Cleek-McCabe: A Circular Fort Ancient Village in Boone County

On the Mud Lick Creek floodplain near Walton in Boone County, Cleek-McCabe is a thirteenth-century Fort Ancient (opens in a new tab) village: a midden ring about 100 feet wide around a plaza about 200 feet across, with low burial mounds east and west. University of Kentucky crews in the late 1930s sampled the ring and dug the western mound; the eastern mound still stands.

Inside the western mound, which stood about 3 feet high, investigators found burials and rock "pavements," flat spreads of large limestone that may mark ritual capping of the mound. Beneath it were three successive roofless public buildings on the same spot: first a 43-foot circle, then rectangles of 40 by 80 and 56 by 95 feet. A large pole pit sat at the center of all three, suggesting a central pole tied to religious activity, and the roofless submound buildings echo those found under earlier Adena and Hopewell mounds.

Cordmarked jars with guilloche-incised necks and thick triangular strap handles tie the pottery to other Fort Ancient communities in Boone County, southwestern Ohio and southeastern Indiana.

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The site is on private land and is not open to visitors, so its map pin is rounded to about 10 km. The Kentucky Archaeological Survey's site page is the best public account.