HEC’s Fort Ancient Event Provided Unique Opportunity

Twenty participants registered for HEC’s special event at Fort Ancient on June 29, 2013. Archaeologist Dr. Jarrod Burks, HEC’s Vice President, offered a powerpoint program in the museum that showed many of the images created by his geophysical survey that discovered the “Moorehead Circle” in 2005.

Dr. Jarrod Burks guides participants through the South Fort area.

Archaeologist Dr. Robert Riordan of Wright State University provided a tour of the Moorehead Circle excavation he has been directing for the last eight years. His findings in this giant feature include multiple concentric woodhenges, the foundations of ceremonial buildings, a stone paved entry way and long mysterious parallel ditches filled with gravel. Participants were given a rare look at the two layers of excavated paving stones of the “grand entrance”, looking more like something from a Roman ruin than a typical prehistoric Ohio site. Dr. Burks also led a guided tour of the intriguing features of the South Fort, where people of the Fort Ancient Culture established a village many centuries after Native Americans of the Hopewell Culture built t he three miles of great embankment walls of the hilltop enclosure nearly 2,000 years ago.

Dr. Robert Riordan explains his findings at the excavation of Moorehead Circle’s “grand entrance.”