Fort Ancient
[6][7] Both the Serpent and Alligator Mounds, first understood as burial locations, have been shown to be Fort Ancient ceremonial effigy sites.
These scattered settlements, located along terraces that overlooked rivers and occasionally on flood plains, would be occupied only briefly before the groups would migrate elsewhere.
Settlements were rarely more permanent than one or two generations, as inhabitants generally migrated once natural resources surrounding the village had been exhausted.
The arrangement of buildings in Fort Ancient settlements is believed to have served as a solar calendar, marking the positions of the solstices and other significant dates.
[9] The occupants also built low platform mounds for ceremonial purposes, and many villages added defensive palisades to their boundaries.
The Madisonville horizon of artifacts after 1400 CE include relatively high proportions of bowls, salt pans, triangular strap handles, colanders, negative painted pottery, notched and beaded rims, and some effigies.
[11] Although the inhabitants of Fort Ancient did not encounter European settlers at this time, they, like other groups in the interior of the continent, may have suffered high fatalities from their diseases, transmitted among Native Americans by trade contacts.
[12] Scholars believe that the Fort Ancient society, like the Mississippian cultures to the south and west, may have been severely disrupted by waves of infectious disease epidemics from the first Spanish explorers in the mid-16th century.
Scholars generally believe that similarities in material culture, art, mythology, and Shawnee oral history link the historic tribe to the Fort Ancient people.
Carbon dating has shown that Fort Ancient lands in West Virginia did not begin to be conquered until the middle phase.
[16] Despite no historical accounts of contact existing, there has been a remarkable amount of European-made goods excavated from Fort Ancient sites—including brass and steel items, as well as glassware.
However, the French did note that most of both sides of the Ohio River Valley were covered in similarly styled villages in various states of destruction or abandonment.
Additionally, Fort Ancient culture can be subdivided into at least 8 phases that span different time periods and regions of southern Ohio and adjacent states.
There was an increasing similarity between Fort Ancient phases leading up to 1650 CE, characterized by the presence of native artifacts and European trade goods found at the Madisonville site.
If social organization was based on kinship, people likely achieved some status by virtue of personal qualities, such as generosity, charisma, and being a good hunter, as well as their deeds.
People of higher status were probably leaders of communities and were potentially responsible for organizing trade, settling disputes among other members of the village, and presiding over ceremonies.
[10] Evidence indicates that Fort Ancient leadership was more like that of the historic Iroquois, whose egalitarian obligations left leaders to be buried with no more than others of their age.
[2] A hallmark of Fort Ancient pottery is engraved decorations on the rim and neck of the vessels, consisting of a series of interlocking lines, called Guilloché.
By the Middle Fort Ancient period, bowls and plates were being produced more frequently, and artisans added strap handles.
Negative painting (a decoration often associated with the Angel phase sites in the Lower Ohio Valley) and Ramey Incised designs (elite motifs associated with the Cahokia polity in Illinois) have been found on some pots.
A head pot was discovered at the Madisonville site similar to those produced in the Central Mississippi Valley by the peoples of the Middle Mississippian Parkin and Nodena phases.
Archaeologists suggest that the change in pottery styles was a result of increased contact with the Mississippian cultures to the south and west of the Fort Ancient peoples.
[27][28] The Fort Ancient peoples made tools from a variety of materials, including stone, bone, horn, shells and antlers.
Archaeological investigations of their cemeteries have shown that almost all of Fort Ancient's people showed pathology of some kind, with a high incidence of dental disease and arthritis.
[44] They had a similar lifestyle to the Fort Ancients; as they were also maize agriculturalists and lived in well laid out palisaded villages with central oval plazas, some of which consisted of as many as 50-100 structures.
To the northwest of the Fort Ancients were the people of the Oliver phase who lived along the east and west forks of the White River in central and southern Indiana from 1200 and 1450.
[47] Located 95 kilometres (59 mi) down the Ohio River to the southwest of the westernmost Fort Ancient settlements were the Middle Mississippian culture peoples of the Prather Complex.
This stretch of river was an empty buffer zone, possibly for social or political reasons, although it might possibly have been because the narrowing of the alluvial valley between the Falls of the Ohio region near Louisville, Kentucky and the mouth of the Miami River at Cincinnati, Ohio made it less suitable for the intensive maize agriculture practiced by both societies.
Mothers would have a special medicine pouch made for one or the other to represent their children and containing the umbilical cord, which they would wear so long as both still lived.
