Whittlesey culture

, 1867 The culture is named for Charles Whittlesey, an archaeologist and geologist who was the founder of the Western Reserve Historical Society. He was known for his work discovering and describing indigenous people, the Whittlesey culture, who lived in northeast Ohio from A.D. 1000 to 1600. ==Culture==

The Whittlesey people are known for where and how they established villages and their pottery. Their villages were surrounded by ditches or palisades and were located near the Lake Erie coast or on plateaus in river valleys. Artifacts Stemmed knives, small triangular projectile points, and flake scrapers are the few types of tools found from the Early Whittlesey period. The Whittlesey lifestyle was similar to that of the Shawnee, but their settlement pattern was similar to the Haudenosaunee. The Whittlesey did not engage in the fur trade with European traders during the early contact period. Whittlesey sites were abandoned about 1640 and were not populated again until the mid-1740s when Odawa and Wyandot people from Detroit moved into the area. Due to the degree of displacement of Native groups during the early contact period, it is difficult to ascertain what happened to the Whittlesey culture people. ==Sites==

South Park Village The Whittlesey established a permanent village across from the Cuyahoga River and lived there for hundreds of years. Artifacts include arrowheads and decorated pottery. They did not have a complex trade network. Their diet included a combination of foods that were hunted and gathered. They hunted duck, beaver, and deer. River mollusks, walnuts, grapes, hickory nuts, and chokeberries were part of their diet. A historic marker is located on the Towpath Trail in Valley View, Ohio. Outdoor Education Center Site The Outdoor Education Center (OEC 1 Site), a Independence Board of Education building, is also an archaeological site of prehistoric people of the Whittlesey culture and earlier. It is located in Independence, Ohio in a wooden nature preserve along the Cuyahoga River. Animal bones, Madison point stone tools, and Tuttle Hill decorated pottery sherds were attributed to the Whittlesey culture. The excavated items were found over a dispersed area in 1999 by a group led by Mark Kollecker, Supervisor of Archaeology Field Programs of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. From the several excavations, the village sat on two to four acres. Kollecker led another Archaeology Field Experience program group in April and May 2000 and found several post molds and nine cooking and storage pits of prehistoric people. A Leimbach cord-marked vessel from about 500 B.C. is believed to be from the Early Woodland period, long before the Whittlesey culture would have lived at the site. ==References==