Fort Ancient

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Fort Ancient is a name for a Native American culture that flourished from 1000-1550 among a people who predominantly inhabited land along the Ohio River in areas of southern modern day Ohio and northern Kentucky. The Fort Ancient culture was once thought to be an expansion of the Mississippian cultures, but is now accepted as an independently developed culture that was descended from the Hopewell culture (100 BCE-CE 500), who were also a Mound Builder people.

The name of the culture originates from the Fort Ancient, Ohio site. Fort Ancient itself is now thought to have been built by the Hopewell, then later occupied by the Fort Ancient culture. The fort is located on a hill above the Little Miami River, close to Lebanon, Ohio. Fort Ancient has earthen walls that are over 3 miles (5 km) long and up to 23 feet (7.5 m) high. The hilltop enclosure surrounds a plot of 100 acres (0.4 km²). Despite its name, most archaeologists do not believe that Fort Ancient was used primarily as a fortress by either the Hopewell or the Fort Ancient -- rather, it was a ceremonial location.

Fort ancient settlements lacked political centralization and elite social structures. Settlements were composed of circular and/or rectangular homes situated around an open plaza. The arrangement of buildings in Fort Ancient settlements is thought to have served as a sort of solar calendar, marking the positions of the solstices and other significant dates. Settlements were rarely permanent, usually being shifted to a new location after one or two generations when the resources surrounding the old village were exhausted.

The Fort Ancient people are noted for their earthen structures, forts, triangular arrow points and pentagonal flint knives. The Fort Ancient people may have built the largest effigy mound in the United States, Serpent Mound. The Fort Ancient are also thought to be responsible for hundreds of burial mounds in the shape of birds and other animals found in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. The Fort Ancient also created small burial mounds for the dead, but eventually this practice faded and only the effigy mounds continued to be built.

The Fort Ancient were primarily a farming and hunting people. Their diet was composed mainly of the three sisters -- maize, squash, and beans -- supplemented with hunting and fishing in nearby forests and rivers.

Uncertainty surrounds the eventual fate of the Fort Ancient people. Most likely their society, like Mississippian societies to the south, was severely disrupted by waves of epidemics from the very first Spanish explorers in the 16th century. There is a gap in the archaeological record between the most recent Fort Ancient sites and the oldest sites of the Shawnee, who occupied the area at the time of later European (French and English) explorers. However, it is generally accepted that similarities in material culture, art, mythology, and Shawnee oral history linking them to the Fort Ancients can be used to establish the shift of Fort Ancient society into historical Shawnee society.