Prehistoric village found on site for football stadium

GNADENHUTTEN — An archaeological dig at the site of Indian Valley High School’s new football stadium has revealed that it was the location of a native American settlement dating from 500 to 2,000 years ago.

“It was not a large settlement and it was not a permanent settlement,” said schools Superintendent Ira Wentworth. “It was a spot where they would take up temporary residence.”

The archaeological study was recently completed and the archaeologist’s report has been accepted by the State Historic Preservation Office.

“The impression out there is that this held things up, and it did not,” Wentworth said. “Phase 3 of the study took about two weeks to complete. It began and finished before the construction schedule was ready to put up.”

The construction fence is scheduled to be put up in a few weeks and the stripping of top soil is scheduled for the week of Aug. 6.

The facility will be built behind the baseball/softball complex at Indian Valley High School. The stadium will include a turf football field, an eight-lane track, locker rooms and a multipurpose building for all athletic teams, as well as the band and physical education classes.

When land is purchased for public purposes with the intent of building on that land, three types of inspections must be done, the superintendent said. One is an environmental inspection, to see if there are any wetlands. There are none. Second is a geotechnical survey, in which samples of the ground are taken to make sure the site is suitable for building. It is suitable, he said. The third survey is archaeological.

The archaeological survey was performed in three phases. During the first, an archaeologist used a hand-held magnetic device to survey the land and mark any spots where hits were registered.

“What they found during phase 1 was fire-cracked rocks,” Wentworth said. The rocks were black and cracked from being used in fire pits.

“The archaeologist estimated the rocks to be 500 to 2,000 years old from prehistoric native Americans,” he said. “What they found would not be from native Indians from the 1780s, but older than that.”

In phase 2, the archaeologist brought out a larger magnetic resonance apparatus and scanned the entire 19-acre site.

“They found cooking pits which were indicative of a smaller settlement,” Wentworth said.

In phase 3, archaeologists excavated an area a little larger than an acre on the site, along with six other spots scattered across the 19 acres.

They found some pottery, some hand tools and a burned root, he said. The bulk of the discoveries were burned rocks from thermal pits.

“It’s appropriate, I guess, considering the history of Gnadenhutten,” Wentworth said of the community, which was the site of a Moravian Indian mission during the Revolutionary War.