Business Ethics & Environmental Sustainability: Adena Mound and the Mound Cold War Discovery Museum : University of Dayton, Ohio

A pervasive theme of the Business Ethics and Environmental Sustainability Living-Learning Community is that humanity has survived, if not thrived, by innovating what are arguably killer apps: first stabbing sticks, then spears, then atlatls, then bows and arrows, and so on. Of course, the first weapons wielded were made of wood, stone and bone, their lethality augmented by poisons made from plants.

Our early consideration of baseball — locally and nationally — enabled the BEES to also appreciate how modern humans’ ability to divide the labor, specialize and trade gave us a competitive edge over Archaic peoples (Neanderthals, Denisovans) and each other.

The BEES then drilled down to learn about humanity’s specific track record in the “land between the Miamis” (between the Little Miami River and the Great Miami River). After the last (Wisconsin) ice age, both Paleo and Archaic peoples passed through the region, doing their part in rendering the great megafauna extinct.

By 1000 BCE, the Adena or Early Woodland tribes supplanted the Archaic, adding slash and burn agriculture to the human repertoire of ‘killer apps.’ But the Early Woodland people are best remembered for their enduring trademark constructions — burial mounds — of which the Adena Mound is the second largest extant conical mound in the United States.

The irony — that the same location came to house, in the 20th century, the area’s Cold War sequel to Dayton’s Manhattan Project units — was not lost on the BEES. Dayton developed the initiator used in the Trinity Test at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico in July 1945, and in the Fat Man device that was dropped on Nagasaki later that same year. Throughout the Cold War, the Mound continued the polonium-related work and developed other explosives for initiators (e.g. radium and actinium, thorium and plutonium).

Before the tour — to better understand the extent to which humanity has impacted the earth’s trajectory— the BEES watched the film Fat Man and Little Boy; most had already seen the more recent feature film Oppenheimer. At the Mound’s Discovery Museum, the site/project manager Jaclyn Miller generously devoted her time to detailing the history of the facility’s research activity as well as the staff’s effort to interview all the people involved in the project (before they perish). The tour of the facility gave the group their first opportunity to use the BEES’ new remote listening system (to make it easier for everyone to hear guides in tight places) — made possible by a grant from UD’s Office of Experiential Learning.

The students learned that much of the Museum’s work is to be discontinued, and the tailings of the discovery center moved to Carillon Historical Park in the future. But the irony — that the Adena constructed a huge burial mound near which humans later located a facility that enhanced the lethality of humanity’s ability to annihilate living things at scale — was not lost on the BEES.