“Peaching” Together the Puzzle: Relocating and Reexcavating the Peach Orchard Site, Hamilton County, Ohio

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Fieldnotes, hand drawn maps, personal communication, and some door-knocking: these are the pieces of the puzzle that allowed us to relocate a Fort Ancient site located near Cincinnati, Ohio. The Peach Orchard site sits atop a prominent hill, overlooking the more well-known Turpin site and the floodplain of the Little Miami River. It was first professionally excavated in the 1880s by archaeologists affiliated with Harvard University. The assemblage collected from Peach Orchard, as well as the fieldnotes and maps made during its excavation, are currently housed at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. By piecing together these primary documents and curated artifacts and the knowledge of local residents, we have recently been able to relocate this site. Here we present a preliminary analysis of the layout of this site, based on results of a geophysical survey conducted in the winter of 2023 and a shovel test survey conducted during the summer of 2024. We highlight potential areas for future exploration and discuss the important role that legacy collections and primary documents can and should play in the development of research projects.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53831