Archaeology Map of the Mound Builders Works in Ohio

Coming down to a smaller scope of territory, can it be shown that in the case of any one state the early Indian mound builders occupied the portions most heavily populated today? It has been said that, in Ohio, four counties contain evidence of having been the scenes of special activity on the part of the earliest inhabitants: Butler, Licking, Ross, and Franklin.

These are interior counties (at a distance from the Ohio and Lake Erie) and, of the remaining sixty-three interior counties in the state, only seven exceeded these four in population in 1880—when the cities had not so largely robbed the country districts of their population as now. Thus the aborigines seem to have been busiest where we have been busiest in the last half of the nineteenth century.