A very long time ago

Earlier this week I was invited to view some prehistoric earthworks located on a private property in Jasper County. They are on a sand ridge that until recently was overgrown with trees and underbrush. The owner of the property has spent many years collecting Indian artifacts and his knowledge of the prehistoric residents of our area was key to his recognizing the significance of what was on his property.

If I had walked alone through his property, I might have noticed that the landscape was unusual, with a number of circular pits and small mounds. It is very unlikely that I would have thought that these features could have been made many centuries ago. Below is a picture I took but it is impossible to capture the patterns that are visible when a person is actually there.

Indiana has other, similar prehistoric earthworks. Perhaps the best known is Mounds State Park near Anderson. (See also here.) The largest earthworks structure there is bigger than any that are on the Jasper County property, but it has a similar shape and design. It is round and on one side the lip of the circle is lower than the rest of the lip. There is a raised platform in the center. This kind of structure seems to be called a henge. There are at least six of them at the Jasper County site. They were probably built by people of the Adena culture more than 2000 years ago.

The owner of the property has shown them to archaeologists from Purdue and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. Both were impressed and said that this is an important archeological site. One of the archaeologists would like to survey and map it with specialized equipment, but that equipment was loaned out and not currently available. Good maps would make interpretation of the site much easier. Even though the site has not been disturbed by farming, many centuries of erosion have blurred the features. One must use imagination to picture what was here when the site was in use.

What archeologists know about the people who made these structures is very limited. The tools and artifacts that were left by the inhabitants of Indiana 2000 years ago were considerably different from the tools and artifacts of the inhabitants of Indiana when Columbus stumbled on the Americas. Think of how little we would know of the Greeks and Romans if they had not left written records. Tools and other artifacts are not good substitutes for written records.

The owner of the land has not dug for any Indian artifacts, but he has used a metal detector to search the site for items left by early European settlers. He has found many nails, mostly from horse shoes, bullets, shell casings, and even part of a gun. Below is about one half of the metal artifacts he has found.

Judging from the tremendous number of Indian artifacts that have been found in Jasper County, this area had substantial populations before European settlement. Further, this area was probably inhabited since the glaciers retreated from Indiana at the end of the last Ice Age about 15,000 years ago. For information about Indian tribes in Indiana when European settlement occurred, see here.

Over the years I have had a number of posts about Indian artifacts (the best one is here and for others search the blog for "Indian artifacts") and I have bemoaned the fact that there is not more recognition of the people who lived here for thousands of years before European settlement. The owner of this site would like to find a way to give some public access to these earthworks. Perhaps it can eventually become something that will give recognition to our area's prehistory.