SunWatch: The Planned Village That Predated Columbus by Two Centuries
Near Dayton, Ohio
Along the Great Miami River south of downtown Dayton, archaeologists in nineteen seventy-one discovered that the city had been planning to build a sewage treatment plant on top of a seven-hundred-year-old village. The city changed its plans. What they uncovered over the next seventeen years is now a National Historic Landmark: SunWatch, a thirteenth-century Fort Ancient community with a layout so deliberate it still startles visitors.
The Fort Ancient people were farmers, growing corn on the Ohio bottomlands around the year twelve hundred. Their village was circular, organized around a large central post that aligned with sunrise and sunset on the solstices and equinoxes, a solar calendar built into the architecture. The whole settlement was occupied for only about twenty years before the community moved on, as Fort Ancient villages typically did when surrounding fields were exhausted. Because it was abandoned cleanly and never built over, the site is one of the most intact examples of pre-Columbian village planning in the eastern United States. The reconstruction opened to the public in nineteen eighty-eight.
