![]() When you see a comet going through the air, it would look like a large snake," he said. "The Miami tell of a horned serpent that flew across the sky and dropped rocks onto the land before plummeting into the river. "What's fascinating is that many different tribes have similar stories of the event," he said. Various Algonquin and Iroquoian tribes, descendants of the Hopewell, spoke of a calamity that befell the Earth, said Tankersley, who is Native American. A comet-shaped mound was constructed near the epicenter of the airburst at a Hopewell site called the Milford Earthworks. The Hopewell people collected the meteorites and forged malleable metal from them into flat sheets used in jewelry and musical instruments called pan flutes.īeyond the physical evidence are cultural clues left behind in the masterworks and oral histories of the Hopewell. And we found a spike in both, iridium and platinum." So we also look for another rare element found in nonterrestrial events such as meteorite impact craters - iridium. "The problem is platinum also occurs in volcanic eruptions. Cosmic events like asteroids and comet airbursts leave behind high quantities of a rare element known as platinum," Tankersley said. "These micrometeorites have a chemical fingerprint. A variety of meteorites, including stony meteorites called pallasites, were found at Hopewell sites. In his lab, lead author Kenneth Tankersley, a professor of anthropology in UC's College of Arts and Sciences, held up a container of tiny micrometeorites collected at the sites. They also found a charcoal layer that suggests the area was exposed to fire and extreme heat. The meteorite fragments were identified from the telltale concentrations of iridium and platinum they contained. ![]() UC archaeologists found an unusually high concentration and diversity of meteorites at Hopewell sites compared to other time periods. The study was published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. This coincides with a period when 69 near-Earth comets were observed and documented by Chinese astronomers and witnessed by Native Americans as told through their oral histories. The airburst affected an area bigger than New Jersey, setting fires across 9,200 square miles between the years A.D. UC archaeologists used radiocarbon and typological dating to determine the age of the event. The comet's glancing pass rained debris down into the Earth's atmosphere, creating a fiery explosion. This was home to the Ohio Hopewell, part of a notable Native American culture found across much of the American East. Researchers with the University of Cincinnati found evidence of a cosmic airburst at 11 Hopewell archaeological sites in three states stretching across the Ohio River Valley.
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