Northeast Subsistence-Settlement Change: A.D. 700 –1300

within single settlements remains elusive, where houses,
related activity areas, and other distribution patterns
can be discerned.
Most researchers agree that Middle Woodland (and
earlier) groups were seasonally nomadic hunter-gatherers
across much of the broad region, except perhaps
in portions of coastal New England and Long Island
(e.g., Ceci 1990; McManamon and Bradley 1988; Ritchie
and Funk 1973; Sanger 1979, 1996; see Custer 1989:277-
280; Dent 1995:240-242; Potter 1993:138-141). In coastal
settings, longer-term and larger hunter-gatherer settlements
may have occurred and/or the degree of annual
mobility may have been very limited by the Middle
Woodland period. Coastal dwellers were largely confined
to marine settings throughout their annual
cycles, as seen using seasonal indicators among faunal
remains, such as tooth and shell sectioning (Sanger
1996), as well as material culture evidence, namely
cordage twist and twined weft slants preserved on pottery
(Petersen 1996). Coastal people did not necessarily
move into the interior, but they could have and apparently
did live year-round on the coast, perhaps moving
only among various marine environments.
Interpretations differ much more widely for the subsequent
Late Woodland period, ca. A.D. 1000-
1550/1600, for reasons alluded to above. For this period
some scholars see an incipient or a full-blown
regional transformation toward sedentary settlements
based on horticulture, while others see a continuation
of mobile hunting-gathering camps as were characteristic
earlier. The “truth” probably combines elements of
each, as may have been typically the case across eastern
North America at this time. Here, some maintain
that the flexible, mobile hunter-gatherer component
was dominant, while others (including us) suggest that
the more sedentary, horticulture component dominated.
Something profound had happened in settlement
patterning as well as in subsistence. Clearly, settlement
heterogeneity is evident across the region, just as for
subsistence, but an increased reliance on horticulture
fostered an established trend toward sedentism,
whether slowly or rapidly. Unequivocal evidence of
food storage and large, concentrated settlements is
present. Some researchers see the relatively new and
widespread reliance on storage pit features as directly
correlated with horticulture, which may have tethered
Native groups to a degree rarely known (but not
impossible) before the advent of farming. Settlement
sizes also clearly increased during the Late Woodland
period in some cases. Settlement locations on high
ground above seasonal flooding became common as
well, in some cases potentially defensible, at least by
A.D. 1500, if not earlier (e.g., Bendremer 1999;
Chapdelaine 1993; Heckenberger et al. 1992;
Mulholland 1988:146-147; Ritchie and Funk 1973; Snow
1980:307-308, 333; Waller 2000).
Instead of dozens of occupants, as inferred for the
typical camp of regional hunter-gatherers, some later
Late Woodland settlements, after ca. A.D. 1200-1300,
were likely occupied by hundreds of people. The
Contact period Fort Hill settlement, which was clearly
dependent on horticulture, included 500 or more
Sokoki residents and this likely provides an analog for
at least some late prehistoric settlements (Thomas
1979). Correspondingly, Ritchie and Funk (1973:224,
331) have estimated Owasco settlements as large as 300
to 350 people during the early portion of the Late
Woodland period before A.D. 1300, while as many as
600 to 700 inhabitants were present in some later Late
Woodland prehistoric proto-Iroquois villages in New
York State after A.D. 1300. Snow (1980:320) has noted
for the Late Woodland period in New England:
[S]ites were now larger, particularly those
located at heads of estuaries. For the last few centuries
of prehistory, the settlement pattern was
heading toward the A.D. 1600 pattern in which
major nucleated villages were located on main
streams, often at the head of estuaries, while
smaller satellite sites such as shell middens
served as special-purpose camps. The most
unfortunate aspect of the Late Prehistoric settlement
pattern is that the large central village sites
were virtually all located at the very places most
favored by Europeans settlers. Few if any of these
important sites have survived well enough to
yield much information through excavation.
In some cases, late prehistoric peoples in New
England away from the coast lived in longhouses like
those of their Iroquoian neighbors (e.g., Cowie et al.
1995, 1999), as known from adjacent regions (e.g.,
Snow 1980:313-314, 317). These longhouses certainly
represent a greater degree of sedentism than earlier
house forms, as do the stockades and other fortifications
that also appeared regionally during late prehistory.
The archaeological record shows that smaller
settlements also persisted during this period, likely
representing seasonal dispersal of small, kin-based
groups across different environments (e.g., Bernstein
1999; Bragdon 1996; Petersen et al. 1985; Thomas et al.
1996). Both of these settlement types apparently
occurred in coastal and interior settings, but with the
exception of the Goddard site on the central coast of
Maine (Bourque and Cox 1981), the larger settlements
Chapter 14 From Hunter-Gatherer Camp to Horticultural Village: Late Prehistoric Indigenous Subsistence and Settlement 275