History of Ohio - Prehistoric Indigenous Peoples

Prehistoric Indigenous Peoples

The Late Archaic period featured the development of focal subsistence economies and regionalization of cultures. Regional cultures in Ohio include the Maple Creek Culture(Excavations) of southwestern Ohio, the Glacial Kame Culture culture of western Ohio (especially northwestern Ohio), and the Red Ochre and Old Copper cultures across much of northern Ohio. Flint Ridge, located in present-day Licking County, provided flint, an extremely important raw material and trade good. Objects made from Flint Ridge flint have been found as far east as the Atlantic coast, as far west as Kansas City, and as far south as Louisiana, demonstrating the wide network of prehistoric trading cultures.

About 800 BCE, Late Archaic cultures were supplanted by the Adena culture. The Adenas were mound builders. Many of their thousands of burial mounds in Ohio have survived. Following the Adena culture was the Hopewell culture (c. 100 to c. 400 C.E.), which also built sophisticated mounds and earthworks, some of which survive at Hopewell and Newark Earthworks. They used their constructions as astronomical observatories and places of ritual celebration. The Fort Ancient culture also built mounds, including some effigy mounds. Researchers first considered the Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio to be an Adena mound. It is the largest effigy mound in the United States and one of Ohio's best-known landmarks. Scholars believe it may have been a more recent work of Fort Ancient people.

When modern Europeans began to arrive in North America, they traded with numerous Native American (also known as American Indian) tribes for furs in exchange for goods. When the Iroquois Confederacy depleted the beaver and other game in its territory in the New York region, they launched a war known as the Beaver Wars, destroying or scattering the contemporary inhabitants of the Tennessee region. During the Beaver Wars in the 1650s, the Iroquois nearly destroyed the Erie along the shore of Lake Erie. Thereafter, the Iroquois claimed Ohio and West Virginia lands as hunting grounds. For several decades, the land was nearly uninhabited.