Chapter Two:
People
When humans entered North America is disputed. The previous understanding held that hunter cultures crossed the Bering Sea from Siberia to Alaska on foot about 14,000 years ago, over a bridge of dry land exposed by ocean levels lowered by the glaciations which then covered the northern part of the globe. More recent interpretations of archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence have led some researchers to assert that humans could have arrived on the continent as distantly as 30,000 years ago or even earlier. What is not disputed is the time of the arrival of the planet's peculiar species in what is now Ohio. This occurred approximately 12,500 years ago.
The Paleo Indian period of habitation of Ohio lasted about 4,000 years. With the retreat of the glaciers, early Natives moved from the south of what is now Ohio to the north, arriving on the lake plain about 10,000 years ago. These people of the Paleo Indian culture lived in small groups of about 50 members, in camps which served as meeting places and centers of communication, moving them with the migrating game. These people built fires, cooked, constructed homes of bark or animal hides, and made tools and clothing. Where flint was available they established workshops to fabricate weapons and tools, and supplemented their diet with the nuts of the oak, hickory and walnut trees.
Euclid Avenue is the oldest ancient artifact in the township. Beneath it lies the sandy beach ridge left by Lake Erie's shoreline of approximately 13,000 years ago. Native peoples used it as a dry elevated highway through the bogs on the lake plain. It follows the base of the Portage Escarpment across the north end of what became Euclid Township from the Niagara River to present-day Detroit. Prehistoric hunters, European trappers, American horses and wagons, and diesel semi-trucks have used this natural thoroughfare for millennia.
A second long period of human habitation followed the Paleo Indian, known as the Archaic period. The Early Archaic Phase lasted approximately 2,500 years, from about 8,000 to about 6,500 years ago. During this time peoples south of the Ohio River practiced agriculture, cultivating squash approximately 4,300 years ago. They supplemented their harvest with continued hunting and gathering, with their camps becoming increasingly permanent with relatively large populations. They added knife technology plus ground granite axes and food preparation tools to their chipped flint spear points. Sites of this tradition are preserved near Tinker's Creek and the Aurora Branch of the Chagrin River, though many others have undoubtedly been destroyed by the industrial development of the Flats in Cleveland on the Cuyahoga River. Still others may have been submerged by the rise of Lake Erie, which today is nearly 130 feet higher than it was during the Early Archaic period.
During the Middle Archaic period, from 6,500 to 4,000 years ago, the people of Ohio learned to use their resources more efficiently. The use of ground and polished tools exploded during this time, and an increasing number of Natives in the future Ohio settled and stayed in camps at the mouths of rivers and streams on Lake Erie. They seem to have preferred the lakeshore, with little evidence of Middle Archaic habitation in the Heights of present-day Cuyahoga County. Evidence suggests that during this time these ancient inhabitants began to appreciate the mystery of death and deliberately to bury their dead. The living dug shallow circular pits and laid individual bodies in them with tokens of the deceased's Earthly time, a single axe or pendant perhaps, or a few chipped stone points.
A warming climate took hold during the Late Archaic period from 4,000 to 2,500 years ago, with temperatures in Ohio much warmer than those of today. The people of this period continued to gather nuts, and to cultivate squash and seed plants, and they may have traded all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Ground stone and shell artifacts of animals and geometric shapes have been found from this period, as well as hooks used with spear throwing tools. The Late Archaic people, like their earlier ancestors, buried their dead in circular pits, but prepared the bodies more elaborately, covering them in red ocher and sending them into the next world with trade goods and pristine flint spear points. Cemeteries of these burial pits were congregated on high ground. In fact, unlike the Middle Archaic people, these Late Archaics seemed to have appreciated the high ground, leaving the greatest number of artifacts along the sandy beach ridges left by the rise and fall of the lake, as well as on the terraces above the large rivers of the area.
Within what became Euclid Township, sometime during the Brewerton Phase of the Laurentian Archaic period of approximately 4,500 to 4,000 years ago, at a spot above Euclid Creek 830 feet above sea level, Native hunters left two weapon points. This site is known as the Clark Site. At roughly the same time, on another bluff of the same height at a place called the Impressive Site, Natives left further artifacts of the same tradition. The precise locations of these and the other known archeological sites in Euclid Township is a secret guarded by the professional archeologists who hope someday to study them in depth. Some are located on private property, and withholding their locations from plunderers and dilettantes both preserves them for later study and protects property owners' lands from being dug up for curiosity or treasure. Brian Redmond of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History will reveal that most of the archeological sites in the Euclid Creek drainage are on private land outside of the Euclid Creek Metropark, above Euclid Avenue and north of Monticello Road. This area occupies a promontory between the main branch of Euclid Creek and a smaller unnamed creek running down the escarpment on the east side of Green Road in South Euclid and Euclid, Ohio. It's high and has a narrow neck between the two streams at the southern end. With a commanding view of the surrounding area—not to mention a lovely view of Lake Erie to the north—it's precisely the kind of ground that the evidence suggests the Natives of the Late Archaic period favored.
The long Archaic period gave way to a new, faster-paced era of technological development and social change known as the Woodland period in approximately 500 BCE. In the Early Woodland period, which lasted until 100 CE, the Native people of Ohio began earnestly to tame the wilderness and to use the power of farming to take control of their food supply. In fields near their settlements they planted sunflowers, goosefoot and squash. Proximity to their food supply and the need to tend to their crops rooted them more deeply to fixed locations, although they continued to supplement their harvests with game and wild plants. These people developed pottery for cooking and storage, though with limited considerations for aesthetics. The pots were usually undecorated, save for the occasional scoring with a twine wrapped stick. In southern Ohio an Early Woodland group known as the Adena constructed conical mounds over their graves and created circular enclosures of earth which may have been used for public ceremonies and events. "Adena" was the name of the estate of Thomas Worthington in Chillicothe, where a large mound of this culture was found in the 19th century. Other Adena mounds were located by historian Charles Whittlesey in the Cuyahoga Valley and on the east side of Tinker's Creek. Whittlesey also recovered a stone pipe from a large mound of the Adena tradition east of the Cuyahoga River. (Whittlesey, incidentally, was an interesting figure in his own right. A Cleveland lawyer and topographic engineer, he was an amateur archaeologist and conducted the first detailed archaeological surveys of Northeast Ohio in the early 1800s. He later became the founder and first president of the Western Reserve Historical Society.)
Approximately 100 CE, the Middle Woodland culture developed in Ohio and lasted for 600 years. These people continued the lifestyle of their ancestors, farming and fishing, hunting and gathering, but with a flowering in the decoration of their pottery. Mound sites from this tradition yielding artifacts of ceramics, flint knives and projectile points have been located south of Brecksville and in Lake County in the area of Willowick and Eastlake, with the Eastlake site revealing artifacts suggesting trade with southwestern Illinois. These people left hunting camps along the ridges above the Cuyahoga River, and again, industrial development in the Cleveland area in the last 200 years has most likely destroyed many Middle Woodland sites.
Approximately 700 CE, the appearance of corn agriculture and the development of a high tech hunting weapon, the bow and arrow, marked a turning point in the human occupation of Ohio. These advances allowed the populations of Late Woodland villages to boom. The climate moderated at this time, and Late Woodland people built circular homes containing fire hearths and storage pits on the bluffs above the rivers of Northeast Ohio. In the spring large camp populations gathered plants and fished, establishing fishing camps on the sand ridges along the streams which flowed to the lake. In the fall and winter they hunted, sometimes setting up camp in rock shelters. One Late Woodland site was discovered in Downtown Cleveland in 1988 and rests in the sands beneath Progressive Field. The Late Woodland Period ended about 1200 CE.
A suspected Late Woodland site known as the Euclid Creek Reservation Site, consisting of grit tempered pottery and triangular projectile points, was located on a terrace 800 feet above sea level overlooking a small stream flowing into the main body of Euclid Creek. Dr. Redmond of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History tried to relocate this known site in 2001, but was unable to do so. He speculates it may have been destroyed by nearby construction prior to 1999. A fourth archeological site within what became Euclid Township known as the Shebanek Site was located 870 feet above sea level near Euclid Creek. This site was destroyed prior to 1980 by the construction of a housing development.
In the Late Prehistoric period, beginning about 1200 CE, northeastern Ohio was occupied by a people known to archeologists as the Whittlesey, named for the aforementioned naturalist who first studied them. Of the prehistoric peoples who lived in northern Ohio prior to 1600 CE, it is the Whittlesey People about whom the most detailed information is known. They lived in villages, growing crops of corn, beans and squash, and, like their ancestors, they fished, hunted game with bows and arrows, collected wild plants and nuts, even kept dogs. Every 10 years or so they would move their settlements, possibly due to depletion of the soil, possibly due to sanitary considerations, maybe both. The presence of crushed shells in the pottery of the Whittlesey People suggest that they may have participated in an extensive trade network with cultural contact in the Ohio Valley, perhaps as far away as the Mississippi. Their ceramic work suggests trade with the Sandusky people to the west, with whom they may have interacted for trade, to exchange brides and for important cultural ceremonies. Their tools of stone, bone and antler survive, and they probably worked in wood as well, although time has destroyed these types of tools.
In the period after 1350 CE the people of the Whittlesey tradition became more fixed in location and reliant on their agriculture, with large villages occupied permanently with associated burial grounds nearby. Evidence suggests defense was on the minds of the people who placed these settlements, favoring locations on promontories with steep sides with clear views overlooking the river valleys. By 1500 CE the Whittlesey People occupied fortified villages year round, farming nearby crops of corn, squash and beans, and living in closely spaced long houses occupied by several families each.
By 1615, when the prehistory of Northeast Ohio ends, extraordinary things probably not unknown to the Native people of the region had already been happening on the distant ocean coast for more than a century. When the first brash young Frenchman and his party emerged from the forest near the great falls at the eastern end of the lake that year, the fatal events in the 12,000 year history of the Native inhabitants of Northeast Ohio had already been in motion for quite some time.
The information in Chapter Two is drawn from the following sources:
"Ohio's Prehistoric People." Ohio Public Library Information Network.
www.oplin.lib.oh.us/products/ flint/people/archeopop.html
"Prehistoric Inhabitants." Encyclopedia of Cleveland History website. www.ech.cwru.edu
Blank, John Edward. "Cultural Resource Survey for Euclid Creek, Ohio." Submitted to Department of the Army Corps of Engineers Buffalo District, 1980.
Chase Bloetscher, Virginia. Indians of the Cuyahoga Valley and Vicinity. Cuyahoga Valley Archaeological Society, 1980.
Cherry, P.P. A Lost Race or The Last Stand of the Eries. Indian Pathfinders Association, 1921.
Hulbert, Archer Butler. Indian Thoroughfares. The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1902.
Redmond, Brian G. "The Whittlesey People." Cleveland Museum of Natural History. www.cmnh.org/research/archaeo/whittlesey/whittlesey.html
Expert Consultation:
Brian G. Redmond, PhD, Curator and Head of Archaeology, Cleveland Museum of Natural History.