Denison University anthropology professor John Soderberg dug himself into a hole.
Well, it was a trench that Soderberg and his team hoped would provide evidence of a long-lost earthen circle built by Indigenous people thousands of years ago.
Something resembling a circle appeared on sub-surface imaging of a field off Newark-Granville Road, east of Columbus. The property belongs to the village of Granville and is home to several known archeological sites. Soderberg said the field shows evidence of being inhabited for around 10,000 years.
But if there was an earthwork there, farmers virtually erased it with 200 years of plowing.
“What we're doing here is called ‘ground truthing,’” Soderberg said. “It’s, ‘OK, we've got this weird anomaly that shows up. Can we figure out what it is?’”
‘Ground truthing’
Soderberg walked along the 50-foot-long trench. For the most part, a clear line divided the lower layer of yellow-orange clay and the upper, brown-colored soil. Soderberg looked for changes that indicate humans once moved the dirt, and he found one.
“Suddenly, this really clear, easy division between that yellow layer and the brown layer goes away,” Soderberg said.
It happened again a little further down the trench. Soderberg believed that could be cross-sections of the circle he’d seen in imaging.
“This is not dramatic, like, ‘Oh my god, here we got it,’ archeology. This is really subtle, small changes,” Soderberg said.
It was slow work on a hot day. The sun beat down on the dig team. Former and current Denison University students sat around tarps, sifting through buckets of dirt by hand. Their efforts didn’t yield anything extraordinary, but the young archeologists still reveled in small discoveries.
Recent graduate Emma Hall held up a small rock.
“It’s my first one,” Hall said. “Yeah, that’s really, a piece of flint!”
She traced her finger along a smooth edge of the stone. It may have been part of an ancient tool. She bagged her find.
Across from Hall, another recent graduate, Eli Lishack, ran his hands through the dirt.
“There’s a challenge in, like, what we want this to be and what it could be and how it could help tell this message,” he said. “Maybe this site isn't showing us exactly what we're seeing on the map. But it's opening up conversations and creating opportunities to transmit this information a little bit more effectively.”
After finding the anomalies in the first trench, the team enlisted a backhoe to open a second perpendicular one. Soderberg sought matching disturbances that would show where the circle curved around. Nothing immediately jumped out.
Brad Lepper, an expert on earthworks with the Ohio History Connection’s World Heritage Program called it a “thorny problem” – but said that’s archeology.
“Archeology isn't just about digging holes and finding cool stuff, it's about answering questions and solving problems. And sometimes those problems aren't solvable in a limited excavation,” he said.
If this was an earthwork, it may have served a different purpose than the much larger, more complex earthworks in nearby Newark that are believed to have been part of a sprawling ceremonial hub.
“These tiny circles might be community churches or shrines or things like that,” Lepper said.
Making a discovery
The team decided to keep digging. Later, Soderberg created a 3D model of the site. And then, he sent an email to the dig team.
“It was like, ‘RE: anomalies, if they're circles,’ or something. And he sent it at like 10 o'clock at night, after he had worked on them all day,” Hall said. “The way that he mapped it, it’s super convincing.”
Soderberg’s digital model shows flags where the disturbances in the soil seem to match in both trenches. It appeared they had discovered an earthen circle after all.
Hall, Lishack and other student archeologists took their findings to Granville’s Planning Commission. In a 20-minute presentation, they explained that experts felt humans had moved the dirt to build something, though they still couldn’t definitively prove it was an earthwork circle.
“The shining golden treasure doesn't appear the first hole that we make, right? And even the second hole, the third hole,” Lishack said after the meeting.
The young archeologists agreed that regardless of the ultimate outcome, searching for the circle was a great experience.
“I don’t think I’ve ever played in the dirt so long in my life,” laughed current Denison student Amelia Xu. “I didn’t know I could be so excited by just finding, like, a small piece of flint.”
Soderberg said the team will analyze the results and do carbon dating in the coming weeks and months. If the anomalies date to the right period, that could confirm that the team found an earthwork.
“The pace of research in archaeology is slow,” Soderberg said. “But the stuff has been sitting there for thousands of years.”
In the meantime, the students have some ambitious ideas about how to share their findings and the history of Granville with residents and visitors. They hope to one day create an interactive digital map that shows Granville as it was then and as it is today.
The village of Granville already protected part of the field where the students dug by turning it into Munson Springs Nature Preserve. It includes other historical sites like the place where the village’s first settlers overnighted before establishing Granville’s main corridor just down the road.
Soderberg and the students hope to continue to explore the area in years to come, possibly as part of Denison University’s brand new archeology minor.
“Being out there on an excavation makes that history come alive,” Soderberg said. “Even if we are never able to be fully confident about the results for the circle, they will never see Granville and the Racoon Valley in the same way. I'd love the opportunity for more people to have that experience.”
