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

Figure 2.15. Map of households within the Late Prehistoric Sunwatch Village site (taken from Nass 1987).
these two trends resulted in the appearance of
planned, nucleated communities at various locations
across the central Ohio Valley. The number of these
sites and their duration is still unclear. However, the
speed and duration of nucleation would be dependent
upon the strength of the benefits afforded by this
strategy. Once concentrated, interhousehold economic
cooperation would have been essential for the vitality
of this settlement arrangement, especially if a tactic
was interhousehold sharing of grown resources. With a
massed population, the farming of cultigens would
have shifted from individual household production to
aggregated monocrop fields outside the boundaries of
the community. However, all farmers are cognizant of
the fact that farming (even of native cultigens) carries
with it an uncertainty and that final outcomes are not
predictable. During periods of high ranking resource
shortages, fallback resources, such as low ranking wild
plants and animals, were exploited provided they
occurred in the necessary densities, and the population
possessed the necessary logistics to collect, process,
and transport them in sufficient quantities. These
nucleated settlements were also at risk in terms of
pathogens and strained social relations. It is still
unclear whether migration or social dispersion was a
tactic to buffer localized resource shortages.
For reasons still unclear, the nucleated settlement
pattern of the early Late Woodland in West Virginia,
Ohio, and Kentucky disappears almost as quickly as
it materialized. Settlement data based on site survey
and excavation have documented the existence of
smaller, dispersed concentrations of cultural remains
across the central Ohio Valley, implying a return to a
dispersed household settlement pattern more reminiscent
of the Middle Woodland (Jefferies and Shott 1992;
Seeman 1992b). This change in settlement strategy
Chapter 2 Central Ohio Valley During the Late Prehistoric Period: Subsistance-Settlement Systems’ Responses to Risk 35