Hardin Village (site 15GP22) sat on a wide, flat terrace of the Ohio River about 3 miles from present-day South Shore, Kentucky. The two-kilometer-wide floodplain offered exactly what Fort Ancient farmers needed: rich soil for maize, beans, and squash, and easy access to the river for fishing and travel. A wooden palisade ringed the village, signaling the kind of intermittent warfare that characterized the late Fort Ancient period. The layout was unusual for the culture. Most Fort Ancient towns arranged houses around a central oval plaza. Hardin's houses clustered instead, possibly because new homes were built atop old foundations as generations stacked up in the same spots.

The houses were rectangular, built single-set-post style with each support sunk into its own hole, then walled with bark, thatch, or hide. They resembled the Iroquoian longhouses farther east. The largest measured up to 9.1 by 21.5 meters, with interior posts holding up the roof and thin partitions splitting the space into multi-family dwellings. Storage pits ran along the inside walls for corn and dried squash. Each house had a single doorway, framed by two larger posts on the river-facing side. Average floor area ran about 133 square meters. Inside, families wove baskets, knapped stone, raised children, and ground mussel shell into temper for their pottery.

Excavations in the late 1930s, 1966, and again in 2015 by University of Kentucky archaeologists have documented between 301 and 445 burials at Hardin - the largest Fort Ancient cemetery found in Kentucky. Most were extended burials, the body laid out straight. About half had grave goods. Adults typically received utilitarian items like pottery and stone tools. Children under four and adults over fifty more often received exotic objects, including engraved shell ornaments and the brass and copper that had reached the Ohio Valley through Mississippian trade with Spanish-era contacts in the southeast. The same burials reveal a darker story. Heavy reliance on maize had given the Fort Ancient people chronic malnutrition and niacin deficiency, producing high rates of arthritis, dental disease, treponematosis - a non-venereal cousin of syphilis - and short life expectancies.

Hardin Village was abandoned by about 1625, decades before sustained European contact. The cause is debated. Climate shifts of the Little Ice Age may have shortened growing seasons; epidemic disease may have traveled ahead of the colonists who introduced it; warfare with Iroquoian peoples pushing into the Ohio Valley may have made the floodplain untenable. Probably it was some combination. By the time French traders followed the river, the palisade had collapsed, the longhouses had rotted away, and the cornfields had returned to floodplain grass. The 445 burials still in the soil were the only continuous record of a community that had farmed this terrace for a century. The grave goods that came from people the villagers never met are now in archaeology labs, evidence of a contact that had reached them before it reached them in person.