Singer-Hieronymus: Fort Ancient Villages in Scott County

Each time people moved, they built a new ring of houses around an open plaza, a short walk from the last one. Over the centuries those moves left a cluster of circular villages unlike any other known in Kentucky or anywhere else in the Fort Ancient (opens in a new tab) world.

University of Kentucky archaeologists first studied the site in the 1920s, when they recorded two circular villages. They came back in the late 1990s. In the late 2010s, teams from East Tennessee State University and the University of Alabama joined them. Fieldwork over many seasons has now documented at least six villages.

Each village shows up as a "midden stain," a ring of dark soil made by everyday life. The rings follow the same plan. Houses stood in a band around the plaza. People buried their dead in front of their houses, close to the plaza.

They threw most of their trash out behind their homes. Five of the stains date from about 1300 to 1400 CE, and one dates to the 1500s. The community may have grown and shrunk as families arrived or moved away, and at times more than one village may have stood at once.

The largest ring, Midden Stain C, covers more than two and a half acres. It is about 330 feet across, with a plaza 210 feet wide. Two low earthen burial mounds were once linked to it. The university fully dug one of them in the 1920s. The other, about 60 feet wide and 3 feet tall, sits at the plaza's northern edge. No mounds are known at the other villages.

Newer tools helped finish the count. Using geophysical survey (opens in a new tab), archaeologists mapped what lay underground without digging. A magnetometer picked up soils changed by houses and trash pits. Electromagnetic induction, which measures how soil carries electricity and responds to magnetism, worked best: the midden stains showed up as bright patches on the maps.

Surveyors had known of four stains before. The new surveys confirmed two more, and a third is suspected, which would bring the total to seven.