04/10/2009

Archaeological Field School at Fox Farm in Mason County

Fox Farm is situated on a broad, gently rolling ridgetop about 60 miles north of Lexington, near Maysville, Kentucky. This very large (40 acres) Fort Ancient village was occupied from A.D. 1100 to 1650. Fox Farm was initially investigated in 1895 by Harlan I. Smith of the American Museum of Natural History. During the 1920s, William Funkhouser and William Webb of the University of Kentucky worked at Fox Farm, and in the 1940s James B. Griffin of the University of Michigan used materials from Fox Farm to define seven Fort Ancient ceramic types. Professional archaeologists from the University of Kentucky returned to Fox Farm in the mid-1980s and undertook limited excavations near the center of the site.

Fox Farm is one of the largest Fort Ancient villages in the Ohio Valley, but archaeologists know very little about its internal organization. Was it organized as a circular community around a central plaza? Does it contain more than one Fort Ancient village? Did the organization of this community change through time? These are the primary research questions you will explore along with archaeologists from the University of Kentucky.

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