My daughter-in-law and I are working on a mural for the new Native American room at the Lake County Historical Society in Painesville, Ohio. We started it last spring and it's about half finished. We've had several interruptions, but started working on it again this week. The finished mural will be about 11 feet high by 14 feet long. It represents a Whittlesey Focus village site about 1500 A.D. as one might have looked if it were situated on our present site, overlooking the Grand River and not far from Lake Erie. In fact, Dr. Redmond and his crew from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History conducted a field survey with some test digs on our site in May of 2008. We only found one piece of worked flint from the holes, but right at the end of the survey, one of our staff members found a beautiful little adze in the field where we were working. A few weeks later, we found a rough, much larger celt. Dr. Redmond said that our site fits perfectly the description of known Whittlesey sites along the southern shore of Lake Erie. Anyway, it's apparent that the Whittlesey at least passed through our site. Dr. Redmond advised us on the details of the mural. He spent a couple of hours at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History going over our layout, letting us photograph Whittlesey pottery and showing us the real Ringlar dugout canoe that is stored in the basement under carefully controlled conditions. (The dugout canoe on display is a replica of the real one downstairs.) Our mural depicts village life, with a combination of round wigwam style buildings and long house type buildings. The village is surrounded on three sides by a stockade. A large field of corn and squash and beans is being harvested just outside the stockade. People are cooking, making pottery, building wigwams, playing games, etc. I'll try to add some photos of the mural to the blog soon.