Fort Ancient

It's almost exactly an hour's drive from the colossal conical mound at Miamisburg to this great enclosed plateau, an expanse of many acres bounded by low earthen ridges. Its real name is forever lost, but it is called Fort Ancient because white people could only see the raised earth walls as a fortification, something to use to defend themselves from the wilderness and from their own wilderness within. The drive south and east from the Dayton suburb is more than the passage through an hour of time and the space of the southern Ohio landscape. To travel from the earthen mountain hand-crafted by the Adena, the simple structure pregnant with meaning sitting above the Great Miami River, to this intricately designed enclosure a couple hundred feet above the Little Miami River is to travel through centuries of changes in the peoples who once lived here and through the changes in the very land itself.

            The Hopewell who inhabited the lands and who built the mounds and miles of earthen walls here had a culture more intricate in its material expression and more complex in its relationship to the land than did the Adena. The Adena culture developed out of a less settled agriculture, with social bonds determined by hunting and gathering. They were a mobile people, and it is easy to imagine them being loosely affiliated with each other except through family bands that became bonds tied at ceremonials associated with the great mounds. At these places the passage to the next life mirrored their nomadic existence: death assisted the passage of the souls to the after–life through the help from the ever flowing rivers and the elevated sites in communion with the winds aiding the spirit in its journey to the west.

            The graves of the Adena reveal large skeletons, the bodies estimated to be over seven feet tall. The skulls are rounded, and I speculate that they were gentle giants passing lightly on the land. Anthropologists are quick to assert that the large skeletons found in the mounds do not signify a race of extra–ordinarily large people, that these skeletons are of a select few chosen for their large size to be honored with ceremonial burials. But there are too many legends about there being "giants in those days" for us to dismiss the Adena largeness by easy speculative denial.

            The large, round headed Adena, mobile and peaceful, provide an effective contrast to the Hopewell, settled agriculturalists with extensive trade networks across the continent from Northern Michigan to the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. The Hopewell were more like us in their continual reaching to something out of themselves for satisfaction but significantly less like us in the way they balanced their spiritual needs with economic ones. I come to Fort Ancient to try to understand the Hopewell way of providing this balance in order to provide for my own.