SpringfieldNewsSun.com
SPRINGFIELD — In the 20 years since the Clark County Historical Society closed its exhibits at Memorial Hall, visitors have been asking the same pointed question: Where are all the arrowheads?
The Clark County Heritage Center now has an answer: on the museum’s second floor.
The center’s recently opened permanent archaeology exhibit features glassed in displays of artifacts collected early in the 20th century at sites all over Clark County, supplemented with drawers of stone artifacts from the museum’s general collection.
Together they cover the essential story of archaeology — a story of tools, technology and time.
Mounds of evidence
The museum’s rich collection of local artifacts is thanks largely to Arthur Altick, the longtime secretary and curator of the historical society, who investigated 44 archaeological digs, most of them in Clark County.
These include the Boblett and Campbell mounds on either side of Donnels Creek in Bethel Twp. to the west and the Shuey Mound in Moorefield Twp. to the northeast. (The exhibit includes a locator map of the local sites.)
“Ninety percent of what’s in the cabinets is what he did in the 1930s, ’40s and earlier,” said Virginia Weygandt, the museum’s director of collections.
The digs typically are named for the farmers who owned the land when Altick investigated them, including the Manring Mound, also known as the National Road Mound, east of Springfield in Harmony Twp.
Discovered in the 1830s by crews bringing the National Road to Springfield, Altick worked it a century and a decade later when workers were making improvements to what had become U.S. 40.
Copper and obsidian tools found there marked it as a Hopewell site, perhaps one of the most significant in Ohio.
As the exhibit points out, neither copper nor obsidian is found here. Their presence at the Manring site and others is seen as evidence that from about 100 B.C. until 500 A.D., the Hopewells had a trading network that stretched from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the likely source of the copper, to the area of present-day Yellowstone National Park, the nearest natural cache of obsidian.
Along with the Adena, the Hopewells were part of the Woodland Period of prehistory. (See story at right.)
The exhibit says archaeologists have identified people back to the Paleoindian Period of 14,000 years ago.
The story of people in this area since has been a gradual, if not unbroken change from nomadic to increasingly settled lives, as hunting and gathering has increasingly given ground to farming, gardening and crops.
Red skeleton
Altick found evidence of pre-archaic peoples (from before the Adena and Hopewell) at a dig in a glacial kame or hill near Tremont City.
The Columbia Snyder farm near Lawrenceville yielded tools from the archaic and early Woodland periods, as did the so-called red ochre burial site discovered in 1934 by a crew grading a gravel hill in George Rogers Clark Park.
The exhibit tells us Altick was called to look at a skeleton that looked “like it had been ... dipped in red paint.”
The kinds of projectile points (often called arrowheads) found on Edwin Shuey’s property seemed to mark that as an Adena site. In contrast, the 32 bear tooth ornaments found on the Bobblett farm in Bethel Twp. seemed to mark it and the nearby Campbell Mound as Hopewell sites.
Trash talk
In addition to burial and ceremonial sites, archaeologists found habitation sites and nearby trash “middens,” the latter of which Ardath Dellapina, the museum’s education program director, discusses with students.
The trash middens or caches get students to consider “how much we leave behind us” and what it might tell about a society, Dellapina said.
“You get really interesting answers” on that question from fourth- through sixth-graders who take part in the unit, she said.
That unit has them digging with spoons in the sand for archaeological finds, also providing a hands-on idea of what archaeologists do.
An early maul?
Below the exhibit’s display cases — for “anybody who wants to do a little more in-depth study,” said Mel Glover of the historical society staff — are drawers of artifacts Glover and co-worker Natalie Fritz anchored in place.
The drawers include decorative gorgets. But most of the artifacts make the drawers a kind of toolbox of prehistoric peoples. There are pestles, cupstones and stone equivalents of rolling pins used to grind grain.
The exhibit tells us that grit from the grinding mixed in with the grain to wear down ancient people’s teeth.
The drawers also hold heavier tools: hammerstones, stone adzes, axes and mauls, raising the possibility that sometime someone might discover an ancient Upper Valley maul.
The exhibit text tells us these tools — and the napped flint knives and points made at Flint Ridge near Newark, Ohio — were part of the cutting-edge technology of the time.
“Technology means not only all the things we use every day — all our tools, our toys, our machines, our clothes, our houses,” the text informs us, “but also the skills we use to make those things.”
Group effort
Weygandt called the exhibit “a very good cooperative effort.”
Before she, curator Kasey Eichensehr and Glover and Fritz even got to work, Robert Morris, retired professor of geology at Wittenberg University, had sorted through the museum’s archaeological collection.
With Eichensehr busy on the script, Glover and Fritz consulted with curators from the National Museum of the United States Air Force about how to display artifacts without damaging them, then figured out how to fasten the stone objects in place using fishline and an 8-inch needle that penetrated the special foam in which they’re anchored without penetrating human skin and sinew.
Funding help came from the Ohio Humanities Council, the Springfield Foundation and the Historical Society.
The exhibit is the first of many the museum will be creating this year as it celebrates its 10th anniversary by reworking its displays so that people will have reason to visit again.
To celebrate the archaeology exhibit, the museum will host Brad Lepper, Ph.D., curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society.
Lepper is the author of “Ohio Archaeology: An illustrated chronicle of Ohio’s ancient American Indian cultures.”
A date for Lepper’s appearance has not been finalized.
Timeline of Archaeological Periods and Native American Cultures
Paleoindian Period: 14,000 to 9,500 B.C.
Paleoindians lived in small groups that could pack up and move quickly. The animals they hunted for food migrated to warmer climates seasonally.
Archaic Period: 9,500 to 1,000 B.C.
Archaic Indians still hunted animals, but fishing and gathering plant foods was more important. They used flint knives and spears for hunting, but made other tools out of much harder kinds of rock, like granite and slate.
Woodland Period: 1,000 B.C. to 1650 A.D.
An Early Woodland Ohio culture, the Adena depended on hunting, fishing and gathering plants for food, but grew more crops. They were the first Ohio culture to make pottery.
The Hopewell Culture, of Middle Woodland period, gardened more and planted an early variety of corn called maize. Their “trade network” acquired materials from as far as 800 miles away, and they built mounds and earthworks shaped like animals or geometric figures.
Late Woodland cultures no longer traded over long distances or built as many mounds and earthworks. But the population continued to grow, and people relied more and more on farming. Villages were often surrounded by a wooden stockade, or wall, indicators that armed conflicts were more common. These cultures were the first Ohioans to use bows and arrows to hunt.
Late Prehistoric Period: 950 A.D. to 1650 A.D.
Indian villages continued to grow larger and more permanent, and farming became the main source of food. In some cases, people built large mounds and earthworks, including effigy mounds. The Fort Ancient culture was a late prehistoric group.
Source: Exhibit at Heritage Center of Clark County
About the Author