Did giants roam Athens County back in the day

And all of those mounds and earthworks throughout Athens County and the Ohio Valley? That’s their handiwork. And they had battles, too. Huge battles. Along the lines of what Homer chronicled in “The Iliad,” and about as verifiable, which is to say, not at all.

Of course there are others – professional archeologists namely – who disagree. Both sides do agree, however, that there once was a tribe known as the Allegewi. The Allegheny Mountains and the Allegheny River are both named after them. And at one point, it was the Allegewi who considered as part of their home what is now Athens County.

In fact, they called most of the Ohio Valley home, extending as far west as the Mississippi River. Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian spokesperson Eileen Maxwell said last week that not much is known about the Allegewi beyond folklore from other tribes.

“There is no peer reviewed or archaeological evidence,” she said. “Lenape lore says the Allegawi they encountered were tall, but not giants.”

Fritz Zimmerman, an independent historian, researcher and author of the two-part “Nephilism Chronicles,” sees it differently. He actively scoffs at what he deems the career-building institutionalism of professional archeology.

“I think I have three, maybe four accounts of giant skeletons being pulled out of mounds in (Athens) County,” he said in a phone interview on Saturday. These skeletons include skulls with sloping foreheads, a protruding brow ridge, a massive jaw and thick skull walls, he said.

In essence, he added, these are Cro-Magnon skulls, along the lines of what he’s said have been found around Stonehenge in Europe, and even, according to Zimmerman, at the gates of Damascus.

Accounts of giant skeletons being pulled from mounds and earthworks can be found in numerous county histories and 19th Century newspaper archives throughout Ohio. These accounts often include tales of giant tools and weapons being discovered with the skulls, which are said to be able to fit over a normal human head. The skulls also have sometimes been reported to have double rows of teeth.

An account from the Athens Messenger dated April 21, 1870, stating that one mound in The Plains “had two circular arches of stone in it.

“Under the first arch of stone were two very large skeletons,” it said.

Similar accounts are found in the Brown and Licking county histories, as well as that of Columbus, Ohio. In Londonderry, Ohio, The Washington Post reported a skeleton only an inch short of eight feet long found under a mound. Zimmerman said he’s aware of more than 300 accounts of giant skeletons found in Israel, the British Isles and North America.

He claims that the Allegewi had advanced understandings of numerology and mathematics in creating their earthworks, including pi. He cites the specificity of the measurements of their mounds and henges, as well as these measurements matching across regions. These tribes lived in the Ohio Valley and made these earthworks roughly between 300 B.C. and 300 A.D., he said.

Zimmerman also maintained that the tribes known to archaeologists as the Adena and Hopewell are actually the Allegewi. He scoffs at the names “Adena” and “Hopewell,” saying they are derived from developers who sought to destroy the very earthworks these tribes created.

In one limited sense then archaeologists and Zimmerman agree on who made these earthworks. Archaeologists say that it was the Adena and Hopewell Indian tribes.

BRAD LEPPER, A CURATOR OF archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society, said Friday that most of what is known about the Allegewi comes from folklore from Delaware tribes who did battle with them and most likely portrayed their enemies in the most fearsome light possible.

“Defeating giants is much more impressive than if you defeat pygmies,” he said. “Oral traditions… can have a lot of information that’s not historically accurate.”

He said equating the Allegewi with the Adena or Hopewell doesn’t work because the oral traditions of the Allegewi’s large towns and fortifications don’t match up with the archeological evidence about the Adena and Hopewell cultures.

“They didn’t live in large towns,” he said, referring to the two latter cultures. “They didn’t live on platform mounds where they would build large temples.”

He said the history of the Allegewi has been embellished, and likened trying to find evidence of their culture to trying to find evidence of the Trojan War.

Lepper also had a number of explanations for the elongated bones, the large tools and the newspaper accounts and county histories. He said, essentially, that if archeologists had evidence of giant skeletons, and actually had the skeletons themselves to show, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t let that information be open to the public.

“If we had bones of giants, we would put them on display,” he said. “Or certainly at least the artifacts and things. Just because it would get you on the cover of National Geographic to have evidence like that.”

He said the Hopewell did make some gigantic spear points, but it’s clear that they were symbolic, not functional, which he said is similar to a key to a city being presented in current times.

“We don’t have any giant-sized tools appropriate for some giant hunter to be using in their daily lives,” he said. “I’ve never heard of any reliable accounts of skeletons larger than maybe seven feet. We don’t have anything that big in our collection.”

Hopewell and Adena people averaged about 5’6” or 5’7”, he said.

As for why newspaper accounts might report skulls with double rows of teeth, Lepper said this is entirely possible.

“It shows up in all populations around the world as a very rare genetic mutation,” he said.

With regard to the “giant” skeletons found, Lepper pointed out that the accounts never tell of finding an average-sized person.

“It’s always either a giant or a pygmy,” he said. “I think that appeals to the sensational that people want to read about.”

He said that when amateurs excavate a burial they come up with unreliable estimates of the stature.

“As the soft tissue – the ligaments and muscle that attaches bones – decays, the bones can settle and spread out a little bit,” he said. “If you just measure where the bones are, you can get an inflated notion of how big somebody was.”

He said no Indian remains from the period in question housed in the Ohio Historical Society collection are giants.

“If these things were real, they would’ve been given more attention,” he said. “They would’ve been published about more than a funny account in a newspaper.”