Prehistoric American Indian settlement in Huron County

[WorkJay]

Huron County- The first clue that something unusual lay hidden beneath the old bean field didn't come from digging in the hard-packed dirt. Archaeology is still fundamentally about digging, but that would come later.

No, the earliest suggestion of something worth uncovering on this plateau above the Huron River was some dark electronic smudges on a piece of graph paper. To an untrained eye, they looked like random squiggles - a few dots, two stripes running roughly parallel to each other, and an oval outline shaped like a chicken egg.

The smudges piqued Brian Redmond's professional curiosity, though.
They were a kind of map of the bean field's subsurface, traced by an instrument called a fluxgate gradiometer.

American archaeologists have only recently begun to rely on the devices. Sweeping one a few inches above the ground produces a sort of magnetic fingerprint of subsurface soil that has been disturbed in some way, whether by digging or burning.

The patterns that the Cleveland Museum of Natural History's archaeology curator saw on the graph paper looked like the signatures of a large-scale ancient dwelling. The dots could be cooking or trash pits, the parallel lines a couple of filled-in ditches, and the oval possibly the remnants of a stockade.

Five weeks of digging this summer by professional and amateur archaeologists from the Cleveland museum and the Firelands Archaeological Research Center, guided by the magnetic readings, have confirmed the presence of a major occupation, and have begun to reveal some tantalizing details about the encampment and its inhabitants.

It's one of the earliest, largest and most sophisticated American Indian settlements in northern Ohio, Redmond said.

Artifacts such as sherds of pottery and razor-sharp flint tools called bladelets indicate that three distinct prehistoric groups occupied the settlement off and on, beginning as early as 2,500 years ago, at the same time the Roman Republic was rising. They remained until shortly before European explorers arrived in the area in the 1600s.

Evidence suggests the site may have, over time, served multiple purposes: a ceremonial spot, a wintering shelter, a defensible village and a trading hub. Its plentiful artifacts are in the same style as those made by the mound-building Hopewell people in southern and central Ohio, but it's not clear whether those items were imported, or crafted by locals imitating the Hopewell traditions.

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