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Mounds offer a glimpse of history predating Marietta

Castle archaeologist Wes Clarke discusses the Conus mound in Marietta’s Mound Cemetery. It’s associated with the Adena culture, which was active in the Mid-Ohio Valley around 800 B.C. to A.D. 100. (Photo by Evan Bevins)

MARIETTA — Mound Cemetery is the final resting place of Revolutionary War veterans and Ohio Company founders Rufus Putnam and Benjamin Tupper, among others. But its history stretches back centuries before the arrival of the first pioneers to Marietta and the Northwest Territory.

Within the Fifth and Cutler streets graveyard stands the 30-foot mound that gives the cemetery its name. Its conical shape with a ditch and embankment surrounding it mark it as an example of construction from the archaeological Adena period, which spanned 800 B.C. to A.D. 100 in the Mid-Ohio Valley.

“These were built through manual labor — obviously they didn’t have backhoes or dump trucks,” said Wes Clarke, archaeologist at the nearby Castle Historic House Museum. “They didn’t even have wheelbarrows. … These would have been multi-generational projects.”

Marietta is also home to earthworks attributed to the Hopewell culture, in an estimated period from 50 B.C. to A.D. 450. These include a pair of rectangular enclosures, surrounding 59 and 27 acres, between what are now Second through Fifth streets, the largest of which contained a trio of flat-top mounds. A graded passageway between that enclosure and the Muskingum River was known as Sacra Via, a name that lives on in a park and bordering street.

The carefully manipulated topography provides clues to at least one purpose of the earthworks, as lines down the center of Sacra Via and across ramps on the Quadranou Mound and Capitoleum Mound align with the sunset on the winter solstice.

Visitors walk atop the Conus mound in Marietta’s Mound Cemetery in August. (Photo by Evan Bevins)

“One simple answer is these were in one sense giant clocks or calendars,” Clarke said. “But I think it’s much more than that.”

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Although Marietta grew around the earthworks — the main branch of the Washington County Public Library even sits atop the Capitoleum mound — they were not in the backyards of the Adena and Hopewell people, who tended to live up and down the river valleys, Clarke said.

“This wasn’t a day-to-day living space,” he said. “We believe that this was set aside as what we might call a sacred space.”

Conical mounds like the one in the cemetery, designated “Conus” in 1785 by leaders of the Ohio Company that settled the area, almost always have bodies buried in them. But they aren’t community grave sites, nor were they reserved just for leaders in the society, Clarke said. Remains of men, women, children and even infants have been found in such mounds.

Old stone steps and a metal handrail provide access to the top of the Conus mound that gives Mound Cemetery its name. (Photo by Evan Bevins)

“There was more going on with that selection than whether you lived to do great things,” said Clarke, saying they might have been for certain clans.

Scholarly speculation suggests the mounds, whether through height or relation to astronomical features, represent an intentional connection between the Earth and the sky, Clarke said. There was likely a religious or spiritual significance.

“These were places where ancestors were buried and you could come here and interact with your ancestors,” Clarke said.

Special objects were buried with the people, often made with materials from outside the area. Examples include marine shells from the Gulf of Mexico, copper from Michigan or mica from North Carolina, Clarke said. That indicates the communities were participating in a massive trade network across the eastern portion of what is now the United States.

It’s presumed that similar contents could be found in the Conus mound, but Clarke won’t be digging there and doesn’t believe anyone else should either.

The Quadranou mound north of Warren and Third streets in Marietta is associated with the Hopewell culture. (Photo by Evan Bevins)

“We’d rather just leave it alone,” he said, noting a desire to avoid disturbing human remains and to keep the earthworks intact. “That’s an irony of archaeology — you destroy your data as you collect it.”

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The top of the Conus mound was leveled off in the 1800s, and unconfirmed stories claim human remains were encountered.

There was some excavation at Capitoleum when the library expanded in 1990. A collaboration then between the library, Marietta College and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History yielded stone tool and ceramic specimens, plant matter providing insight into the environment and diets of the era and wood charcoal that was carbon dated to confirm its place in the Hopewell period, according to information provided by Clarke.

Some prehistoric artifacts — including bladelets, long and narrow flint tools with sharp edges associated with the Hopewell culture — have been recovered while researchers investigated the Nathaniel Clark pottery site on The Castle grounds, about a block away from Mound Cemetery.

The Washington County Public Library on Fifth Street in Marietta sits atop the Capitoleum mound, associated with the Hopewell culture. (Photo by Art Smith)

While some of the earthworks have been lost over the years, Clarke is grateful the leaders of the Ohio Company and others through the years recognized the importance of the earthworks and that so much has survived.

“It’s wonderful that it was set aside so early, so it’s been really well preserved,” he said.

Clarke likens the earthworks to famous historical sites such as Stonehenge or the pyramids of Egypt. Conus, including the ditch and embankment, is similar in diameter to Stonehenge, and the Great Pyramid at Giza could fit inside the square surrounding the flat-top mounds four times.

Both those structures are on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site list, and Marietta’s earthworks are on that radar.

“They are receiving … recognition that they are significant and important on an international level,” Clarke said. “It’s a very long and detailed process. International teams have come here to see the mounds, evaluate them.”

(Image Provided)

In the meantime, area residents and visitors can visit The Castle website, mariettacastle.org, to find upcoming events focused on the earthworks and other aspects of local history. The Castle plays host to an annual gathering to observe the winter solstice sunset at Sacra Via.

Evan Bevins can be reached at ebevins@newsandsentinel.com

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