Magnetic Survey of the Mound City Group at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Ross County, Ohio

Summary

Mound City Group is a Hopewell mound and enclosure site located in south-central Ohio. The site was originally mapped by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis in 1846. The prehistoric earthworks consisted of 24 mounds within a square embankment wall and surrounded by eight borrow pits above the right bank of the Scioto River. In 1917, the mound group was leveled by the U.S. Army during the construction of the World War I training camp of Camp Sherman, except for Mound 7. After Camp Sherman was razed in the 1920s, the Ohio Historical Society excavated the site and reconstructed the Hopewell earthworks and mounds. The National Park Service conducted additional archaeological investigations at the site from the 1960s to the present. Between 2010 and 2013, a magnetic survey of the entire site was conducted by the Midwest Archeological Center in order to obtain a baseline data set of buried archeological features at the site. A dual fluxgate gradiometer was used to conduct the magnetic investigations. The analysis of the resulting data revealed the presence of numerous features associated with the World War I training camp. Several magnetic features appear to be related to the Hopewell activities at the site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Hopewell Ceremonial Landscapes Seen Through the Lens of Large-Scale Geophysical Surveys: Big Data, Big Opportunities, Big Challenges

Keywords

Spatial Coverage