Seventeenth-Century Fort Ancient Mortuary Practices and Ritual Space

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The 2023 investigation of the seventeenth-century Fort Ancient village of Augusta, Kentucky, focused on a section of the community’s cemetery and ritual space. It was conducted in advance of planned improvements to the historic town of Augusta’s sewage treatment system. Although six extended adult burials were documented within an 80 m2 excavation block, the significance of this research lies in the documentation of features reflecting ritual activities that would have taken place near each grave. These features included large, individual rock-chinked poles, intensely fired hearths, evidence for ritual feasting, the intentional breakage of ceramic vessels, possible grave structures, and clay lined grave shafts. These characteristics are similar to those documented at the contemporary Fort Ancient villages of Hardin and Larkin, and at the later lower Shawnee Town, an eighteenth-century village located upstream from Augusta. Significantly, these features are described in ethnohistoric and historic documents as elements of Shawnee mortuary practices. These investigations suggest that there are strong links between pre-contact Fort Ancient groups of the middle Ohio valley and historic Shawnee people.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38701.0