A rare piece of Native American jewelry, believed to date from the fifth century CE has been found by a crew digging a ditch in Ohio.

Contractors digging a ditch for a fiber optic box near in the Ohio village of Newtown unearthed human remains and called the police. The police quickly realized that what they had found was a Native burial site and not a recently dug grave and phoned the Cincinnati Museum Center.

“When the police department actually called us, when I talked to them, he said they found some human remains and he said there was a plate with it.  And I kind of knew exactly what he meant because we had found these other two back in 1981,” Bob Genheimer, Rieveschl Curator for Archeology, at the Cincinnati Museum Center, told WVXU.

According to Genheimer, the plate is called a gorget. Shell gorgets, a Native American art form involving animal depictions carved into polished shells were worn around the neck. The name comes from the French gorget which ranged from simple cloths being worn around the neck to armor plates.

The Native varieties were used by a number of different tribes in different regions but were most common in the Eastern Woodlands tribes from 200 BCE until 500 CE and the Mississippian cultural groups from 800 CE until 1500 CE. The oldest shell gorgets date back 3000 years. They are believed to have been used to demonstrate status or rank or for religious reasons as protective amulets.

“A gorget is an ornamental item.  These gorgets have three holes in them. They have two at the top for suspension and there’s one in the middle where they possibly could have been attached to clothing or something else, and on the inside, they are engraved,” said Genheimer.

Two other shell gorgets have been found in Newtown, one with the image of an opossum and the other with a panther carved on them. The latest find has a hybrid animal that is part bird and part cat.

“We believe that the bird may be a Carolina Parakeet.  Which, as many people know, is now an extinct bird, but used to be prevalent in the southern United States and as far north as here,” said Genheimer.

Native American artifacts are found frequently in and around Newtown which had a long history of settlement prior to the arrival of European settlers. Genheimer believes that the shell gorget dates to the fifth century inhabitants of the valley.

“These people lived their lives like anyone else, but they had a little more elaborate ceremonialism when they died, and they would bury things with them,” he said.

One thing that is not clear is where the shells used to make the ornaments came from. The shells are believed to have come from the Gulf Coast or southern Atlantic region of the US which suggests extensive trade routes.

“It’s a good question how these got up here.  Obviously it’s probably trade.  We don’t think anyone from here went down and got them.  One of the real questions is where were they engraved?  Were they engraved somewhere in the southeast where the shell came from?  Or was the shell brought up here and were they engraved here?  We really don’t know the answer to that,” said Genheimer.

The remains have been reported according to the conditions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and could be claimed for reburial.

Additional information about the people who lived in the area around the fifth century can be found at the Newark Earthworks, a nearby site in Ohio dating from roughly the same period.