5. Walk on an indigenous mound buried in concrete.

Jessamine County’s pioneers narrated themselves as settling vacant land. But they absolutely knew that they were not the first peoples in the area. Bennett Young, the grandson of settlers from North Carolina and Virginia, recalled finding “beautiful arrow-points and a few stone axes” while plowing, hoeing, planting and harvesting crops on his father’s farm in the 1840s. He put them in a small treasure box.

 

Young also uncovered prehistoric skeletons in rock shelves in shallow caves near the town of Keene. He was finding traces of the Early Fort Ancient peoples.

 

A century and a half later, real archaeologists began to learn much more. In the twentieth century the federal government mandated cultural resource management studies of vulnerable locations. One of those digs happened in the 1980s near Young’s plantation on the top of a broad ridge near Jessamine Creek, now the site of the Jessamine County Board of Education and Nicholasville’s Rt. 27 bypass.

 

It was dubbed the Muir site. It consisted of four structures and forty-four pits occurring in clusters thought to be residential units. Each “house” was rectangular and small, only 3x4 meters in dimension. Inside were two deep floor basins with centrally located hearths for cooking and heating. One had interior posts that suggested a bench or partition. It appears that these structures were not used for much other than sleeping and storage by about five families—and for just fifteen or so years, a relatively short period of time. After being abandoned, it appears that they were used as garbage dumps.

 

During their seven-week dig, the archaeologists found many artifacts. Most of them were sherds (broken pottery in this case)—23,328 sherds to be exact. In addition, they found 13,536 lithic artifacts (stone pieces, especially stone tools) and 102 bone tools (bird bones into awls or fishhooks, turtle carapace remains used as cups or bowls, elk antlers as scrapers). To give you a sense of what archaeological scholarship reads like, here’s an excerpt that describes some of those artifacts:

 

The Jessamine series includes Jessamine cordmarked and Jessamine plain types. Jessamine series ceramics are primarily tempered with limestone, though other materials are present as secondary or minor temper constituents. These minor constituents may include ferromanganese concretions if these are present in the local clay bodies used for ceramic manufacture. Other common temper materials include crushed shell, which becomes more common in the latter half of the temporal span of its manufacture. Other attributes of Jessamine series ceramics are the presence of loop handles and almost exclusively S-twist cordage. Jessamine sherds are generally thin-walled, and vessel forms include primarily jars and bowls. Jessamine series ceramics are associated with the terminal Woodland period and the early Fort Ancient period, with a date range of about 800-1200 CE.

 

Since none of the ceramics they unearthed could be assigned to existing Fort Ancient ceramic types, the archaeologists assigned a brand-new category—Jessamine—to the sherds recovered from Muir.

 

They also found molded pinchpot bowls, ear spools, and an elbow pipe. The most amusing discovery was a discoidal, a disc-shaped stone rolled across the ground and used as a target for spear-throwing in a game known as chungke. They also found lots of tools: bifaces, drills, scrapers, fishhooks, and perforating and hide-working implements like beamers and awls. Many of these tools were made of cobble chert (see picture), which is a hard opaque sedimentary rock they got from the Kentucky River. They found arrow heads, long triangular points that were long and narrow with exaggerated flared bases, some of which were finely serrated.

 

The Early Fort Ancient Peoples used these implements to kill and process deer (47.3 percent), elk (24.5 percent), and bear (16.6 percent). These animals accounted for almost 90 percent of the bones at the site. Also identified in the assemblage were beaver, raccoon, gray fox, dog, gray squirrel, woodchuck, otter, bobcat, and opossum. Turkey accounted for almost all the bird remains. Fishing and freshwater mussel gathering apparently were only a minor activity for the Muir site population and contributed little to their diet. The only human remains recovered were two baby teeth.

 

From evidence gathered at Muir, we know that they cultivated plant food such as knotweed, sunflower and beans. Phaseolus beans especially were essential to middle and late Fort Ancient plant use and identity. In fact, archaeologists determined that this village marked a new phase in Fort Ancient development—the Osborne era (950-1200 CE)—when indigenous peoples increasingly utilized agriculture. Calibrated radiocarbon dating indicates that the site was occupied during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

 

There are many more indigenous sites in Jessamine County outside of Muir. These are especially intriguing because they date back even earlier to the Adena period of the so-called “moundbuilders” who lived here as early as 800 BCE. That’s nearly a millennium before the time of Christ. One such mound is located near the Bethany Woods development east of Nicholasville.

 

Adena mounds held dead bodies. They typically started small, typically holding just several bodies. They stood just a few feet tall and measuring seventy feet or less in diameter. If no one else was buried there, the mound remained a low feature on the landscape. That means that there were thousands of small Adena mounds scattered across the landscape, almost all of which have been lost to agriculture and the construction of towns.

 

Some mounds, however, kept growing. In these cases, the Adena kept burying people (usually elites who held important social positions in their communities) on top of each other, separating bodies with a layer of soil. Over time, these mounds became vertical cemeteries. Their burial mounds and earthworks stand today in mute testimony to the richness of their cultural traditions.

​

As Bennett Young got older, he got nostalgic. He became preoccupied with the encounters he had with the Indian artifacts of his youth. When attending Kentucky’s constitutional convention of 1890, another collector gave Young an entire cabinet full of arrow heads. As Young later wrote, “The gift . . . awoke a slumbering admiration which for forty years had remained dormant, and with a well fixed, increasing yearning I at once set about gathering a store of these stone implements and remains. Like a tiger, the taste of blood only enlarged the desire, and soon my researches, as well as my demands for specimens, became a torment to my friends and acquaintances.”

​

In 1910 Young published a book entitled The Prehistoric Men of Kentucky: A History of What Is Known of Their Lives and Habits, Together with a Description of Their Implements and Other Relics and of the Tumuli Which Have Earned for Them the Designation of Mound Builders. The book depicted the “vanishing races” of the Early Fort Ancient peoples as “noble savages” who in their time had “stood for much that was bold, wise, and progressive.” They paved the way for the “civilized” white pioneers who would follow.

​​

In 1914, just five years before his death, the Smithsonian offered Young $50,000 for his collection of relics. He rejected the offer to keep the collection in his home state. It is currently housed at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville.

​

Since the Depression era, the pace of mound research in the Bluegrass has slowed. Archaeologists are still identifying new mounds, but they excavate them only rarely, typically when modern construction projects cannot avoid them.