Integrated Learning-Living Communities

Over two weekends in October, the BEES broke up into smaller cohorts and used Recplex bikes to trek to the SunWatch Indian Village across the Great Miami River. Inhabited by the Late Woodland people (often dubbed Ft. Ancient) around 1200 BCE for just 20 years, the site speaks poignantly to the detrimental environmental consequences of human activity.

More than half of the Ft. Ancient diet was provided by maize and deer along with a few small mammals provided what protein was sourced from meat. Rapid depletion of the soil and deforestation seems to have undermined the viability of the site and a high infant mortality rate, as well as skeletal deformities in the adults testify to the cost of relying more on agriculture, less on hunting and gathering. 

While corn, beans and squash are often celebrated as a food source, there is evidence the high density of planting of the “three sisters” together can lead to increased competition for nutrients and water in the soil, reducing yield. Scientists speculate that other causes, in addition to depleted resources, were probably to blame: climate change (the Little Ice Age), inter-group strife (evidenced by palisade fencing) and a fire in the village may have prompted the group’s departure roughly 800 years ago, for, literally, greener pastures to the south.

Until the site was unearthed during an expansion of the wastewater treatment plant in the 1970s, this village had escaped notice. It was protected, from time and the later plows of settlers in the 1650s, by frequent flooding and deposition of soil, and a team of mostly volunteers from the Dayton Museum of Natural History provided much of the labor required to excavate the site between 1968 and 1989 when it was opened to the public.

While biking along the Great Miami River, some groups saw turtles and one cohort was fortunate enough to catch sight of Carillon Park’s pair of breeding eagles — Willa and Orville. (Since the trek, Orville has gone missing, and a new younger male has taken up with Willa. Again, speculation as to the circumstances of Orville’s disappearance is rife, since eagles mate for life. In this disappearance, too, several causes have been advanced, at least some owing to detrimental human activity: traffic on I-75, high voltage electrical lines as well as disease or old age.