[Aztlan] Complex Woodland Site at Danbury

[michael ruggeri]

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Searching through the past at a 'place full of stories'
Archaeologists study ancient people at Danbury site
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
John Mangels
Plain Dealer Science Writer
Danbury Township -- The things they cared about went with them to the  
grave.

A spear point, chipped from flint, its beveled edges still sharp and  
true. A smooth, greenish piece of slate, gracefully carved to  
resemble a bird. The jaw of a dog, or maybe a wolf . . . a faithful  
companion, perhaps, or a hunting conquest.

And a limestone pipe, once redolent of tobacco or bark, intentionally  
smashed to bits and placed among the bones, as if to signify its  
owner's life was over.

Who were these ancient people who brought their dead to Lake Erie's  
shore and took care to entomb them with the objects they loved? Why  
did they return, year after year, to a gentle rise overlooking  
Sandusky Bay? After occupying the site for more than 40 centuries,  
why did they vanish before European explorers arrived?

For the past three summers, a team of Cleveland Museum of Natural  
History archaeologists and volunteers has teased the secrets of  
what's called the Danbury site from its silty clay soil.

The excavation, on private property amid a construction site, is a  
model of cooperation among the researchers, the developer and  
American Indian representatives. They've all agreed that after study,  
the human remains and burial artifacts will be returned to the earth,  
in a plot set aside within the vacation community for that purpose.

The digging has uncovered evidence of a gathering place of native  
peoples that far outlasted the cities of the Greek and Roman empires.  
Its history stretches across the Archaic, Woodland and Prehistoric  
periods, a span of more than 4,000 years.

Over time, Danbury's use changed as the people who came there  
evolved. The first inhabitants were still semi-nomadic hunters who  
may have spent just a few weeks at the lush wetlands site, fishing,  
catching waterfowl and burying their dead. Later occupants grew  
maize, built more permanent seasonal settlements, and had more  
sophisticated burial customs.

After 1000 A.D., Danbury appears to have become a full-fledged  
village. There are signs of trading with outsiders, long-term food  
storage, dwellings and, by 1500, what appears to be a protective  
stockade, judging by stains in the dirt that indicate a line of post  
holes.

"It's a hell of a site because there was so much there for over 4,000  
years," said Brian Redmond, the natural history museum's archaeology  
curator and director of the dig.

"This is a place where groups were coming together, maybe every  
year," Redmond said. "There's socializing, maybe marriages performed,  
gift-giving. There's trading, religious rituals, including burial of  
the dead. This place is full of stories."

Brothers Greg and Gary Spatz thought they were getting a vacation  
paradise, not an archaeological site, when their development company  
bought 25 acres along Sandusky Bay in 1999. They ended up with both.

A bulldozer grading the development's main road in July 2003  
unearthed several large groups of skeletal remains and storage and  
cooking pits.

"What do we do now?" was Greg Spatz's first reaction. Unlike other  
states, Ohio has no laws for ancient bones and artifacts on private  
property.

That's a boon to developers and private collectors who are unfettered  
by government red tape, but a major concern for professional  
archaeologists who'd like to see the remains responsibly studied, and  
for American Indian groups who'd prefer that they be left undisturbed.

"It's a difficult situation," said Franco Ruffini, the state's deputy  
historic preservation officer. "It's not the kind of thing we have  
the political climate to legislate."

Redmond wonders what's been lost.

"Ohio has great archaeological resources," he said. But "there's a  
big private collector interest that primarily opposes any kind of  
regulation." And some landowners believe that "on your property you  
should be able to do what you want, even if it's bulldozing a  
[burial] mound away."

Greg Spatz didn't feel that way, even though he knew an  
archaeological excavation could delay construction and decrease the  
land available for homes.

"Maximizing profits is not always the way to go," he said. "I've  
learned in working with some astute people that you can't just take;  
you've got to give back. This was kind of my give-back."

Spatz bought six lots from his development company that appeared to  
have concentrations of artifacts. He and Redmond agreed that  
participants in the museum's summer archaeology field school would  
excavate the site. Ohio State University physical anthropologist Paul  
Sciulli would analyze the remains.

The bones and any items in the graves would be reinterred in a  
designated green space on the property. Though they have no definite  
ancestral connection to Danbury's occupants, members of the Wyandotte  
Nation of Oklahoma, whose forebears occupied Northwest Ohio in the  
18th and 19th centuries, would supervise the reburials.

The museum team's three years of work at Danbury has provided  
valuable insights into a poorly understood civilization that left no  
written records and apparently had no direct contact with later  
groups who could have described them.

The few spear points found at Danbury indicate hunting wasn't a major  
activity there, instead probably occurring farther inland. The  
abundance of fish scales, and clam and mussel shells shows that  
occupants took advantage of the rich ecosystem. Dozens of storage  
pits held fish, corn and other foodstuffs.

Local clay deposits supplied material for some of the earliest  
cooking pots in the Great Lakes, dating to 1000 B.C. Shards show the  
Danbury pottery was hand-molded, with simple decorative markings made  
by cords or sticks wrapped with rope.

Tools recovered from the dig include part of a grinding stone; some  
celts, or stone hand axes; a sharpened piece of raccoon leg bone used  
as a punch or awl; and a rasp - an etched deer rib that someone may  
have scraped as a percussion instrument during a religious or magic  
ritual.

Danbury's most striking feature is its graves. The museum team has  
recovered the remains of close to 100 people. Nearly half the dead  
are children younger than 5, Sciulli said, a testament to disease and  
harsh living conditions. There are no signs of violent deaths.

The site functioned as a cemetery throughout its long history - the  
earliest grave dates to at least 2480 B.C. - with burial practices  
changing over time. There are individual plots; "secondary" burials,  
whose sometimes cleaned and bundled bones were brought from another  
location; and ossuaries, or mass graves.

"It looks like they may have carried their dead to the site," Redmond  
said. The bundled bones "could be people who died in winter camps and  
were brought to the site for a communal burial ceremony."  
Alternatively, "bundled sites may have been different bands coming  
together and burying their dead in a ceremonial way."

Some of the bones were stained with copper or powdered red ocher,  
resembling blood. Sometimes they were disarticulated - removed from  
their natural position and rearranged in unusual ways.

"Obviously, they're going into the burials, disinterring people,  
taking out some of the bones, putting in other bones, moving bones  
around," Redmond said. "It's really complex."

When Jesuit priests visited Huron Indian settlements in the 1600s,  
they observed elaborate rituals in which relocating villagers would  
dig up their dead, take them to a new communal grave site, and spend  
days displaying the bones and offering gifts before reburying them.

"Maybe this feast of the dead ceremony is just beginning at about  
1000 A.D. in this area," Redmond said of Danbury.

Equally mysterious are the talismans sprinkled in certain graves,  
like one uncovered in 2005. It held the 1,000-year-old bones of a  
middle-age woman and two younger men, laid side by side, and more  
than 230 ornaments made from shells.

Many were small beads, arranged around the woman's head. The most  
unusual items were two halves of a lightning whelk shell, each with a  
hole allowing it to be worn as a pendant. One pendant was placed in  
the woman's mouth when she was buried; its mate rested with the  
younger of the two men.

Lightning whelks come from the Gulf of Mexico, so their presence in  
the grave indicates Danbury's later inhabitants must have been  
involved in trading.

"I'm wondering who these people are," Redmond said. "Why are they  
being so richly adorned?"

Elsewhere, elaborate relics indicate their owners were chiefs or  
ruling families. "The funny thing is, the Late Woodland people from  
this region seem unranked," Redmond said. "They don't have great  
chiefs, complex political organizations, any obvious signs of wealth  
or status. That's why this stands out as such a weird thing."

It's another secret that Danbury has yet to reveal.


? 2006 The Plain Dealer
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