Artifacts from the Adena which were discovered in Loganton, in the forefront, were on display as well as other finds brought by Thomas "Tank" Baird for his talk on the mound mystery at the Thomas Taber Museum recently.

Thomas “Tank” Baird, President of North Central Chapter 8 of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology, recently shared his love of local archaeology at a presentation on artifacts recovered from a site in Loganton where the Adena Culture once lived.

About 50 people attended the event at the Thomas Taber Museum to listen to Baird share the history of the Adena who were in this area from around 800 BC until 1300 AD.

“They quickly set themselves apart from the hunter-gatherers early woodlands culture that were in Ohio and the things that set them apart were their burial practices. No one knows where they got it,” Baird said.

“Worldwide they were creating mounds and burying people in the mounds. It’s in Russia, in Scandinavia, in China, literally all around the world,” Baird noted.

Saying that he didn’t believe that there was a worldwide collaboration to explain how mounds arrived here.

“If all this communicating was going on the Native Americans would have gotten the bow and arrow earlier,” he postulated.

However, he noted that the mortuary practices of the Adena “went as far as anyone worldwide.”

The Adena are often compared to Egyptians because of the culture’s practice of trading exotic goods and for burying their dead in conical burial mounds with some of the artifacts they traded.

Although the Adena were in this region for some time, Baird noted that there is no archaeological evidence of them in the areas along the Susquehanna River, which would have been a logical site for artifacts of this culture, which dealt in trading along the eastern coast of the country.

Baird also noted that in the western region of the state, mounds are very common. But nearer to the Susquehanna River, “they’re just not there,” he said. The artifacts that were discovered were just 15 miles from the river at Loganton over a period of years in the early 1960s.

“This is not a usual find,” Baird said.

At the start of the presentation, Baird, who is considered an authority on Native Americans, shared what drew him to study local archaeology.

“What has always fascinated me is what’s right under our feet here, literally,” he said.

“I probably won’t get the chance to excavate in Egypt or Rome or any place like that, but we have stuff, routinely that old right here,” he said.