During my interview with Michele Greenan, the State Museum archeologist, I learned that her family moved from Maine to Charlottesville and that she attended Ball State, my alma mater.
I asked her how archeologists come up with the ages that they attribute to bits of pottery or my axe head that she says dates from 6000 to 1500 B.C. Are they just guessing or pulling figures out of thin air?
Michele says that scientists date objects by association based on Carbon 14 dating that I learned about in college and for which Walter Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. All living organisms absorb the isotope Carbon 14 from the earth’s atmosphere. Thus, materials that once come from a living organism — wood, leather, plant material — contain the isotope. After an organism’s death, Carbon 14 is cut in half — called a half life — and decays at a steady, predictable rate. Thus, when scientists measure the amount of Carbon 14 in organic matter, let’s say in a cave, they can estimate the age of nearby inanimate objects.
Our conversation set me off on a new journey of the mind. Frankly, I never really associated Indiana with archeology. “Not so,” Michele said. “Indiana is rich in archeology such as the mounds.” Most people in central Indiana know about the mounds near Anderson that are preserved as a state park. We camped there once when Vicki was a girl. The Adena-Hopewell people built ten mounds there around 160 B.C. and used them as gathering places for religious ceremonies and for burials.
I read up on the subject and learned that there are hundreds of mounds scattered across the eastern U.S. from as far south as Florida and Louisiana to as far north as Minnesota and on into Canada. There’s a mound in the complex at Cahokia, Illinois, that is ten stories tall! There are mounds in almost every county in Indiana.
The Great Mound at Anderson is a circular henge with an earthen embankment nine feet tall and 394 feet across. Within it is ten-foot deep ditch. I was amazed to learn that there’s a mound in New Castle’s Baker Park where I used to swim and mounds at what used to be the Epileptic Village.
Who were the people who built the mounds and henges? Evidently they were part of a far-flung culture of sun worshipers who venerated Mother Earth. They were clever astronomers. Their earthworks were “sunclocks,” oriented — just as England’s Stonehenge — to indicate the equinoxes and solstices and sometimes the passage of the moon and the stars. To do this, they had to understand mathematics such as pi and square roots. (Miss Trotter, my geometry teacher, never succeeded in making me understand pi!)
The mounds were built by rivers, and there was a far-flung trading system where Great Lakes copper, gulf coast shells and Colorado mica were obtained. They made pottery and art objects such as birds. Most of us would be interested in excavating the mounds. Not so with Michele. Her interest would be in excavating the areas between the mounds where the ancient people lived.
Those native Americans are gone now, and their rich story is little told. Michele believes that they were absorbed into various Indian tribes.
According to Fitz Zimmerman this was “an ancient civilization who deserve to take their place amongst the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans as people known for conquest, science, building and empire.” Unfortunately, many mounds have been destroyed or their objects taken.
Museums are a window on the world through which we can look at places and eras that we cannot visit. The State Museum has many interesting exhibits. Would you like to go on an archeological dig or send children aged 8 to 12 to the museum’s Fall Break Adventure October 14-18 where they will experience Indiana Life through the centuries? Cost is $100, phone (317) 232-1637. wclarke@comcast.net