“Why So Many Shapes?: Explorations of the Steel and Junction Group Sites” – Timothy Everhart

Famous ancient sites such as the Pyramids of Giza or the Pantheon led to the lasting association between monuments and complex societies like the Dynastic Egyptians or the Romans. Yet more recent research has documented that many small-scale societies worldwide constructed monuments. Unique among these examples are the Woodland earthworks of the Central Scioto River Valley. The noteworthy features of these societies and their monuments include their wide-spanning ritual network used to acquire exotic raw materials, the art of unprecedented skill produced from these materials and ultimately incorporated in funerary ceremonies, the varied and complex architecture of earthen monuments, and the scale and diversity of form of these monuments. Together these features were a complicated dynamic between people and the landscape – what archaeologists call monumentality. One of the most striking features of this monumentality is the variability in monumental forms. Excavation at the Steel and Junction Group sites over the last two years has sought to explain the source of this diversity. This talk will detail the results of those field campaigns and offer suggestions as to why these societies chose to build such an array of earthworks.

For more information, please call the park at 740-774-1126. For a complete list of lectures please visit https://www.nps.gov/hocu/planyourvisit/summer-lecture-series.htm