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Northeast Ohio was temporary home to roaming Native Americans
Northeast Ohio was temporary home to roaming tribes
POLAND
Despite the persistence of tales of Native Americans in the Youngstown area, Northeast Ohio was like a buffer zone among multiple tribes in the region when European settlers arrived.
In her presentation sponsored by the Poland Historical Society on Tuesday, Traci Manning, curator of education for the Mahoning Valley Historical Society, explained that the Mahoning Valley was not home to permanent Native American settlements. Rather, it accommodated migrants and refugees from tribal wars.
Manning started her presentation by explaining the migration of people to North America.
The first evidence of human settlement in the area is Meadowcroft rock shelter, which is about 70 miles from Youngstown. Indigenous groups stayed at the site more than 19,000 years ago.
At this time, called the Paleolithic Age, “small groups [followed] large animals. They are doing some gathering of fruits and plant life. Very migrant and likely no permanent settlement location,” Manning said.
Although Native American tribes started to build permanent communities between 4,000 to 9,000 years ago, historians speculate that poor soil quality, weather and dense forest underbrush kept Native Americans from permanently settling here.
Evidence of temporary housing, such as wigwams, could be found in the area, however. Wigwams are small, domed shelters that could be made of saplings, bark and hides.
In the hundreds of years that led up to the European settlement of North America, Native Americans had developed complex chiefdoms, creation stories, ceramic tools and crop cultivation.
Historians refer to the clash between Native Americans and European settlers as the juncture in which Native Americans become “historic” rather than “prehistoric.”
Historians use the terminology to refer to groups of people who record their history and those that do not.
But Manning noted that “language” is defined by those who write history.
“I hope we’ll get to a time period where we stop using that prehistoric/historic term, because cultures we consider prehistoric may have been more advanced than cultures considered historic just because they wrote things down,” Manning said.