AA Sum 05 pg 44-C4
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The Conservancy To Acquire Its 300th Site The Fort Salem earthwork has Hopewell and Adena characteristics.
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summer • 2005
CHARLOTTE HILL-COBB
I
n 1980 The Archaeological Conservancy made its first purchase of an archaeological site by acquiring one of the most famous sites in American prehistory, the Hopewell Mounds site in southern Ohio. Twenty-five years later, we are still at it, purchasing for 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 six feet high and 60 feet in diameter, while the smaller one was about four feet high and 40 feet in diameter. The wall was about three feet high and was paralleled for much of its length by an exterior ditch. Today both mounds are about two feet lower and the wall is only about one to two 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 This artist’s rendition of the Fort Salem earthwork is based on the 1883 drawing by surveyor J.P. MacLean that within the circle bespeak a very appeared in the Smithsonian Annual Report. It’s believed to be the first published drawing of the earthwork. long period of growth. The site has not been mechanically plowed, nated the site to the National RegisThe site was part of a farm that and by all accounts it is one of the ter of Historic Places in 1971, but no was to be sold at an auction. Patrick best preserved earthworks remainscientific excavations have taken Welch, a local avocational archaeoloing in private ownership in Ohio. place there. Any past looting apgist, notified the Conservancy of the The Ohio Historical Society nomipears to have been minimal. situation. “The Fort Salem Chapter
