Integrated Learning-Living Communities

In mid-September 2024, the BEES visited the newly-minted UNESCO World Heritage Site featuring the Ft. Ancient Earthworks in Oregonia, Ohio.

“Built on a steep bluff overlooking the Little Miami River, Fort Ancient is a nature-lover’s paradise with miles of trails, earthen embankments and hidden astronomical connections. Some of the embankments reach 23 feet high, which is incredible considering they were built one basket of earth at a time. More than 67 gateways break up these embankment.”

While currently celebrated as a site of pilgrimage (to which people brought exotic items as offerings), the site was long comprehended as evidence of long-distance trade. Archaeologists have found artifacts made from copper from Minnesota, shells from the Gulf of Mexico, mica from the Carolinas and obsidian from the Rocky Mountains), revealing the geographical extent of the network.

Whether the exchanges are evidence of ‘transfers’ (gifts) or grade, the level of sophistication suggests a significant degree of specialization and division of labor, which together with trade constitutes a most critical innovation: an economic system that enabled modern humans to put paid to rival human groups (Neanderthals and Denisovans) more devastating than any single innovation in our increasingly lethal toolkit.

For whatever reason people or artifacts were transported to southwest Ohio, where the Hopewell people spent the better of part of over 200 years building a site to receive them, there is little doubt that navigable rivers played a pivotal role in conveying humans and their accoutrements to and from the earthworks. This understanding, of course, required the BEES to hit the water and enjoy a three-mile excursion down Ohio’s first (of 16) designated scenic river. Some modern ‘innovations (in the form of water launchers) were deployed en route, to permit the BEES to hone their skills with long-range projectile technologies.

The float also enabled the BEES to practice the tree identification skills they acquired at Woodland Cemetery and also collect some limestone — the evidence of the seas that previously inundated the region 450 million years ago during the Ordovician Period — and the river valley itself — shaped by glaciation during the Pleistocene epoch.

Of course, the day’s activities culminated in the BEES making a stab at throwing spears with the assistance of atlatls, an innovation that current research suggests leveled the ‘playing field’ for women since experiments have confirmed that women achieve much the same velocity and accuracy as men with the help of this accoutrement. This new research forces anthropologists to reconsider many of the claims made about the sexual division of labor in prehistoric times. Rosey the Riveter would be proud.