(Originally printed in the Summer 2005 issue of American Archaeology and udated in November 2024.)
In 1980 The Archaeological Conservancy made its first purchase of an archaeological site by acquiring one of the most famous sites in American history, the Hopewell Mounds site in southern Ohio. Twenty-five years later, we are still at it, purchasing our 300th preserve, the Fort Salem Earthwork, an Ohio Moundbuilders culture enclosure east of Cincinnati.
The Fort Salem Earthwork, also known as the Workman Works, is a circular enclosure about 450 feet in diameter that surrounds a conjoined mound. When described by surveyor J.P. MacLean in 1883, the larger mound of the conjoined pair was about 6 feet high and 60 feet in diameter, while the smaller one was about 4 feet high and 40 feet in diameter. The wall was about 3 feet high and was paralleled for much of its length by an exterior ditch.
Today both mounds are about 2 feet lower, and the wall is only about 1 to 2 feet high. Usually, such deflation of mounds and earthworks is ascribed to plowing. However, within recent memory, the property has been used as a pasture, and the presence of beech trees up to 10 feet in circumference within the circle bespeaks an exceptionally prolonged period of growth. The site has not been mechanically plowed, and it is one of the best-preserved earthworks remaining in private ownership in Ohio. The Ohio Historical Society nominated the site to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, but no scientific excavations have taken place there. Any past looting appears to have been minimal.
The site was part of a farm that was to be sold at an auction. Patrick Welch, a local avocational archaeologist, notified the Conservancy of the situation. “The Fort Salem Chapter of the Archaeological Society of Ohio was named for the site, and we hated to see the site destroyed by a developer. Unfortunately, we did not have the means to save it,” said Welch, explaining his motivation for calling on the Conservancy. Following Welch’s lead, the Conservancy made a last-minute effort to obtain the property but was outbid at the auction. Unfazed, Joe Navari, the associate director of the Conservancy’s Midwest Office, began a six-month dialogue with the new owners to convince them of the archaeological importance of their new building lot. Eventually, Navari was able to persuade them to allow us to buy the 19-acre tract for a fair market price of $100,000.
The Fort Salem Earthwork was considered a desirable acquisition for several reasons. In an area where intensive farming has destroyed most earthworks, the Fort Salem walls and mounds remain prominent. The possibility that the site was never plowed makes it especially desirable as a research preserve. Second, the site’s location in Highland County places it between two great Hopewell population concentrations: those along the Little Miami River northeast of Cincinnati and those along the Scioto River and Paint Creek near Chillicothe. The Fort Salem site may hold clues to how these two populations interacted. Today this location is just at the limit of sprawl from the greater Cincinnati area. Any surviving sites in this area are in grave danger of disappearing under suburban lawns. Finally, the site is not readily assigned to any culture, as it has attributes of both Adena and Hopewell constructions. The plan of a circular earthen wall and ditch surrounding a central mound is typically Adena. However, placing the ditch outside the wall would be unusual for an Adena mound-and-circle, and the scale of the earthwork is more typical of the Hopewell.
“Beautiful. Quite an accomplishment,” remarked Ohio State University archaeologist William Dancey when informed of the site’s acquisition. Dancey’s long-term research has focused on investigating Hopewell period settlement patterns seeking to determine how the people were distributed across the landscape. This research has drawn Dancey—like many before him—into pondering the relationship of Ohio’s two great mound building cultures, the Adena and the Hopewell. “It gets to be a messy semantic issue,” he said. “The circular earthworks seem to be a mixed bag of one or the other. It’s difficult to specify a rule for assigning them.”
N’omi Greber, curator of Archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, agreed about the difficulty of classifying circular enclosures particularly in the Hopewell hinterlands. She noted, “It’s the difficult-to-classify sites that fascinate.”
