Ohio's Archaic period

At a glance

A changing world after the ice

As the Pleistocene ended, Ohio's climate warmed toward its modern four-season pattern, and the open, park-like landscape Paleoindian hunters had known closed in to hardwood forest. Ohio History Central splits the early Archaic into two working periods: Early Archaic, roughly 10,000 to 8,000 years before present, and Middle Archaic, 8,000 to 5,000 years before present, inside an overall Archaic era the same source dates 8000 BC to 500 BC in calendar terms. A mid-Holocene warm, dry spell known across the wider Midwest as the Hypsithermal did not turn Ohio into prairie the way it did parts of Illinois and Indiana; where vegetation shifted here at all, it shifted within forest types rather than converting forest to grassland, according to a Wright State University thesis on regional pollen records.

Early Archaic people lived in small, highly mobile bands that moved with the seasons, hunting deer, turkey, rabbit and waterfowl, fishing, and gathering berries, hickory nuts and acorns. Archaeologists reconstruct this way of life largely from riverside base camps on the Maumee River in northwest Ohio — the Dupont, Raisch-Smith and Weilnau sites — where families gathered seasonally to fish, build dugout canoes with ground-stone axes, and grind nuts for winter storage. The Weilnau site preserved a probable habitation structure from this period, rare direct evidence of a shelter this old.

During the Middle Archaic, groups grew larger and the toolkit diversified beyond spear points, knives and scrapers to include a new family of ground-stone tools: grooved axes, atlatl weights, grinding stones, pitted nutting stones, plummets and net sinkers. Ground-stone axes, made from hard stone such as granite, let people fell trees and shape dugout canoes, a technology that persisted all the way to the end of the Archaic. One of the best-known examples, the Ringler dugout, was accidentally recovered by commercial dredging of Savannah Lake in Ashland County in late November 1976 and conserved by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. It was published in 1982 as a Late Archaic canoe of about 1600 BC, but that date didn't hold up: three radiocarbon dates reported by the museum's own team in 2012 place its making and use in the mid-1600s AD, more than three thousand years later than first thought — a correction, not an Archaic canoe.

The atlatl and its puzzling stone accessories

Archaic hunters across this whole span relied on the atlatl, a wooden spear-thrower with a handle at one end and a hook at the other that let a dart be thrown much farther and harder than by an unaided arm. Starting in the fourth millennium BC, some Ohio hunters began carving and grinding pieces of banded slate into bannerstones — polished stones with a hole bored through the center, most often shaped like a wing-nut or butterfly — and attaching them somewhere along the atlatl shaft. Bannerstones vanish from the archaeological record again by about 1500 BC, even though the atlatl itself stayed in use for roughly another 2,000 years after that, according to Wikipedia's summary of the bannerstone record.

What bannerstones actually did remains genuinely unresolved. Mechanical testing by researchers Larry Kinsella and Herman Pontzer — after Kinsella himself scored worse in a throwing competition using a bannerstone-weighted atlatl than he had the year before without one — found that bannerstones did not improve throwing accuracy, but may have let a hunter hold a nocked dart more comfortably during a long wait. Many surviving bannerstones are also simply too heavy for practical use: some exceed 100 grams, and one atlatl researcher, Robert Berg, reports handling examples weighing more than a pound, "very significant" compared with objects independently identified as genuine working atlatl weights, according to Berg's own analysis. That mismatch is one reason some archaeologists read at least the more elaborate bannerstones as status objects or hunting insignia rather than working hardware. At the Burrell Orchard site in Lorain County, a Late Archaic clay house floor held one half of a slate bannerstone that had apparently been broken on purpose and buried — one of the clearer hints that these objects carried ritual as well as practical meaning.

Birdstones are a related and equally debated art form from the very end of the Archaic into the Early Woodland period, roughly 1500 BC to AD 500: small, stylized bird-shaped carvings, usually in dark slate, with a pair of conical holes drilled diagonally through the base. They have no known parallel in any historic Native American culture, so their function has to be inferred rather than observed; the most widely credited theory, as with bannerstones, is that they served as atlatl weights, though this is not settled. Ohio is one of the primary find-spots for birdstones, alongside New York, Michigan and Wisconsin.

A swept-clean house on Lake Erie

The single best-documented Archaic site on Ohio's Lake Erie shore is Burrell Orchard (33Ln15), in Sheffield Village, Lorain County, near the Black River. Brian Redmond of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has directed excavations there across multiple seasons, including 2008, 2014 and 2015. The 2008 season alone uncovered more than 4,600 square meters of cultural deposits and 32 features, with radiocarbon dates on the earliest occupation running from 2570 to 1780 BC. In 2014 and 2015, the team found a puddled-clay house floor roughly 4,000 years old and about three inches thick, made of yellow clay hauled in from elsewhere and resurfaced at least twice, with post molds around its perimeter suggesting a hickory-sapling frame draped in woven cattail mats, plus a built-in basin, cooking pits and storage holes containing tools and hickory nuts, according to the History Blog and Ideastream Public Media. Ground-penetrating radar confirmed a second floor layer nearby in 2015.

Redmond's team concluded that people used Burrell Orchard as a seasonal base camp for at least 500 years, mainly in fall and winter, harvesting hickory nuts, deer and Lake Erie fish, and that the house interior was kept swept clean — most debris turned up outside the structure. A separate 2015 paper by Redmond and colleagues in American Antiquity argues the clay floors functioned in part as domestic ritual "shrines" — nonmortuary ceremonial space inside an ordinary Late Archaic base camp, not a separate mound or special-purpose building. As Redmond put it, "there's nothing like this anywhere in Ohio. It's very significant, a much more significant site than we previously thought," according to the History Blog.

Along the Ohio River: Maple Creek and its neighbors

In southwestern Ohio, the Maple Creek phase, running roughly from 5000 to 3000 years before present into the Early Woodland, names a distinctive set of large riverine base camps on both sides of the Ohio River around Cincinnati, identified by McWhinney Heavy Stemmed and Meron-Trimble projectile points, a small chipped-stone tool industry and earth ovens. The type site, Maple Creek, sits at the confluence of Maple Creek and the Ohio River in Clermont County; related base camps include Mabel Hall and Davisson Farm in Lawrence County.

Nearby, the Devanney Site, about 7 acres along a small stream west of Goshen in Clermont County, was occupied periodically across thousands of years and is prized as one of the few well-preserved Archaic temporary campsites in the Ohio River valley; it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 30, 1978. The Bullskin Creek site, on a terrace above Bullskin Creek near its mouth on the Ohio River near Felicity, also in Clermont County, was occupied from about 2750 to 1750 BC, covers roughly 3 acres including a deep midden, and was excavated by the University of Cincinnati in the 1970s. Finds there included flint knives, atlatl parts, stone axes and pestles, a cache read as possible shaman's equipment, and at least five plow-disturbed burials laid in a flexed position and covered in red ochre, without accompanying grave goods; it too joined the National Register on March 30, 1978.

Ohio's first farmers

Across the mid-continent, between roughly 5,000 and 3,800 years ago, Late Archaic people began deliberately cultivating a cluster of native seed plants archaeologists now call the Eastern Agricultural Complex: squash, sunflower, sumpweed (also called marsh elder) and goosefoot. Domesticated forms of these seeds are identified by measurable changes from their wild ancestors, such as thinner chenopod seed coats and larger marsh-elder kernels. Ohio History Central credits Late Archaic groups here as the first people to make pottery in Ohio and the first to grow crops — "mainly squash, sunflowers, and marsh elder" — in gardens that were tended less intensively than the gardens of the following Early Woodland period.

The strongest specific Ohio evidence for this shift comes from the County Home site (33At40) in Athens County, where analysis of chenopod seed-coat thickness and marsh-elder kernel size identified domesticated-type specimens more than 3,000 years old, recovered from hearths and earth ovens alongside other cultivated plants — evidence that domesticated crops reached the Appalachian mixed-forest zone of the middle Ohio Valley earlier than had previously been documented, according to a study in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology.

By the very end of the Archaic, a clear pottery tradition also appears in northern Ohio: Leimbach ware, type-sited on the Vermilion River in Lorain County, a simple, thick-walled, grit-tempered pottery, cordmarked on the exterior, with heavy rectangular lug handles unlike anything the following Adena culture made. Recent dating has pushed Leimbach ware's origin back to as early as 1000 BC, squarely at the boundary between the Archaic and the Early Woodland period that followed it.

Copper roads and a hilltop cemetery

From at least 6500 BC, according to a 2021 study in Radiocarbon, Archaic people in the western Great Lakes mined and hammered nearly pure native copper from the Lake Superior basin, a tradition archaeologists call the Old Copper Complex, among the oldest metalworking traditions known anywhere. That copper moved along exchange networks reaching well over 1,000 miles, into the Ohio Valley and beyond, centuries before the famous Hopewell copper working of the following period made the same Lake Superior sources famous. Ohio History Central credits the Late Archaic Glacial Kame people specifically with trading for float copper, worked both cold and hot, and marine shell, treating both as prestige goods buried with people who appear to have held special status as leaders, healers or other respected figures.

The Glacial Kame culture takes its name from its members' practice of burying their dead atop kames, the steep, conical gravel hills dropped by melting glacial ice. Its range covered southern Ontario, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, with Champaign, Hardin and Logan counties in west-central Ohio regarded as its heartland. The type site, the Ridgeway Site, sits between the villages of Ridgeway and Mount Victory in Hardin County, on a roughly 1.5-acre glacial gravel deposit. Railroad construction exposed it in 1856, when workers mining the kame for track ballast uncovered hundreds of buried bodies. The excavator's own report recorded 308 burials and estimated the kame held the remains of 400 to 500 individuals in total, in a mix of flexed inhumations and cremations. Grave goods included copper beads, shell ornaments, stone tools, bone awls and a string of shell beads 90 feet long; one burial pit held a pile of 27 detached skulls, and some bodies had plainly been beheaded before burial, according to Wikipedia's account of the Ridgeway Site. More than 50 child burials under age eight were recorded, along with at least seven individuals showing signs consistent with extreme old age.

Nearby, the Zimmerman Kame, a circular, roughly 20-foot-tall, 5-acre gravel hill in Hardin County, was worked as a commercial gravel pit until the 1970s, when the discovery of Glacial Kame artifacts ended the quarrying. It produced small pottery objects — an important find, because Glacial Kame people had long been assumed not to make ceramics at all. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 30, 1974, the first glacial kame of any kind added to the Register.

Dogs at the fire

Dogs were already old companions to people in this era. At the Koster site in Illinois, two dog skeletons, directly radiocarbon-dated to roughly 10,190 to 9,630 calibrated years before present, were individually buried, laid on their sides in shallow graves with no butchery marks, in the same part of the settlement where people buried their own dead — evidence that these animals were mourned rather than eaten, according to a 2019 study in American Antiquity. In the well-studied Green River valley of Kentucky, 246 dog burials have been recorded in total, 31 of them found directly associated with human burials. Why some people were buried with dogs remains an open question, with proposed explanations ranging from dogs as healers or companions for the dead to, in some Middle Archaic cases, a pattern tied to violent human deaths. What is clear is that dogs were not treated as an ordinary food source, unlike deer or turkey, "not used for a food source unless in drastic times."

By the close of the Archaic, cemeteries had become common for the first time in Ohio's human history. Ohio History Central is explicit that "for the first time, burials became a prominent occurrence on sites," and that "the quality and quantity of grave goods in some burials suggest a growing differentiation in status" — the first solid evidence anywhere in Ohio's past for social inequality expressed in death. That combination of pottery, small gardens, long-distance trade and status-marked burial was the direct foundation the Adena culture built on when it began raising Ohio's first burial mounds around 800 BC.

Sources

• Ohio History Central, "Archaic Period" (via Wayback Machine)
• Ohio History Central, "Early/Middle Archaic Culture" (via Wayback Machine)
• Ohio History Central, "Late Archaic Culture" (via Wayback Machine)
• Wikipedia, "Bannerstone"
• Robert S. Berg, "Bannerstones and How They Relate to the Atlatl," Thunderbird Atlatl
• Wikipedia, "Bird stone"
• Ideastream Public Media, "Archaic Ohio Uncovered in Lorain County," 2015
• The History Blog, "Floor of 4,000-year-old dwelling found in Ohio"
• "Late Archaic Ritualism in Domestic Contexts: Clay-Floored Shrines at the Burrell Orchard Site, Ohio," American Antiquity
• Wikipedia, "Maple Creek phase"
• Wikipedia, "Devanney Site"
• Wikipedia, "Bullskin Creek Site"
• Wikipedia, "Eastern Agricultural Complex"
• "Archaic Period Domesticated Plants in the Mid-Ohio Valley," Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology
• Wikipedia, "Glacial Kame culture"
• Wikipedia, "Ridgeway Site"
• Wikipedia, "Zimmerman Kame"
• Pompeani et al. 2021, "A Radiocarbon Chronology for the Old Copper Complex," Radiocarbon 63(2)
• Greber, Ruhl and Greber 2012, "The Ringler Dugout Revisited," Journal of Ohio Archaeology 2
• Wikipedia, "Riverside Site"
• Wikipedia, "Red Ocher people"
• Perri et al. 2019, "New Evidence of the Earliest Domestic Dogs in the Americas," American Antiquity
• Wikipedia, "Archaic Dog Burials in the Midwest United States"
• Academia.edu, "The Development, Adoption, and Local Manufacture of Leimbach Ware Pottery in Northern Ohio"