As we as a country begin to address and deconstruct history as we knew it, Columbus Day is dying under the new wave of Indigenous Peoples Day. That’s poetic for so many reasons, but it’s also a great opportunity to discuss they very relevant history of Indigenous Americans right here in the Appalachian foothills! Sure, OU was founded in 1803, but that’s about 10-20000 years into it, give or take a few millennia.
There is so much here, truly, and many, many theses and dissertations have begun to explore the ancient history of our area over the last few decades. In fact, OU’s own Elliot Abrams and Ann Freter-Abrams quite literally wrote the book on Ohio’s Mound Builders.
Have we scratched the surface? Probably. Are we ever going to be close to fully understanding the complexity and development of the people who lived here before they were driven out by European invaders? Probably not. But we can put a basic timeline together to get introduced to the real Athens, Ohio – what’s lost and what’s buried.
A Timeline of Indigenous Americans in the Ohio Valley
You’ve likely heard of the Mound Builders, the Hopewell and the Adena, but these are actually the last cultural groups we see before contact. Their ancestors were here tens of thousands of years before that:
19000+ Years Before Present (YBP)
Just a couple hours away at a rock shelter in southwest PA, C14 dates confirm human use going back at least 19000 years. These would likely have been related groups to those in our area, as bands of people moved seasonally for hunting/gathering purposes. But it’s important to note that there are actually C14 dates associated with artifacts that date back 32000 years. That, however, is a long and heated academic discussion not made for this article.
12000 YBP: The Paleo Period
A style of fluted points attributed to the Clovis culture has been found in temporary, permanent, workshop, and rock shelter sites in the area. These tools are both made from local stone and stone that was traded or brought in. During this period, settlements were small and largely temporary, and the main mode of living was hunting and gathering.
10000-3000 YBP: The Archaic Period
During this time, people lived in small groups and relied on hunting and gathering. They used the ridges, valleys and rock shelters to manage forests, literally affecting how the forests worked in a strategy to make food more available without interrupting natural processes.
Over time, the climate changed and so did technology. Around 5000 years ago, we start seeing pottery in the archaeological record. This likely coincides with the emergence of local agriculture. Indigenous Americans in Ohio had a specific set of domesticates that would eventually be known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex, which included things like chenopodium and sunflower. Wild chenopodium is still growing pretty much everywhere you go hiking around here.
3000-1000 YBP: The Woodland Period
This is where we see the emergence of the Mound Builders. Ever been to The Plains? The entire town sits on a complex of hundreds of mounds that was likely an area for migration-level gatherings. Or what about Ash Cave in Hocking Hills? Those layers of ash in the cave floor are from gathering hearths during the Woodland Period, and there have even been Native remains found there.
This period was full of changes. Habitations became permanent, territory began to be marked by mounds and other markers, people started living in larger groups that eventually became hierarchical, and in the Late Woodland Period, inventions like the bow and arrow emerged.
Yup – if you’ve ever found one of the million “arrowheads” in the fields and streams around Athens, more likely than not, it wasn’t an arrowhead at all, as they didn’t exist until around 1000 years ago. We call those non-arrowheads projectile points, and they were used as anything from knives to atlatl projectiles to spears, and more.
1000-500 YBP: The Mississippian Cultures
In Ohio, this period is defined first by the Hopewell/Adena culture, and then later by the Fort Ancient culture. There were a number or large urban settlements throughout the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys that flourished during this period, as did long-distance trade. These societies were highly-developed; they were essentially state systems, and bordered on empire status in their size and complexity.
A warming period and the arrival of European pirates led to a steep decline in the infrastructure of the region, and by the time colonists came in full-force, these lands were largely abandoned – relegated to tribal hunting grounds. That’s why today, when local archaeologists find indigenous remains, they often have trouble finding a tribe to claim them, because so many tribes were displaced, and because so many tribes lived on, used, and hunted on these grounds over thousands upon thousands of years.
Why Indigenous People’s Day is Important
This is possibly the slimmest summary of Athens’ rich ancient history ever written, but it’s important to take every opportunity to start learning more. With the arrival of the Europeans, Indigenous Americans saw the world they had so carefully crafted fall apart in a matter of a century. Genocide, displacement, war, bad-faith dealings by the Europeans, re-education camps, kidnappings, and more led to a near-complete loss of the indigenous population, their many languages, oral histories, traditions – everything. All wiped away.
What we have left today is the things their ancestors left behind; it is sadly the only way to reconstruct a history that was stolen, and a diverse country of many ethnicities, cultures, traditions, and beliefs so harshly removed from the earth that even those who survive have often lost their own origins.
This is why Indigenous Peoples Day is so important. We should be celebrating the people who built this country, not the guy who invaded it and then killed or enslaved everyone inside. Indigenous history is American history – that’s where our pride should lie. And that’s where we should start as we move forward towards restoring a much-deserved and all-too-late respect for our indigenous neighbors, their rights, sovereignty, quality of life, and their place in their country.
Want to learn more about Ohio archaeology? Check out these resources: