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27 chapter 2 The Parochial Cosmopolitans of the Middle Ohio Valley Petersburg, in Boone County, Kentucky, is the perfect spot for a river town. Even during the great flood of 1937, when the Ohio River breached its floodplain, Petersburg remained dry. It is a stable and high spot of ground with rich soils, and human societies have recognized its virtues for millennia. Before Petersburg, Kentuckians called it Tanner Station, no doubt after the abundance of deer hides that Indians and settlers hauled into the town during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Before Tanner Station, generations of Fort Ancient villagers took advantage of this protected terrace facing the river. Today, very little in this tiny hamlet of four streets suggests that Petersburg was once one of the most favored spots, for American Indians and settlers alike, across the breadth of the Ohio Valley.1 Archaeologists have known something of its value since 1993, when soil tests along the riverbank revealed abundant evidence of past occupants . At that time, archaeologists David Pollack and Gwynn Henderson persuaded town officials to “stop offering permits [for] any ground disturbing activity . . . or risk unearthing human remains.” Folks in Petersburg listened to their advice until 2004, when a local man wanted to build a large house facing the river, on Front Street. A permit was issued, and the backhoe operator set to his task. Human remains appeared in the back-dirt piles almost immediately. Parts of skulls, femurs, and human teeth seemed to scream out of the alluvial soils, pleading with the backhoe operator to stop the work. But he kept digging until the footprint of the basement (at least sixty by forty feet) was nearly complete.2 Frantic phone calls followed, and town officials arrived and informed the homeowner and the backhoe operator that they had committed a felony under Kentucky state law.3 The mayor called Pollack and Henderson , the lead archaeologists with the Kentucky Archaeological Survey, to 28 / THE DAWN OF COLONIZATION investigate what had occurred. Pollack and Henderson have been haunted by the memories of what they found ever since. Bones, stone-lined graves, and other funerary objects protruded from the basement walls. The brutal power of the backhoe had ripped through an ancient cemetery, destroying perhaps fifteen to twenty graves. At the times of these deaths, relatives of the deceased had placed copper ornaments, beads, beavertails, copper clips, and whole pots with them. They had laid out their kin in extended poses, on their backs, and some of the graves had been framed with cuts of limestone, making a kind of rectangular stone coffin for the deceased. Grave goods interred with the dead revealed that the backhoe operator had callously unearthed a protohistoric site, a place in which European trade goods, rather than Europeans themselves, had begun to transform Native ways of life.4 Petersburg is downstream from where the Great Miami drains into the Ohio, at the center of a string of Fort Ancient villages that were located along the Ohio River on the eve of colonization. Pollack and Henderson did what they could to salvage, restore, and save what remained of the Fort Ancient cemetery. They concluded that the destroyed site had been built on top of previous villages dating back seven hundred to eight hundred years. The homeowner in need of a basement had built a house atop a place that had been continuously occupied for nearly a millennium. As they worked, curious onlookers craned their necks, hoping to catch a glimpse of burials that should not have been theirs to see. When Pollack and Henderson’s work was done, the state declined to prosecute either the backhoe operator or the homeowner. Across the Middle Ohio Valley, there are places just like Petersburg. Once Europeans made contact with American Indians, Native migrants and colonizers alike desired the same things that Fort Ancient villagers had wanted from the land. Native Americans and colonizers considered the risk of flooding, the opportunities for trade, and the abundance of the land. To the east of Petersburg, at the confluence of the Little Miami and Ohio rivers, modern Cincinnati sits atop the late Fort Ancient site of Madisonville. And east of Madisonville, at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio rivers, settlers founded modern Portsmouth, Ohio, on top of generations of Shawnee and Fort Ancient towns. Colonial-era migrants, Native and non-Native alike, favored confluences because these places combined agricultural and diplomatic opportunities. In the 1720s, Algonquian and Iroquois migrants called...

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