Results by title

Although founders of the state like Rufus Putnam pointed to the remaining prehistoric earthworks at Marietta as evidence that the architects were a people of “ingenuity, industry, and elegance,” their words did not prevent a rivalry with the area’s Indian inhabitants that was settled only through decades of warfare and treaty-making.

Native American armies managed to win battles with Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair, but not the war with Anthony Wayne. By the early nineteenth century only a few native peoples remained, still hoping to retain their homes. Pressures from federal and state governments as well as the settlers‘ desire for land, however, left the earlier inhabitants no refuge. By the mid-1840s they were gone, leaving behind relatively few markers on the land.

Ohio’s First Peoples depicts the Native Americans of the Buckeye State from the time of the well-known Hopewell peoples to the forced removal of the Wyandots in the 1840s.

Professor James O’Donnell presents the stories of the early Ohioans based on the archaeological record. In an accessible narrative style, he provides a detailed overview of the movements of Fort Ancient peoples driven out by economic and political forces in the seventeenth century. Ohio’s plentiful game and fertile farmlands soon lured tribes such as the Wyandots, Shawnees, and Delawares, which are familiar to observers of the historic period.

In celebrating the bicentennial of Ohio, we need to remember its earliest residents. Ohio’s First Peoples recounts their story and documents their contribution to Ohio’s full heritage.

Focuses on the development of village social structure within a broad geographic and temporal framework, recognizing border areas as particularly dynamic contexts of social change

The last prehistoric cultures to inhabit the Middle Ohio Valley  (ca. A.D. 1000–1650) are referred to as Fort Ancient societies, which exhibited a wide variety of Mississippian period characteristics. What is less well-known and little understood are the social processes by which Mississippian characteristics spread to Fort Ancient communities. Through a comprehensive study of SunWatch, one of the few thoroughly excavated Fort Ancient settlements, the author focuses on the development of village social structure within a broad geographic and temporal framework, recognizing border areas as particularly dynamic contexts of social change. As a fundamental study of social patterning of Fort Ancient villages, this work reveals the interrelationships of small social units in culture change and social structure development and provides a full reconsideration of the Mississippian dimensions of Fort Ancient societies and a model for future investigations of larger patterning in the lateprehistory of the region.

The inspiring story of how two intrepid college professors revealed the lunar alignments and ancient engineering genius behind the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.

How did people two millennia ago achieve the stunning architectural and scientific accomplishment that in 2023 became Ohio’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site? In Where the Moon Stands Still, James W. Graham recounts the inspiring true story of two small-town college professors who, without funds or training in archaeology, helped unlock secrets behind an ancient monumental work of land art—the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks—all but hidden in plain sight on a local golf course. Ever since the arrival of Europeans, thousands of Native earthworks east of the Mississippi were neglected, vandalized, bulldozed, and plundered. Their origins and purposes baffled scholars. How did ancient people build monuments of such grand scale and geometric sophistication? Why? Crucial answers emerged in the 1980s when philosopher Bob Horn and astronomer Ray Hively, driven by curiosity and a tireless devotion to truth-seeking, made a decades-long effort to conquer the skepticism of experts and unmask the ??astronomical genius behind the Indigenous earthworks. As he recounts Hively and Horn’s investigation, Graham refutes exploitative mythical interpretations and explains the history around these earthworks and of US treatment of its Indigenous people, including the long quest for tribes to regain authority over stories, ancestors, and places. Where the Moon Stands Still signals a global reawakening to the greatness of Indigenous achievement in America’s heartland.