The Ohio Historical Society's new archaeology exhibit "Following in Ancient Footsteps" is located in a special gallery at the Ohio History Center. Large windows provide an abundance of natural light and allow views of a garden area containing native plants and bird feeders. Many of the birds you can see flitting about the feeders are the same species of birds the Hopewell artisans rendered so faithfully in the amazing effigy pipes they ultimately shattered and buried in Tremper Mound. Excavated in 1915 by OHS archaeologists, many of the pipes were restored and are on display in this gallery. A birdsong interactive exhibit allows you to hear echoes of the same songs heard by the shamans in the forests of ancient Ohio.If you haven't visited the Ohio History Center lately, I urge you to come soon and enjoy this unique museum experience!
For more information about Tremper Mound and the cache of effigy pipes discovered there, see the Ohio Historical Society's online First Ohioans exhibit:
http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=622
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4 comments:
I got a chance to visit the exhibit today. Very nice. All of the extra signboards really added to the artifacts, and it was nice to see some new artifacts there too (or at least I'd never noticed them before). That pile of flints from Indiana was rather amazing.
I have a question on the Earthworks computer presentation. It showed a secondary earthwork surrounding the observatory mound and octagon. Is there really archeological evidence for that? Even if not, it does seem like a reasonable extension of the walls that are marked on Squier and Davis, and we do know that a lot of these works were missing by the time they did their thing.
ahcuah,
Yep! Evidence for that outer wall is found in David Wyrick's 1860 map as well as the 1864 Salisbury map.
Here is a link to an image of Wyrick's map:
http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/p267401coll32&CISOPTR=12900&CISOBOX=1&REC=10
and here's a link to the Salisbury map:
http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/places/c08/pdf/Fig2_SalisburyMap1862.pdf
Thanks, Brad. Very interesting, and I love the links to the other maps. Of course, it does raise further questions (and these are questions I doubt anybody know the answer to): So why isn't it on the 1847 Squier and Davis map? If it appears on an 1860 map it must have been there back in 1847. And another question, what happened to it? How did it get destroyed while the main earthworks was preserved? I realize a lot of it is currently paved over, but you'd think the parts near Raccoon Creek might have been preserved.
Barefoot Bob
Hi Bob,
Great questions!
Actually, Squier & Davis got a number of things wrong -- on several of their maps. They were from Chillicothe and visited sites like Newark probably for relatively short periods of time. David Wyrick, surveyor of the 1866 map of Newark, lived in Newark. Since he lived there he likely spent a lot more time on his survey and was more familiar with the site to begin with.
The outer system of walls was not as substantial as the main walls and so were more easily erased by plowing. Excavations I co-directed in 1992 showed that the outer wall around the Great Circle (not shown in Wyrick's map, but mapped by James and Charles Salisbury in 1862) did, in fact, exist. The remnants of the wall's foundations still were visible beneath a shallow plow zone.
I have no idea why Wyrick missed the outer wall around the Great Circle, although the Salisburys note it already was mostly plowed down in 1862 and they mapped it largely by the different colored soils of its foundation.
Brad
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