Hello there! I'm Ben Cross,
an archeological technician at
Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.
Due to continued concerns with COVID-19
my coworkers and I are all working at home.
As you can see, I'm here in my office.
While i really enjoy being surrounded by all of my
baseball memorabilia, I miss being surrounded by all
of the artifacts in our collections at the park.
That's a little better!
Despite being a little unassuming, HOCU-837 is actually
one of my favorite pieces to think about.
This palm sized ceramic sherd,
or broken piece of pottery,
is made of clay mixed with broken pieces of rock.
That is what we call a grit temper.
At the top of the piece, you can see a little bit of the lip
jutting out from the jar, meaning that this is the rim.
On the neck of the exterior you can
see that there are three arching lines that have been
carved into the piece,
while another couple lines can be seen
curving up to meet it at the very bottom.
These zig-zagging set of decorative lines
are oftentimes called curvilinear guilloche.
This piece of ceramic is actually not from the Hopewell period,
but rather from the later Fort Ancient period.
That is about AD 1000 to 1600,
or approximately 500-ish years after the
end of the Hopewell period.
Fort Ancient groups were agriculturalists.
They set up relatively permanent villages along major rivers
and they farmed a lot of corn.
The curvilinear guilloche design we see on HOCU-837
is particularly noticeable at a lot of Fort Ancient sites.
Some have proposed that this design may be meant
to represent rivers, snakes, or both,
as the lines meander the same way snakes or rivers move.
Another interesting thing about this piece
is that it is from the Gartner site,
a Fort Ancient village a couple miles north of our park
along the Scioto River.
Now interestingly enough
this site has never once been a part of our park.
This piece was actually collected by our park's very first
park archeologist in the 1960s,
but for some reason we don't have any
paperwork that seems to indicate why
he was out collecting at Gartner.
So as you can see, little old HOCU-837 might not
look like a lot at first, but once we start digging deeper
it might tell us a little bit more about our region's
prehistoric past than one might assume.
So thanks for joining me in this episode
of Inside the Collections!
Now I have to get back to work to figure out more about
this piece, and the Fort Ancient period in the
Scioto River valley
so that I can write more for the attached article
that you can click on here on our website.
So stay safe and I hope to see you at
Hopewell Culture National Historical Park
sometime soon!
you