Mike Wolanin | The Republic A view of the construction site for the new court services building in Columbus, Ind., shown Monday, Aug. 2, 2021, after additional human bones were found on the site.
While analysis of remains found at a local construction site is still ongoing, the city of Columbus could receive a report on the case by the end of this year.
Rachel Sharkey, a research archaeologist with the Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, said the University of Indianapolis is still analyzing bones found at the construction site of the new Bartholomew County Court Services Building. She does not know when they will be finished.
“I think they’re (the college) finalizing their analysis, and, as I said, they’re hoping to have a summary report of findings to the city of Columbus by the end of the year,” said Sharkey.
The university has been involved in the investigation and is analyzing both human and animal bones found on the land. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources has also been involved with the case.
Bones were first found on May 18 by construction workers trying to locate a 1940s-era clay sewer line as part of the court services building project at 555 First St. The human bones do not make up a complete skeleton, city Redevelopment Director Heather Pope said in a previous interview, and were found about 6- to 7-feet deep, mixed with animal leg bones from pig and cattle that had been severed by some sort of serrated saw.
Since the bones were not found in a casket or burial container, investigators think the bones were moved to the site at an unknown point in time, Sharkey said in an earlier interview. It is unknown why they were found in a somewhat jumbled formation, and why the human bones were not laid out in an anatomically correct way, as would have been expected with a burial.
Additional bones, believed to be human, were then found in August on the construction site, and were added to the investigation.
Pope said that fragments were identified from eight individuals, possibly nine. Sharkey confirmed that this figure pertains to humans.
“It’s been taking a while, because they’ve literally had thousands of fragments,” she said. “The bones weren’t in great condition, and so they’ve had to do a lot of piecing together.”
She added that another factor in the timeline is that the college is relying on students for this project, as well as instructor Christopher Schmidt, who is the principal investigator. The material was transported to the university at the beginning of the semester, said Sharkey. She noted that those involved with the project have also had classes to manage, as well as the adjustments of returning to campus for the first time since the pandemic started.
Sharkey said that there is no news on reburial plans for the human bones.
“As far as I’m aware, no arrangements have been made yet, but as soon as analysis complete, I know that we’ll be reaching out to Native American tribes to get that taken care of,” she said.
At least some of the human bones found on the construction site since the initial discovery are believed to be from the Adena culture.
“We haven’t found a lot of diagnostic artifacts to give a definitive time period, but there are some indicators that they are dating to what we like to call the Woodland Period,” Sharkey said in a previous interview.
This period, she said, dates from about 1,000 B.C. to 1,200 A.D.
According to the DNR, from 1,000 to 200 B.C there was a people group in Indiana that is now known as the Adena culture. This name was given to the group by archeologists, who did not know what members called themselves. The term originates from the name of Thomas Worthington’s farm. Worthington lived in Chillicothe, Ohio in the 19th century.
The Adena was not one tribe, but instead probably a “group of interconnected communities living mostly in Ohio and Indiana.” Over a period of 500 years, the Adena culture turned into the “Hopewell tradition,” another set of interconnected groups also named by archaeologists. Some scholars believe that the Hopewell could have later become the people we now know as the Miami or Shawnee.
Sharkey said in May that the animal bones are newer than the human remains, and added that she believed the animal bones to be “historical,” dating from the 1800s to the early 1900s.
