60 Proceedings of Indiana Academy of Science 
The director of the Field Museum at Chicago advised me, upon 
inquiry, that some five distinct cultures are traceable in Illinois; and 
Prof. Mills, Curator of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical 
Society, says that about as many minor cults are said to have existed 
in Ohio, although they have not been definitely traced. Indiana, in 
between, must have harbored all of them more or less, and an interest- 
ing field, consequently, is here open for investigation. 
The great pyramidal mounds at Etowah in Georgia and Cahokia 
in Illinois, with their associated tumuli, are evidences that a race with 
great power and high ideals once occupied the Mississippi valley. They 
Seem to have passed up to the headwaters of the Mississippi and also 
branched off into the comparatively mild valley of the Ohio, leaving 
traces in Indiana and Kentucky. 
In Ohio two quite distinct groups developed, reached their zenith 
and passed into oblivion, for their characteristics were not common to 
the native tribes which occupied that section at the beginning of our 
historical period. 
The earlier of these two cultures is marked as peculiar by having 
been the first to build immense earth walls. The largest of these em- 
bankments are located at a point some 40 miles north of Cincinnati, 
on a headland with steep sides and some 200 feet above the Little Miami 
River which adjoins it, and is known as Fort Ancient. They inclose 
about 100 acres of level ground and are over 3% miles in length; they 
contain about three million cubic feet of earth which was carried from 
a distance to construct them. In places they are twenty feet in height 
with a base about four times the height. Openings were left in the 
embankment every 200 feet or so and these openings average some- 
thing like 20 feet. This feature interferes with the inference that they 
were the walls of a fort, and point rather to their being of a ceremonial 
nature. 
At Marietta, Ohio, at the mouth of the Muskingum River, and at 
Newark, in the upper Muskingum valley, some 40 miles east of Colum- 
bus, were traces of this early Fort Ancient culture in the form of 
pyramidal mounds at the former place and remarkable earthworks at 
the latter. These embankments while not being any ways near as large 
as those at Fort Ancient, being only from about 2 feet to 8 feet in 
height, were constructed with a wonderful geometrical accuracy. They 
were in groups enclosing areas of from 2 to 50 acres, and the groups 
were distributed over an area of four square miles. Many of these 
groups being connected by passageways outlined by low parallel walls 
8 to 12 feet apart, indicating an extensive ceremonial use on a tre- 
mendous scale. 
Large sepulchral mounds with indications of cremation burial are 
lacking with the culture or cultures at Fort Ancient and at Newark, 
but in the Scioto valley a culture developed to an almost unbelievable 
perfection. Here earth embankments of wonderful geometrical accuracy 
are accompanied by sepulchral mounds which contain evidences of cere- 
monial rites in connection with elaborate cremation burial, the most 
remarkable of artistic pottery and carving in stone which undoubtedly 
will place them at the forefront of stone-age peoples, and above any 
