Fort Ancient culture

The Fort Ancient culture flourished from about 1000 to 1750 CE along the Ohio River valley, from present-day Ohio and western West Virginia through northern Kentucky into southeastern Indiana. A contemporary and so-called sister culture of the neighbouring Mississippians, it was distinct in pottery, settlement and burial ways, and mitochondrial DNA suggests it did not descend directly from the older Hopewell culture it succeeded. Fort Ancient villagers lived in stockaded towns with central plazas and platform mounds, grew the maize-beans-squash triad the culture is credited with introducing to Ohio, and hunted deer, elk and black bear in the surrounding hills. Its ceremonial genius survives in effigy earthworks: the Great Serpent Mound and the Alligator Effigy Mound were both shown by modern radiocarbon work to be Fort Ancient creations rather than Hopewell ones. After European contact, epidemic disease, the fur trade and the Beaver Wars scattered Fort Ancient towns; survivors are thought to have joined Siouan and Algonquian peoples, including the ancestors of the Shawnee.