1 BEFORE THE WESTERN RESERVE: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF NORTHEAST OHIO Brian G. Redmond, Ph.D. Curator of Archaeology, The Cleveland Museum of Natural History March 2006 When Moses Cleaveland landed at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in 1796, he had no idea that the human history of the land he was sent to survey was unbelievably ancient. He was also probably unaware that the few Native Americans that he met in the newly christened Western Reserve were relative newcomers. They were unrelated to the original inhabitants of the land whose final descendants had disappeared just a few generations earlier. This then, is a story of the first people of northeast Ohio. People whose true names are unknown, but whose deeds are reflected in the artifacts left behind. This is a history that only archaeologists can read, but one that all northeast Ohioans should know. The landscape of northeast Ohio is a relict of the great Late Pleistocene Ice Age. The rugged terrain, which begins just south and east of Cleveland, is known as the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau, an ice-scoured portion of the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. This land was once covered in thick Beech-Maple forest and small lakes and bogs left behind by the glaciers. The steepness of these "heights" is set off by the nearly flat Lake Erie Plain that hugs the south shore of Lake Erie from Buffalo to beyond Toledo. At the time of white settlement, the mixed oak forest of this plain was interrupted by coastal marshes, small prairies, and wide river estuaries. Just west of the Cuyahoga Valley, the land flattens out to become the Central Till Plain, a rolling terrain of glacial soils still covered today in spots by native beech-oak-hickory woodland. All of these landscapes, with their varying but productive ecosystems, come together in the Greater Cleveland area and make northeast Ohio one of the most geographically diverse, but environmentally rich, landscapes in Ohio. Into this ecological mosaic ventured the first human inhabitants. They, and those who came after, occupied our state for more than 10 millennia before contact with Europeans. THE FIRST PEOPLE Archaeological research in northeast Ohio over the last century sheds considerable light on the various prehistoric or ‘pre-Contact' cultures that inhabited our region. The earliest known colonists are called ‘Paleoindians' ("Paleo" meaning ancient) or more appropriately ‘Paleoamericans' since their true relationship to more recent Native Americans remains uncertain. These earliest peoples lived in Ohio from about 13,000 to 11,000 years ago and left behind their finely flaked flint spear tips (called ‘fluted' points), as well as stone hide-scrapers and knives, in dozens of locations across