Fort Ancient (A.D. 1350-1450) Domestic Rituals of the Middle Ohio Valley

Summary

In many parts of the world, the construction and maintenance of a domestic dwelling is often accompanied by rituals intended to bless the house, appease the ancestors, or please the spirit world. Within the Fort Ancient (A.D. 1000-1750) area of the middle Ohio River Valley, as evidenced at Fox Farm, a large Fort Ancient village in north-central Kentucky, such rituals may take the form of objects (pipes, shell or bone pendants, marginella shell beads, drilled deer toe bones [cup and pin game], projectile points, discoidals, and ceramics) placed in the holes dug for exterior structural wall posts or interior roof support posts, and concentrations of animal bones (deer jaw mandibles or bear tibia) placed along the edge of a house basin. Other rituals are represented by sacred pole-pits that contain portions of ceramic vessels, animal bones, and plant remains deposited after the pole was removed but before the pit was sealed. In this paper, we examine the contextual association of these materials within houses at Fox Farm that were occupied during and after the Fort Ancient Transformation (A.D. 1375-1425) for how they may inform our understanding of Fort Ancient ritual life.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16710