INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

Mesoamerica, intensification of food production led to Neolithic-style adaptations and, in
Mesoamerica, true civilization.
What is the Woodland period in the eastern U.S.? Beginning around 4,000 years ago, the earliest
pottery is developed during the Late Archaic the vessels being made of clay mixed with plant
fibers. By 3,000 years ago, the beginning of the Woodland, we see more refined-looking pottery
and burial mound construction as indications of some changing lifestyles, as well as a few
domesticated indigenous weedy plants. Early Woodland mounds contained graves of people who
were buried with a few artifacts, suggesting little social difference. By the Middle Woodland,
described in your book as the Hopewell culture of the Midwestern region, there are large
differences between grave offerings, suggesting a few people are vastly more important.
Principal burials typically occur in log tombs below the center of the mound, to be covered over
as the mound grows and other skeletons or cremated bones are interred. There is also evidence of
long-distance origins of ceremonial items such as obsidian from the West and Florida conch
shells ending up in Ohio and Kentucky mounds. Besides burial mounds, earthworks in many
geometric and animal shapes were constructed with baskets or bags of soil. The Serpent Mound,
a snake-shaped Ohio earthwork shown in the Hopewell chapter of the book (p.264), is now
thought to have originated later in time.
In the Southeast there are just as many burial mounds,
if not more, but different cultural names. The map (p.
266) showing Hopewell sites in the mid-continent only
should be redrawn to include at least the northwest
portion of Florida down to Tampa Bay. We have not
only the famous Weeden Island site in the bay that
gave our Middle Woodland culture its name, but also
the Crystal River site, where we are going on our field
trip, with many of the same kinds of exotic artifacts as
are found in Ohio Hopewell. Some of the fancier raw
materials buried in these mounds included mica, a
shiny flat flaky stone obtained from the mountains,
cold-hammered copper, all kinds of exotic, shiny stone, soapstone or steatite, sharks’ teeth, and
bear teeth. The Middle Woodland burial mound people were thought certainly to have been
agriculturalists since they would have needed to settle down to do such monumental
construction. But we have evidence only of small
gardens, and hardly any maize at all.
How and when does maize get to the eastern U.S.? We
are not sure of this at all, since the earliest
domesticates were indigenous plants such as sunflower
and chenopodium, but maize had to have come from
Mexico. Somehow it got here, and by the Late
Woodland, between A.D. 600-900, we see it
increasingly in midden sites. Burial mound
construction diminishes or disappears during this
time—maybe everyone is too busy farming? The