In 1990 I met David Orr of Ross County through contacts in the Ohio archaeological community who knew I had worked with Arlington Mallery. Orr, a farmer, had plowed up some unusual burned material in a wheat field. He suspected it might be evidence of the kind of furnaces Mallery had uncovered in 1949-50 in the nearby Deer Creek valley. Orr knew about the furnaces because his uncle Marcus Orr was the photographer for the Chillicothe Gazette who took photos of Mallery and his excavations.
I contacted Orr and set a time to meet at his wheat field site. The burned debris was found at the top of a glacial kame. I examined the material Orr found and knew right away it was the same as I had dug up with Mallery in 1963. Then I found more of the burned and glazed materials at the top of this elevation. I was certain these unique materials were evidence that a furnace existed there. Convinced we were "on to something," Orr and I decided to work together to solve the mystery of the furnaces.
We began our investigations in June, 1990 with a surface excavation at this site which we named "Glacial Kame." The property owner permitted Orr and I to make only a shallow excavation there in June, 1990. But since we uncovered an oval ring of hard-baked red clay, I knew this was the upper part of a pit furnace. I'd seen the same thing at the nearby Arledge mound with Mallery in 1963. This became our first archaeological dig. We took photos, collected materials and artifacts and wrote reports on our findings.
Another site, the Arledge Mound, was re-excavated in 1991 to obtain materials for laboratory dating. This site had been previously dug by several amateurs and was highly disturbed by other intrusions.
Both of these digs gave us valuable but limited experience. We hoped another furnace site could be found so we could make a complete investigation. However, we had our doubts, feeling that the pit furnace phenomena might be very local with only a few examples available.
But there were more! At first we found one more, the Lynn Acres furnace, and then, we were amazed when reports and of them just kept accumulating until there were a dozen new ones, and then even more. Today, including both existing sites when our investigation began, and new ones, there are 30 of the Deer Creek types sites reported for Ohio.
In January, 1992 we investigated at Lynn Acres in southwestern Pickaway County after hearing that our kind of artifacts had been found there. The landowner had been bulldozing a hillside in the course of building a dam for a farm pond and had uncovered more of the mysterious burned materials. Once again, I was certain a furnace existed at a site because of the oval ring of clay, which I recognized as the upper part of a pit furnace bowl. Also in evidence were glazed stones, hard-baked clay and iron slag.
Since we realized no one had ever proven that the fire pits were iron furnaces, we coined the term "archaeo-pyrogenic" to describe them so we could maintain scientific objectivity. We also realized some of the fire pits, especially the prehistoric examples, probably represented some other type of high temperature materials processing.
While amateurs previously had declared some of the Ohio pits to be "iron furnaces," professional archaeologists never accepted their claims. Since these amateurs didn't follow accepted archaeological methodology when digging at their sites, rejection by the professionals was not unreasonable.
Therefore, until we could gather evidence and submit it to the proper authority to evaluate, we considered the function of a fire pit to be unknown but capable of high-temperature materials processing, or archaeo-pyrogenic.
Once we had worked out the archaeo-pyrogenic approach, we decided to form an organization to better investigate the fire pit phenomena. Orr and I then formed the Archaeo-Pyrogenics Society (APGS) in 1992. Membership included interested non-professionals from Maine to Washington State and a group of local Ohioans who located, investigated and excavated fire pit sites.
A paper co-authored by William Conner, David Orr and Scott Troy, entitled "The Enigmatic Iron Pit Furnaces of South-Central Ohio," was presented to at a meeting of the organization of Ohio's professional archaeologists, the Ohio Archaeological Council (OAC), in May, 1995. Scott Troy is a professional archaeologist of Columbus, Ohio who is a member of the OAC and the APGS.
This paper represented an important milestone for Orr and I. We had long sought professional recognition of the furnace phenomena and it was finally achieved at this meeting.
The abstract is as follows:
"For over 45 years, the existence of artifacts, surface anomalies and erosional remnants associated with iron smelting pit furnaces have been reported from the middle Scioto River Valley. Although much of this evidence has been refuted or ignored by professional archaeologists, current research has identified 33 sites supporting a pre-nineteenth century chronology."
For more about the presumed historic Deer Creek type furnaces, and the excavation of the Lynn Acres furnace, use the link below:
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