OF CHEESE HEADS AND CLOVIS POINTS: A POSSIBLE OCCURENCE OF HIXTON SILICIFIED SANDSTONE IN THE OHIO VALLEY

Pictured right, OHS archaeological collections item number A1021/1, can be considered an excellent example of a fluted or Clovis type projectile point made in a style often seen in the eastern half of the of the United States. It measures nearly 5” in length by 1½ “ in width and is made from a material not particularly common among flaked stone artifacts in Ohio but more on that below. Fluted points such as these date to the late stages of the Pleistocene or latest Ice Age in North America or to about 11,000 -13,000 years before present. They were used by Paleoindian hunters as the primary weapon form to bring down their hunted quarry that could include mammoths, mastodons and other Ice Age megafauna as well as smaller, more familiar species such as deer, elk and caribou. As a tool or weapon, fluted points can be described as somewhat elongated lanceolate forms with straight to slightly excurvate lateral edges. For about the lower third of its length the edges are often ground or at least smoothed, probably to facilitate hafting. A slight asymmetry of the lateral blade margins above the haft areas may develop over time from damage repair or continued re-sharpening. The finished points are flaked on both faces and are flat to slightly lenticular or lens shaped in cross section and the basal edge is usually indented to a certain extent and thinned on each face by the removal of one or more elongated channel or “fluting” flakes, thus the descriptive name. Even without a temporal placement these points were recognized early on to collectors and antiquarians as a distinctive type, curiously different from the more abundant stemmed or notched forms. Some even thought the smaller specimens especially to be some sort of rare arrow point. Their relative antiquity was recognized in 1929 at a site called Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico where fluted points were found intermixed with the remains of Ice Age megafauna including mammoth, horse, camel, bison, saber tooth cat and dire wolf. Their absolute age of around12, 000 years was later determined in the 1950’s with the advent of radiometric or C-14 dating.
Traditionally, Paleoindians were thought of as free roaming hunters whose subsistence was based on following the seasonal movement of the megafauna, often into totally unexplored regions. This pioneering model has been at least partially supplanted in recent years, especially in the east, by a model that suggests that Paleoindians may have actually operated within semi-familiar, defined territories and while still heavily dependent on hunting they were more generalists in their subsistence patterns than first thought. If a hunting band did take a mastodon or other large animal it may have been culled out of the herd based on age or physical condition or perhaps simply because it was the largest target around and provided the most return for labor invested. More typically their subsistence strategy might focus on deer, elk, caribou, bear and other quarry that could be easily managed by small groups of hunters. Hunting tasks were addressed with a large and varied flaked stone tool kit usually made from high quality tool stone. Paleoindian tool kits would be designed to undertake a variety of large and small tasks and likely include fluted projectile points, fluted and un-fluted knives, prismatic blades from cores, large bifaces that doubled as flake tool cores during the early stages of reduction and a selection of robust scrapers, borers, cutters, burins and other tools made a particular task in mind. Overall the tool kit would be designed with a predictable service life fit for extended periods away from flint sources. By the new model, settlement would be based on a periodic nucleation and dispersal pattern whereby dispersed bands or groups within a region would nucleate or come together on some sort of regular basis, perhaps seasonal, for social maintenance of the entire group that would include trade, the exchange of marriage partners and the renewal of alliances. These activities might be centered on flint quarry areas or based at some other prominent site or easy to find, familiar location on the landscape. As social activities waned the individual groups would then again disperse until the next gathering cycle took place.
Since the Clovis/Blackwater Draw discoveries, fluted point sites have been recognized all over the United States and North America from Maine to Washington to Florida to Arizona and from Canada to Mexico. Like the Blackwater Draw Site some sites, such as Kimmswick in Missouri and the Gault Site in Texas, contain both flaked stone tools and the remains of extinct animals. Other sites, especially in the Great Basin and the high deserts of the Rocky Mountain west, site tool assemblages often consist entirely of large caches of projectile points and associated flaked stone tools made from very attractive forms of flint, chalcedony, agate, quartz crystal and obsidian These would include the Simon Cache in Idaho, the Drake Cache in Colorado and the Fenn Cache, ostensibly from Utah but whose true origins remain somewhat clouded. These and other large caches were discovered without the benefit of any sort of well defined site context so it’s hard to determine the manner or the degree of human activity at these sites although other western sites such as the Anzick Site in Montana and the East Wenatchee Site in Washington that were more thoroughly investigated did in fact produce evidence of complex habitation activities as well as the caching if large numbers of tools.

East of the Rocky Mountains habitation, hunting camp and quarrying sites are more the norm or at least they are more easily recognized. These sites range in size from one or two points and a few flakes to very large sites that likely represent multiple reoccupations. As a pure function of time moderately populated sites like the Vail Site complex in Maine can accumulate a full range of points, preforms, scrapers, borers, other tools as well as large quantities of debitage or waste flakes. Other items in the Paleoindian material culture such as leather work, basketry and carvings in bone wood or ivory were of a perishable nature and no longer exist and almost all of what we know or have surmised about the people of that time comes from the study of flaked stone tools. Nobles Pond (33ST357) near Canton Ohio is one of the most extensively studied large Paleoindian sites in eastern North America. Nobles Pond is actually a 25 acre complex of at least 22 discreet loci located on the edge of a glacial age kettle lake. Although it is not quarry centered it is located within a manageable distance of the flint sources in and around Coshocton County and along Flint Ridge in eastern Licking County and depended heavily on these two primary sources of flint. This is reflected in the fact that these two flint types alone account for a very high percentage of the total flaked stone assemblage. There were undoubtedly other features beyond flint extraction including its location and aquatic resources that made this particular location attractive as a favored spot. Conversely, small fluted point sites with immediately available flint outcrops and reliable riverine and game resources are scattered along the floodplains and throughout the uplands in the Nellie/Warsaw area of the Walhonding Valley of Coshocton County, Ohio. The close proximity to each other of some of these sites, like Welling and Nellie Heights, makes it hard sometimes to tell just where one site stops and the other begins. Perhaps at one time Nellie Heights and Welling were just the opposite ends of the same large site or it may be that they were both components of a larger aggregation of quarry based activity areas.

Throughout the Ohio Valley large fluted point sites are not confined to just one particular region and given the correct circumstances might be located just about anywhere. The Sandy Springs Site in Ohio is located in along the Ohio River in southern Adams County and is notable for its location removed from the lithic rich northeast quarter of Ohio. In its structure it is akin to Nobles Pond as an assemblage of individual camp or habitation sites and their associated midden areas containing points, scrapers and other residue of continued reoccupations rather than a single contiguous site although there are no significant flint sources in the general neighborhood as there were at Nobles Pond. But like Nobles Pond the Sandy Springs area has advantages to offer other than tool stone. These include its location along a major river corridor, its situation on a high sandy terrace above a big bend in the Ohio River providing a panoramic view of the surrounding valley and perhaps most importantly an active salt springs to attract local animal populations. Sandy Springs is presently the center piece of a nationally recognized 175 acre archaeological reserve designated as a National Historic Landmark and referred to as the Adams County Paleoindian District.

The model of Paleoindians arranging themselves on the landscape in terms of a favored location/ quarry centered social structure not withstanding, it appears there was also at the same time a long distance cross country movement of select raw material. This phenomenon is frequently but not always observed in the form of finished projectile points and/or preforms. Whether this represents a direct, long distance quest by one person or a small group of individuals to obtain a particular type of tool stone, an embedded procurement strategy where preferred flint is collected along with other resources during regular journeys within a given territory, down the line trading among groups or even the gifting of prized stone to cement an alliance is not known or well understood but it certainly isn’t out of the question to find Paleoindian artifacts made from a tool stone whose geologic source is sometimes hundreds of miles from where the objects were recovered. At the Lamb Site in Genesee County of western New York State, finished points and preforms made of Ohio Flint Ridge and Upper Mercer Flints and Hornstone from southwestern Indiana/western Kentucky were recovered from what was probably a short term camp or possible burial site situated on a low glacial knoll on otherwise level landscape. It is note worthy in particular that among the recovered flaked stone assemblage was a single point made from Knife River Flint, a type of tool stone only found in North Dakota, over 1500 miles distant from the Lamb Site. All this seemed to be brought into a region where an extensive source of Onondaga Chert was available only a few miles away along the Niagara Escarpment. The fact that they appeared to have sacrificed valuable projectile points to create minor tool forms hints at the group’s incomplete understanding of the local environment. It may also be that it just represents a preference for the higher quality flint imported from Ohio and elsewhere. Onondaga Chert is a grainy, drab material that is not the easiest stone to manipulate and when flaked reeks with the sulpherous odor of petroleum. There is a saying among present day flint knappers that friends don’t let friends knap Onondaga Chert and it certainly isn’t repeated without just cause.
At Duchess Quarry Cave along the Hudson River in New York, points made from Ohio Upper Mercer Flint were recovered among flint artifacts made of Normanskill Chert and other flints of a more local origin. This was also the case at the Gainey Site near Flint, Michigan where Upper Mercer Flint from eastern Ohio and Ten Mile Creek Chert from northwest Ohio made up a majority of the lithic assemblage and was apparently much favored over the more local Bayport Chert from the Saginaw Bay region. This is also true at the Paleo Crossing Site in Medina County southwest of Cleveland where Hornstone/ Harrison County Chert from southern Indiana was the favored lithic material. It’s also an odd statistical fact of archaeology that a significant percentage of all recorded fluted points were simply isolated finds and not associated with other tools, camp sites or habitation locations. It is probable that they were lost, dropped or misplaced and for whatever reason never retrieved. It’s also not unheard of that such points are sometimes a single representative in that region of an exotic raw material for which there is no rhyme or reason for it to be found where it was found. At an artifact identification event a few years back an individual came by with a small fluted point made from rock crystal quartz. It was found by her grandfather on his farm south of Cleveland. There are several places in North America where quartz crystals can be found that are large enough from which to fashion a point but none of them are within 500 miles of Cleveland. Where it came from or how it got there is anyone’s guess. In a similar vein, such is the case for OHS archaeology item A1021/1. Object A1021/1 was donated to the Society in 1929 by a Mr. Guy Wallace. It was part of a small collection of items he collected in Bratton Twp., located in northern Adams County Ohio. As stated earlier, it is classic in form to many other fluted points that have been found throughout the Ohio Valley. What is not typical of Mr. Wallace’s discovery is the material it is made from. The Ohio Valley has several outstanding high quality flint resources. Upper Mercer and Flint Ridge Flints come from easily accessible Pennsylvanian bedrock outcrops in eastern Ohio and there are several varieties of lesser cherts in the Devonian and Silurian bedrock exposures just to the west. There are also the nodular Hornstone sources in Indiana and a well utilized source of Paoli or Carter Cave Flint in northern Kentucky. Object A1021/1 is made from none of these. Rather, it’s made from a semi-translucent, slightly grainy, honey colored material that in fact isn’t a flint at all but a material known as orthoquartzite, sometimes called sugar quartz. Orthoquartzite refers to a type of sandstone whose individual grains have been bonded or cemented together by chalcedony formed through the transportation of silicates in aqueous solution into sandstone bedrock. While there are a few locations where knapable sugar quartz might be obtained in the eastern United States, the grand daddy of them all is the Hixton Silicified Sandstone deposits in Wisconsin, nearly 600 miles to the northwest of where Mr. Wallace made his find. It’s a country now inhabited by a hardy folk who see fit to attend major sporting events adorned with headgear resembling great blocks of cheese and who lightheartedly but proudly refer to themselves as Cheeseheads. Was this the source of Mr. Wallace’s point? Perhaps, but read on.
Hixton Silicified Sandstone outcrops at Silver Mound (47JA21) near the headwaters of the Trempealeau River in Jackson County of west central Wisconsin. Silver Mound is neither a mound in the sense of a prehistoric earthwork nor is there any silver involved. Early settlers to the region who saw the profusion of quarry pits about the Mound mistakenly came to believe in the legend of a lost silver mine within the Mound, although no silver had ever been recovered there. Even though ample geologic evidence had been produced by the 1860’s to prove otherwise, silver prospecting continued there without results into the 1890’s and for whatever reason the name stuck. Silver Mound is actually a half-mile long, L-shaped hill capped by resistant strata of Cambrian Sandstone that stands about 65 meters above the surrounding rolling terrain. At about 30 meters below the crest is a core stratum of very resilient orthoquartzite referred to geologically as Hixton Silicified Sandstone (HSS). The result is that the combined strata of Cambrian Sandstone and orthoquartzite of Silver Mound has continued to resist weathering while the surrounding areas of un-silicified sandstone have eroded away into a rolling, sand hill landscape. There are other sources of orthoquartzite in the region but none match the quality of HSS for flaked stone tool making. James Porter of the Wisconsin Historical Society argued as early as 1961 that since HSS is such a unique, high quality material Silver Mound is likely the ultimate source for nearly all silicified sandstone artifacts recovered from archaeological contexts. He didn’t say how far afield this might extend but it’s an argument that even today might retain a certain amount of validity.
HSS is composed of well sorted (uniform sized) round to sub-round sand grains cemented together by an opal-chalcedony matrix of silicates likely introduced into the formation by the actions of ground water. HSS is typically white to honey colored with variants ranging from yellow to orange to red due to microscopic inclusions tourmaline, rutile, hematite, apatite and other minerals. A deep red coloration of finished artifacts can also result from the absorption of water born minerals such as hematite and other oxides of iron in the depositional environment and continued exposure to sunlight may produce a white patina indicating a susceptibility to ultraviolet light. For making flaked stone tools HSS is said to be harder than flint. When struck it breaks with a well defined conchoidal fracture that produces a sharp, durable edge. In the tool making process the fracture plain actually travels through both the matrix and the granular structure and not around the individual grains. This imparts a somewhat lustrous sheen to the object and a smoother than expected texture. Light refracting from the faces of the individual grains gives the finished object a subdued sparkling or satin-like appearance.
It is thought that the quarries at Silver Mound were used for at least 12,000 years, from the Paleoindian through Late Prehistoric/Early Historic periods. Studies of the distribution of objects produced in prehistoric quarry areas in general can often offer insights on precisely how the HSS quarry areas themselves may have functioned over time. According to such a study, artifacts made of orthoquartzite from the HSS quarries and representing all time periods would be relatively common at sites located within a certain radius of this lithic source, but less common at more distant sites. The fact that this distribution pattern would tend to change dramatically over space relative to time is due to a mechanism referred to as distance decay. That is, the further afield a commodity like flint (or even an idea) is from its source, the rarer it becomes and the less its influence tends to be in the larger scheme of things. Therefore as distance from the Silver Mound lithic source increases, the artifacts made of HSS would become rarer and rarer. It is also the case concerning Silver Mound and HSS that distance decay could also seem to apply to the estimated age of the artifacts made of this raw material. In other words the closer to the present an artifact is temporally, the smaller the geographic range covered by its maker would be in the overall sphere of HSS distribution. People who utilized HSS for making arrow points a few hundred years ago likely viewed it as a local resource and probably didn't travel that far to get to the Silver Mound quarries. Additionally, all the arrow points produced were likely used within that specific region or catchment area and not traded out. A catchment can be described as that geographic “comfort zone” of sorts – a river valley or region of small lakes - containing those resources most necessary for the group to successfully function. There were probably other lithic sources near the periphery of the Silver Mound catchment considered as good as HSS for arrow points and in a quantity possibly sufficient to satisfy the needs of most of those peripheral groups. This would make these alternate sources even more attractive to outlying groups in a cost-benefit relationship, lessening the importance of HSS and limiting even further the HSS distribution within the catchment. Going back to the Archaic period (about 3,000 to 10,000 years ago) the distribution range of a relatively smaller number of lithic artifacts would be significantly larger as would be the catchment area of the people who used them. What might have been a hunting group’s catchment of perhaps a few dozen to a few hundred square miles in the late Prehistoric/ Early Historic Period could have been as large as several hundred to a few thousand square miles in the Archaic Period. In Paleoindian times(12,000 years ago) a catchment area might have included an entire geographic region covering tens of thousands of square miles and through distribution mechanisms described above it would be expected that a very limited number of objects might be found as much as several hundreds of miles distant from its source. If in fact OHS archaeology object A1021 /1 is made from HSS this concept might hint at, but certainly not fully explain how it got to be where Guy Wallace eventually found it and picked it up. Other factors involved may never be known, recognized or explained.
Silver Mound is now included in the Silver Mound Archaeological District, a 20 square kilometer area surrounding the HSS source itself. Archaeological resources within the district are organized around the extraction of HSS from Silver Mound and reflect a wide range of human activity including quarry sites, lithic workshops and habitiation sites. There are also at least two rock shelters that contain some form of rock art. In 2006 Silver Mound was declared a National Historic Landmark as an important source of high quality lithic material critical to the peopling of eastern North America.
Is A1021/1 made from HSS? It certainly has the correct qualities of color and texture. There are sophisticated tests that can determine if it actually is HSS as there are minor sources of look-alike material. But given it’s find location in the same county as the Sandy Springs Site and considering all the traffic in and out of there in Paleoindian times, it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to see such a point making it’s way through the upper Mississippi region and into the Ohio Valley to Sandy Springs and from there a relatively short jaunt up country to present day Bratton Twp., laying dormant for perhaps a dozen millennia until Mr. Wallace came along. Take a moment to consider all that has happened in the world in the time in between.
A1021/1 is on display in the Windows to Our Collections exhibit at the Ohio Historical Center. Drop by and take a look.

Bill Pickard

For further reading see:
Dillon H. Carr and Robert F. Boszhardt:

Silver Mound, Wisconsin: Source of Hixton Silicified Sandstone Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Spring 2010

Check out Dr. R.M. Gramly’s recent article on the Vail Site complex in Maine on the American Society for Amateur Archaeology web site:
http://asaa-persimmonpress.com/

Also see The Lithic Casting Lab web site:
http://www.lithiccastinglab.com/

For cutting edge research on Paleoindian sites in the Southwest especially at the Blackwater Draw site see:
http://theclovissite.wordpress.com/

A HOPEWELL - MEXICAN CONNECTION?

The question of the extent to which cultural developments in ancient Ohio were influenced by the more extravagant and certainly more widely known civilizations of Mesoamerica frequently comes up in popular and, though less commonly, scholarly discussions.

I addressed this perennially fascinating and contentious question in my regular Archaeology column for the Columbus Dispatch [http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/science/stories/2011/02/20/did-cultures-mingle-or-develop-on-their-own.html?sid=101], but it's such a huge and consequential topic that I wasn't able to do it justice in the space I'm generally allowed. This blog, therefore, is a sort of continuation of the column.

The usual reasons people assume there was a connection relate to perceived similarities in architecture, ornamentation and artistic representations between the Hopewell and various more or less contemporary Mesoamerican cultures. I address some of these arguments in my column, but had to leave out a compelling reason for thinking there was no important Hopewell-Mesoamerican connection. Although there are no insurmountable, or even terribly daunting, geographic barriers separating the regions and people could have gone back and forth between these regions by boat or on foot engaging in trade or cultural exchanges of one sort or another, there is, so far, a nearly complete absence of compelling evidence for such connections.

Ohio's Hopewell culture invested enormous energy in obtaining exotic raw materials from which to craft their evocative ritual paraphernalia (see illustrations for examples). These materials were brought to Ohio from as far east as the Atlantic coast and from as far west as the Rocky Mountains, but no demonstrably Mexican stuff has ever been documented at even a single Hopewell site in Ohio.

The Hopewell obtained obsidian, a black volcanic glass, but none of it has been identified as Mexican obsidian. It all came from either Wyoming or Idaho. Turquoise and jade were important materials in Mesoamerica, but not so much as a bead of either material has ever been found at an Ohio site. If the Hopewell artisans could have gotten their hands on these materials, it's hard to imagine a reason why they would not have put them to use in their magnificent and iconic jewelry and sculpture.

It's a frequently cited maxim that the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but the lack of any definitively Mesoamerican materials in the small mountains of exotic material acquired by the Hopewell is, in my view, at least strongly suggestive that no important interaction occurred between these distant regions. It could have, but so far there is no convincing evidence that it did in fact happen.

Nevertheless, it remains an open question and an important one that has been avoided by serious scholars in recent decades. The recent book Gulf Coast Archaeology: the southeastern United States and Mexico, edited by Nancy Marie White, brings together a diverse group of scholars from north and south of the Rio Grande to explore the question from a variety of perspectives. I highly recommend this book to your attention if you find the subject of enough interest to have read this far into a long blog posting.

Finally, it's worth noting that modern scholars largely have tended to avoid this question because of the subtle and sometimes baldly explicit ethnocentrism (or even racism) inherent in the claim that many of the achievements of the Hopewell were borrowed from their more "civilized" neighbors. The underlying message being that the eastern Woodland Indians could not, on their own, do what they did. This is only one step away from the more outrageously stupid claims that all of America's civilizations ultimately owe their glories to contact with ancient Egypt, Israel or the supposedly lost Atlantis.

The Hopewell people developed a unique and rich culture in southern Ohio. The cosmopolitan reach of the Hopewell "interaction sphere" continues to surprise us and their knowledge of their neighbors' affairs was almost certainly greater than we suspect. Yet their achievements are their own and we have no reason to look beyond the Ohio Valley (and maybe Illinois) for the genesis of this remarkable cultural florescence.

Brad Lepper

HEARTLAND EARTHWORKS CONSERVANCY

The Heartlands Earthworks Conservancy is a new organization deserving of your attention.

Its' mission is to preserve and protect ancient Native American earthworks in southern Ohio by purchasing endangered sites as well as by promoting education and research to increase the public's appreciation of this remarkable legacy.

I'm proud to be an advisor to the HEC's Board of Trustees, which is made up of some of the leading archaeologists and scholars studying Ohio's mound-building cultures, including William Dancey, Emeritus Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Ohio State University, Jarrod Burks, Director of Archaeological Geophysics of Ohio Valley Archaeology, Inc., Robert Genheimer, George Rieveschl Curator of Archaeology at the Cincinnati Museum Center, and Johh Hancock, Professor of Architecture at the University of Cincinnati. The founder of HEC is Bruce Lombardo, a former site manager at Serpent Mound State Memorial.

If this is a cause you care about, check out the HEC's website for news and events as well as ways you can be a part of helping fulfill this important mission.

http://www.earthworksconservancy.org/

Brad

Image of the Hopewell Earthworks courtesy of CERHAS, University of Cincinnati.

Soooo....... ya wanna be an archaeologist?

During the course of our work at the Ohio Historical Society we often have the opportunity to talk to kids about archaeology as a career choice and there are several questions that we get on a regular basis. I never really thought about writing down the questions and answers for future reference and now it seems I don't need to since this article by K. Kris Hirst nicely and concisely addresses the most popular questions.

http://archaeology.about.com/od/questionoftheweek/qt/faq13.htm

Enjoy!

Linda

TOP TEN MOST HISTORICALLY INACCURATE MOVIES

What are the ten most historically inaccurate movies? We probably all have our own favorites and many of mine are on this list.

10 Most Historically Inaccurate Movies
http://www.screenjunkies.com/movies/genres-movies/drama/10-most-historically-inaccurate-movies /

Do you have any others that should have made the cut? Post them as a comment.

DID A COSMIC IMPACT KILL THE MAMMOTHS -- AND MASTODONS AND LOTS OF PALEOINDIANS?

If you're interested in the discussion over whether an extraterrestrial impact wiped out the Pleistocene megafauna, check out this balanced review of the debate by David Morrison, senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute! It's one of the best and least technical overviews of the "rise and fall" of the hypothesis that a cosmic catastophe changed the course of North American prehistory that I have ever had the pleasure to read.

Did a Cosmic Impact Kill the Mammoths?

Excerpt: "Even without considering the technical issues at stake, there are two clues that something is amiss with the YD [Younger Dryas] impact hypothesis. First is the 2006 book The Cosmic Catastrophes, which formulates the YD hypothesis within the context of castrophist pseudoscience. ... Second is the absence of confirming or supporting papers by scientists who were not members of the original team."

For the rest of the story, go to the Skeptical Inquirer's webpage:
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/did_a_cosmic_impact_kill_the_mammoths/


Brad Lepper

Contemporary Gunmakers and Allied Artisans Show

This Saturday, February 12, 2011 at the Campus Martius Museum in Marietta

Have you ever wondered about the Kentucky Flintlock Long rifles used by Daniel Boone or Simon Kenton in the late 1700’s? What can be learned about the people who used huge flint muskets in the Ohio wilderness at places like Pickawillany, Fort Laurens, Fort Meigs and Fallen Timbers by studying the wonderful set of parts we have recovered during archaeology projects at those places? How were they made and how were they used? Do you know that the muskets of the Revolutionary War were often nearly as long as the fellow using it was tall? Why was that? You might be surprised to learn that the phrase Kentucky Long Rifle is actually a misnomer. The rifles of Boone, Kenton and thousands of other frontier folk really had very little to do with Kentucky and actually came from a Pennsylvania German tradition or school of gun building that had it’s beginnings about 1750 in the townships of Lancaster and Lebanon Counties in Pennsylvania. It spread from there and moved west with the frontier. Gun building and its allied trades reached Ohio by the early 1800’s and developed into a school of gun making that produced handsome, hand made rifles that were well designed and aesthetically pleasing in their own right You might also be surprised to know that there are artisans still today that produce these functional works of art the same way their forefathers did two or more centuries ago. This is an official invitation to attend the Contemporary Gunmakers and Allied Artisans Show this Saturday, February 12, 2011 at the Campus Martius Museum in downtown Marietta Ohio. The show will be from 9:30am to 4:00pm. Museum admission is $7 for adults and $4 for students. Free for OHS members and children under 5. Here is an excellent opportunity to see the rifles, powder horns and hunting pouches as re-created by modern masters in that still time honored tradition. Contact Bill Reynolds at 800-860-0145 for further information.

Thanks to the NMLRA for the use of their calendar picture

Bill Pickard

THE TOP TEN THINGS WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT OHIO ARCHAEOLOGY

I've wanted to be an archaeologist ever since I was a kid and I vividly remember the fear and frustration I felt that all the important archaeological sites would be discovered before I ever got the chance to be an archaeologist and get in on the fun. It's easy to look back on that now and laugh, but people that should know better still occasionally claim that eventually science is going to discover everything and put scientists out of work. Actually, it's been my experience that every new discovery brings with it many new questions that we wouldn't even have been able to ask before we gained the new insights revealed by the new discovery.

As a way of answering the absurd idea that archaeology is an endangered science, I thought I'd present my list of the top ten things we don't know about Ohio's ancient past. Such a list inevitably is idiosyncratic and biased. Other archaeologists might come up with very different lists (and I would love to have y'all post your own alternative ideas as comments to this post), but that just goes to prove my point that the questions we can ask of the past are virtually endless. Some of the questions on my list relate to the BIG questions of Archaeology, such as the origins of agriculture and social inequality, and Ohio's archaeological record can contribute to answering these big questions. Others are more focused on Ohio specifically as you'll see.

1. When did people first enter Ohio? This question may be impossible to answer, because how would you ever know you had found the absolutely earliest footprint made by a human in Ohio, or on this continent? It is, nevertheless, one of the most important questions in American archaeology, because, if you're committed to the idea that you have to understand the past in order to understand the present, then the first link of that chain is of fundamental importance for understanding everything that comes after it.

2. What role did humans play in the extinction of the giant mammals of the Pleistocene epoch? We know humans occasionally hunted mammoths and mastodons, but did they kill enough of them in a short enough amount of time to actually drive these species to extinction?

3. What is going on during the Late Paleoindian period? On the Plains, this is a period during which there is a dramatic shift from hunters going after mammoths to hunters chasing herds of bison off of cliffs. Bison were not all that abundant in Ohio at this time, so the Late Paleoindian spear points made and used in Ohio likely were used to hunt deer or elk, but I can't think of a single well-dated Late Paleoindian site in Ohio to help us understand what was happening during the important transition from Paleoindian to Archaic ways of life.

4. Why did the Late Archaic hunting and gathering societies eventually turn their hand to a farming way of life? The answer most definitely is NOT because farming provided an obviously higher quality of life. Hunting and gathering in general provides a healthier diet and the early farmers mostly had to work harder for the same number of calories. Moreover, there tends to be much less social inequality among hunters and gatherers than among early farmers, so it doesn't look like an obvious choice for Late Archaic folks to be making

5. Why did the Hopewell culture build their enormous earthworks, such as Fort Ancient and the Newark Earthworks? We have a sort of answer in that these wonders of the world clearly served as places of ceremony, including the burial of important people, but why did they need monumental architecture on this amazing scale to conduct these ceremonies?

6. What was the purpose of the Hopewell "Interaction Sphere"? It's not just trade, because it has long been recognized that for all the prodigious quantities of exotic material coming into Ohio during this period, there is precious little evidence for anything going in the other direction.

7. Why did the Hopewell stop building monumental earthworks and drastically curtail the extent of their "Interaction Sphere"? To some extent, when we know why they built the earthworks in the first place, we will have a better idea for why they may have stopped building them, but maybe it's more complicated than that.

8. What is the meaning of Ohio's effigy mounds? Is there any relationship between Ohio's effigy mounds and the effigy mounds of the Upper Midwest? There are hundreds of effigy mounds in Wisconsin, but only two in Ohio – and very few between there and here. Clearly, there is something different going on here.

9. What was the role of warfare in Late Prehistoric societies? Late Prehistoric villages often have walls around them and there are many examples of people buried with arrowheads stuck between their ribs. What was the cause of this conflict and how common was it across Ohio during this period? What role (if any) did warfare play in the rise of socio-cultural complexity?

10. What happened in Ohio between the end of the Late Prehistoric period and the beginning of the historic period? Currently, this is a sort of Black Hole between the archaeological record of Late Prehistoric societies and the historic record of the American Indian tribes living here when Europeans first arrived.

I could list lots more, but by convention I'll stick with my top ten. Let me know if you take the time and effort to come up with your own "top ten" list. I'd love to see how they compare.