The Fort Ancient people populated southern Ohio from 1000 to 1750 CE. Their culture was based on agriculture, primarily corn, squash and beans. They lived in villages of about 100 to 500 residents. SunWatch is the most extensively excavated village belonging to this prehistoric culture.
HOW TO GO
WHAT: SunWatch Indian Village/Archaeological Park
WHERE: 2301 West River Road, Dayton
HOURS: Tuesday-Saturday, 9 am. - 5 p.m.; Sunday, 12 - 5 p.m.; closed Mondays.
ADMISSION: Adults, $6; seniors, $4; students, 6-16, $4; children under 6 and members are free.
FOR MORE INFO: 937-268-8199 or sunwatch.org
Two key features at an open-air museum are being restored to give visitors a unique glimpse into how prehistoric people once lived next to the Great Miami River.
Having deteriorated over the years, the Solstice House at SunWatch Indian Village/Archaeological Park was razed last summer so a new one could be rebuilt in the exact spot where archaeologists unearthed relics of a prehistoric structure. Adjacent to the Solstice House is the Big House, which is slated for restoration later in the year.
“We believe SunWatch is an important exercise in experimental archaeology,”said Mark Meister, President and CEO of the Dayton Society of Natural History, which owns and operates SunWatch.
Central figures in the restoration of the Solstice House are Curator of Anthropology Bill Kennedy of SunWatch and independent contractor William Cahill, one of only two master thatchers in the United States.
Cahill, originally from Ireland and now living in Middletown, is completing thatchwork on the structure, which the prehistoric Fort Ancient people, whose culture was keenly based on the seasons, oriented to mark Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year.
“I’m wood and William is thatch,” Kennedy said. “(The SunWatch staff are) not professional thatchers, and it’s lasted as long as we’d hoped.”
Reconstructing the Solstice House has been a lengthy process for Kennedy and Cahill. Using only local wood cut by hand, Kennedy rebuilt the frame. The poles stand in the very same holes as the original prehistoric structure’s — “It’s exactly on the footprint where a house was 700 years ago,” Kennedy said.
“It’s is a very green structure, considering that everything is local,” Cahill said.
Between winter snowstorms, Kennedy and Cahill gathered prairie grass for the roof from the grounds at SunWatch as well as Five Rivers MetroParks’ Medlar Conservation Area in Miamisburg. “We couldn’t do this without (Five Rivers MetroParks’) help,” Kennedy said.
“We used to have lots of native prairies here,” Kennedy said. “It’s a type of ecosystem that was once common. But like wetlands, the prairies were wiped out by modern development.”
Although prairie grass was once a common roofing material, few people today are experts in using it. To become a master thatcher — an official title— Cahill completed a five-year apprenticeship in Ireland. Then he “traveled to Asia and Africa to learn all their methods and styles,” Cahill said.
“To get to work with William has taught me more than I could ever learn from reading books,” said Kennedy, whose scholarly focus in the past five years has been on prehistoric architecture.
“What people don’t realize is that there are so many sites in Southwest Ohio,” Kennedy said. “There are over 5,000 prehistoric sites recorded within 25 miles of SunWatch. Unfortunately, many have been destroyed and some are very small. But there are huge earthworks like the Miamisburg Mound and Fort Ancient.
“Just counting burial mounds, there were once 20,000 in Ohio. Only a few survive today,” Kennedy said. “One of the messages we hope to teach is how important conservation is. We’re losing sites every day, mostly to urban sprawl.”
Research is ongoing at SunWatch. “When we build those structures, we monitor how they age and are always learning how to rebuild in a better way,” Meister said. “For example, we’ve had a question about the thatching, ‘Which end of the grass goes up or down?’ William Cahill has been a tremendous asset.
“It’s been a learning process, and we’re always trying to get at the heart of how the Fort Ancient people lived,” Meister said.
Cahill hopes to complete the thatching of the Solstice House soon after Easter. “Weather permitting,” he said.
He’s on site most days. Visitors at SunWatch are welcome to watch him work and ask questions about thatching.
A grant from the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation and the Fred and Alice Charitable Memorial Foundation, with additional support provided by Fiver Rivers MetroParks, has made the restoration of the Solstice House possible.
Later in the year, SunWatch is scheduled to rethatch the Big House, Kennedy said.
The larger structure sits beside the Solstice House. The Fort Ancient people, who were heavily dependent on corn, oriented the Big House so that the huge pole in the center of the village casts a shadow in the doorway in the spring and fall to signify planting and harvesting time, said Samantha Lake, who has worked at SunWatch for two years.
Funding for the Big House project comes from a $16,000 grant from the Ohio Historical Society, which recently announced History Fund grants to 10 organizations in the state. In addition to SunWatch’s grant, the other local group to receive a grant is Dayton History, which has been awarded $18,000 to digitize a collection of very early aerial photographs from the William Preston/Marvin Christian Photograph and Negative Collection.
“People should come out and take advantage of SunWatch,” Meister said. “Having a site like this in the city is very, very rare. The people of Dayton should be thankful how it’s been preserved.”
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