On the interior attached ditch enclosures of the middle and upper Ohio Valley*

Abstract

This paper summarizes data collected from the literature on 123 interior attached ditch enclosures ("sacred enclosures") of the Middle and Upper Ohio River Valley. In addition to the data summary it isolates two structural elements‐dirt and water—that were employed consistently in the construction of sacred spaces beginning about 2300 B.P. These same two elements reappear in the historic mythology of the region. It is proposed that the enclosures represent a material expression of the creation of the world as an historical event. Thus, the creation of a sacred place for ritual was also a recreation of the cosmos as related historically in the Earth Diver myth.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.