolest stuff in the world!  I would stray from my group and sneak a look through the crack between the doors…what would I see? Dinosaur bones? Mummies? All manner of stuffed animals peering back at me?  You guessed it; I saw filing cabinets, cinder block walls, and cement floors!

Fast-forward about a decade. As a junior in high school I had the chance to get a behind-the-scenes tour at one of my favorite museums: the Ohio Historical Society! (I still like that phrase: “behind-the scenes”! Who doesn’t want to get to see behind the scenes of almost anything!? I still enjoy watching the how-it’s-made short videos that come with feature film DVDs, usually more than the actual films themselves!). Finally, I was going to see what went on in those long halls and rooms behind the exhibits. As the door swung open from the exhibit hall it was just a little disappointing at first; indeed it was a typical office environment… filing cabinets and all. However I held out hope for more when I saw the endless rooms that lined the long hallway. Our small group met with Dr. Carl Albrecht, the Curator of Natural History at the time. After a short orientation we started off down the hall (and as it were, toward my future). We approached a set of dark wooden doors with the intriguing room title on the wall “Synoptic Room”*! I had NO idea what that meant, but with a title like that –sounding all scientific yet a bit mysterious – it HAD to be awesome! Sure enough it was a jaw-dropping experience:  row after row of cabinets with signs that hinted at amazing things within:  Minerals, Insects, Birds, Mammals, Skeletons, and Fossils. And on top of the cabinets large, fascinating objects loomed overhead... huge skulls, giant bones, and long tusks that I knew must be from Ice Age mastodons or mammoths.

One glimpse into a museum collection and I knew then and there that this was to be my life’s work. Growing up I had always collected various natural history objects, and my brothers and I even operated a small “museum” in our basement for the neighborhood kids. So on this day, when I realized that working in a museum was an actual career possibility, I knew that I had to do it. I quickly begged to be allowed to work on any task that needed doing, and ended up volunteering in natural history during my senior year of high school. I was then privileged to continue part-time during my college years. 

I am now honored to be given the opportunity to follow the previous natural history curators; Carl Albrecht, William Schultz, and Bob Glotzhober. They had faith in me when I started in museum work, shared their amazing knowledge, and opened those doors for me, both literally and figuratively.  

*Want to know what Synoptic Room means!? Email me!

David Dyer. Ddyer@ohiohistory.org

People of the Forest: the Arc of Appalachia’s 2013 Summer Lecture Series at Serpent Mound

People of the Forest

The Arc of Appalachia’s 2013 Indigenous Legacies Summer Lecture Series

Exploring Eastern America’s Cultural Roots

Three Archaeological Lectures on Ohio Valley’s Mound-builders
Sunday July 14, Saturday August 3, Saturday August 31, 2013;
1:00 pm, at the Serpent Mound shelter house.

Free to the public, no registration required, parking fee $7.00 per car

For no less than 12,000 years preceding European contact, Native Americans were an integral community member of the rich and complex ecology of America’s Eastern Forest. This lecture series will explore three different ancient woodland cultures: the Adena Culture, the Hopewell Culture, and the Fort Ancient Culture. 

In these presentations we will step back in time, and take in a broad sweeping perspective. From this holistic view, within the limitations of the archaeological evidence we have, these lectures will address: Who were these peoples, what distinguished their cultural eras, what was each culture’s geographic reach, who were their contemporaries elsewhere in the continent and the world, and what were each culture’s most distinguishing artistic and cultural contributions?

Program One: People of the Forest – the Adena Culture
Epic Mound Builders: 1000 to 200 CE 
Sunday July 14 at 1:00 pm
Presented by Elliot Abrams, Professor of Anthropology, Ohio University

Program Two: People of the Forest – the Hopewell Culture
Geometry & Astronomy – Written on the Land: 100 BCE to 400 CE
Saturday August 3 at 1:00 pm
Presented by Bradley Lepper, Curator of Archaeology for the Ohio Historical Society

Program Three: People of the Forest – the Fort Ancient Culture
Farmers of the Ohio Valley: 1000-1750 CE 
Saturday August 31 at 1:00 pm
Presented by Robert Allan Cook, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University

More information on each lecture can be found here: http://arcofappalachia.org/events/people-of-the-forest.html.

DID JAPANESE FISHERMEN DISCOVER AMERICA 5,000 YEARS AGO?

The possibility that various European, African, or Asian cultures might have “discovered” the Americas centuries or even millennia before Columbus is a wildly popular idea. Numerous books, magazines, and television programs have been devoted to the topic. Most of these claims are complete nonsense, but at least one has the distinction of having been championed by a respected archaeologist who works for the normally reputable Smithsonian Institution.

In my May column for the Columbus Dispatch, I consider the hypothesis, championed by the late Betty J. Meggers, that fishermen from Japan's Jomon culture, perhaps swept out to sea by a major storm, survived a prolonged sea voyage to end up on the shores of Ecuador where they introduced their ideas about how pottery should be made.

Meggers, writing in the Winter 1980 issue of the unfortunately short-lived magazine Early Man, described how Emilio Estrada, “a young Ecuadorian businessman” and dedicated avocational archaeologist, along with Clifford Evans, a fellow Smithsonian archaeologist, and Meggers came up with the “hypothesis of a pre-columbian introduction of pottery making from Japan to Ecuador.”

Here, in her own words, is a brief summary of how they came up with the idea:

“During late 1960, Estrada undertook a large excavation at Valdivia, which provided a much bigger sample of pottery from the earliest levels. The following spring, he wrote us a letter with a novel suggestion. He had encountered a report on the Jomon pottery of Japan and observed that many of the techniques and motifs of decoration were similar to those of Valdivia.

Having been taught in graduate school that transpacific contacts were irrelevant to explaining the origins of New World traits, we reacted with skepticism. When we examined his sources, however, we found to our surprise that the similarities were closer and more numerous than anything we had been able to find within the Americas. Following the rules traditionally employed by archeologists for establishing affiliations made it necessary to infer that Jomon and Valdivia were related. This implied a transpacific contact about the beginning of the third millennium B.C.”

Among the specific decorative traits and rim treatments shared by Jomon and Valdivia pottery are the following:

 1.  Broad-line incision

 2.  Excision

 3.  Red slip

 4.  Finger grooving

 5.  Shell stamping

 6.  Combing

 7.  Cord impression

 8.  Rocker stamping

 9.  Folded-over rim

10.  Short spout

There are essentially two alternative explanations for the similarities. Either the two traditions developed independently and the similarities are entirely coincidental, or one gave rise to the other through the direct transfer of knowledge via transpacific contact.

For Meggers, the “rules traditionally employed by archaeologists for establishing affiliations” required accepting the transpacific contact hypothesis as the preferred explanation for the facts.

Those “rules,” at the time Meggers and her colleagues were developing their hypothesis, were based on the view that similarities and differences in artifacts were a simple reflection of the social identities of their makers. Therefore, the degree of similarity between artifacts at different sites provided a direct measure of the degree of the social relationships between the people living at those sites. Lewis Binford and others subsequently challenged this “cultural historical” approach to the analysis of artifacts and assemblages, but without going into this debate it seems surprising to me that Meggers could not see the difference between applying this line of reasoning to assemblages of artifacts from neighboring valleys and applying it to assemblages on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in the absence of other convincing evidence of contact between those distant places. Isn’t it obvious that, as a general rule, the plausibility of an argument for a cultural relationship between groups of people making similar looking artifacts would decrease with increasing geographic distance between the groups?

Given the strong arguments against the idea of pre-Columbian contacts between the Americas and the rest of the world and the long history of failure of all such arguments that had been proposed up to that time, it seems to me that Meggers and her colleagues were extraordinarily naive to think their data constituted a strong case for transpacific contact or that their arguments would convince the archaeological community.

The new genetic evidence for a possible connection between Jomon Japan and Valdivian Ecuador, which I discuss in my Dispatch column, provides a measure of vindication for Meggers, but it does not mean that the archaeological community should have accepted the evidence as it was presented in the 1960s.

Robert Pirsig has written that “the real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know.”

Meggers thought she knew something back in 1965. She may, indeed, have been on to something, but she actually didn’t know it. The evidence was not sufficient to support her extraordinary claim.

Oddly enough, another Smithsonian archaeologist, Dennis Stanford is now making the even more extraordinary claim that the Paleolithic European Solutrean culture colonized eastern North American introducing the Clovis point to this hemisphere. The hypothesis is not widely accepted and, unlike the Jomon hypothesis, it is not supported by the genetic record.

Finally, it should go without saying (but won’t) that even if it can be confirmed that the Jomon culture did, indeed, make contact with ancient Ecuadorans, that would in no may make any of the other claims for pre-Columbian contact any more plausible. Each such claim must stand or fall on the merits of the evidence marshaled for that particular claim.

FOR FURTHER READING

Craig, O. E., et al.

2013 Earliest evidence for the use of pottery. Nature, Volume 496, pages 351-354.

Daggett, Richard E.

1978 The life cycle of an idea: transpacific voyages and American archaeology. Journal of the Virgin Islands Archaeological Society No. 6, pp. 13-22.

http://www.stcroixarchaeology.org/files/Transpacific_Voyages_-_Daggett.pdf

Ebbesmeyer, Curtis and Eric Scigliano

2009 Borne on a Black Current. Smithsonian.com

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Borne-on-a-Black-Current.html

Estrada, Emilio and Betty J. Meggers

1962 Possible transpacific contact on the coast of Ecuador. Science, Volume 135, Number 3501, pages 371-372.

McEqan, Gordon F. and D. Bruce Dickson

1978 Valdivia, Jomon fishermen, and the nature of the North Pacific: some nautical problems with Meggers, Evans, and Estrada's (1965) transoceanic contact thesis. American Antiquity Volume 43, Number 3, pages 362-371.

Meggers, Betty J.

1972 Prehistoric America. Aldine, Chicago.

Meggers, Betty J., Clifford Evans and Emilio Estrada

1965 Early Formative Period of Coastal Ecuador: The Valdivia and Machalilla Phases. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, Volume 1: http://www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontributions/Anthropology/sc_RecordSingle.cfm?filename=SCtA-0001&CFID=16241102&CFTOKEN=22089688

Roewer, Lutz, et al.

2013 Continent-wide decoupling of Y-chromosomal genetic variation from language and geography in Native South Americans. PLOS Genetics, Volume 9, Issue 4: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1003460

Brad Lepper

THE ADENA PIPE -- JUST ANOTHER “STATE THING”?

The Adena Pipe is now Ohio’s State Artifact.

So what?

As a friend of mine implied in a comment to my announcement on Facebook, is it just another meaningless exercise in naming “State Things”?

I don’t think so. And I don’t think you would think so either if you had been in the room at the Ohio Statehouse listening to Governor John Kasich talk to the students from the Columbus School for Girls who have been fiercely persistent in their effort to have this unique effigy pipe recognized as the State Artifact.

It certainly isn’t meaningless to those young women and their teachers.

In their joint statement at the ceremony, Charlotte Stiverson and Tracy Kessler told their students the lesson they hoped everyone would remember –

“Your voice can be heard – whether you’re a child or a long, lost prehistoric culture.”

These young women did their best to help give a sort of voice to Ohio’s ancient peoples. One of their most magnificent works of art now represents the State of Ohio.

You might say it’s only a symbol, but symbols can be extraordinarily potent.

Think about it.

Our State Artifact is a small masterpiece carved by a Native American artisan more than 2,000 years ago.

It’s not a rubber tire, a light bulb, or an astronaut’s space helmet. It’s not a soldier’s saber, a judge’s gavel, or a politician’s pen.

Unanimous votes from both the House and Senate declared in one voice that Ohio would pay homage to our Native American heritage with this symbolic honor.

I don’t think that’s meaningless. I think it’s a miracle.

Thank you to Charlotte and Tracy, to the students at the Columbus School for Girls, to the State Representatives and Senators who sponsored the bills and all of them that voted for both versions, and to Governor Kasich for signing the final bill into law!

Brad Lepper