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MWAC
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Hopewell
Archeology:
The Newsletter of Hopewell Archeology
in the Ohio River Valley
Volume 1, Number 1, May 1995
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7. Recent Archeological
Explorations at the Newark Earthworks By Dr.
Bradley
Lepper of the Ohio Historical Society
In 1815, Robert Walsh, Jr. made a map
of the Newark Earthworks which represents one
of the earliest efforts to record the grand
complex of Hopewellian geometric enclosures
in the Raccoon Creek valley. This map, while
neither remarkably accurate, nor complete,
is significant for historical reasons certainly,
but also because Walsh made observations which
document features not noted by previous or
subsequent students of the Newark Works. Recent
developments at Octagon State Memorial afforded
the opportunity for archeologists from the
Ohio Historical Society (OHS) to look for surviving
traces of one of these features.
| Radiocarbon
Radiocarbon dating
has become the most effective and
widely used method of dating prehistoric
archeological sites in North America.
The technique is based on the knowledge
that the element carbon has several
inert and several radioactive isotopes.
All living things absorb the radioactive
isotope carbon-14 from the atmosphere.
Science has learned the rate of decay
of carbon-14 is constant and can
be measured. When a plant or animal
dies, the only change in the proportion
of carbon-14 to the isotope carbon-12
in the remains of the organism will
be the decay of carbon-14. Consequently,
laboratory analysis makes it possible
to measure the carbon-14 content
of organic materials, like soil humates,
wood charcoal, animal bone, or mussel
shell, and estimate how long it has
been since the organism stopped ingesting
carbon-14 (and died). |
Moundbuilders Country Club leases Octagon
State Memorial from the Ohio Historical Society
for use as a golf course. They have leased
the site since 1910 when the owner of the
site was the Newark Board of Trade. The Country
Club has plans to enlarge a maintenance facility
located near one of the gateways into the
octagonal enclosure. In this general locations,
adjacent to one of the platform mounds which
stands just inside he opening, Robert Walsh
documented the presence of a "sunken well" or "cavity
in the earth." Brad Lepper (Ohio Historical
Society) directed a team of OHS archeologists
and volunteers from The Ohio State University
in testing this area. They discovered the
truncated remnants of a large, egg-shaped
basin 1.7 m long by 0.7 m wide filled with
coarse gravel at the base of the platform
mound. The excavators identified a single
postmold, 8 cm in diameter, in the center
of this basin. No artifacts of any kind were
recovered. Paleoethnobotanist Dee Anne Wymer
(Bloomsburg University) studied sediment
samples from both the basin and the postmold
and did not identify any prehistoric botanical
material. Sediment samples from the feature
were submitted to Beta-Analytic, Inc. for
radiocarbon dating of soil humates.
Two samples have been dated, one from Feature
2, the postmold, and one from Feature 3,
the gravel-filled basin (Feature 1 was an
historic postmold). Feature 2 produced a
date of 1,650+-80 BP (Beta-76908) and Feature
3 produced a date of 1,770 +-80BP (Beta-76909).
These dates are significant because they
are the only radiocarbon dates related to
the prehistoric use of Newark's octagonal
enclosure. Moreover, they add to the small
but growing corpus of dates for the Hopewellian
occupation of the Raccoon Creek drainage.
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