INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

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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
maize-beans-squash complex was the foundation of southeastern (and southwestern) chiefdoms that were beginning to develop around 1,000 years ago. What is Mississippian culture? We use this term to refer to the late prehistoric chiefdoms that developed all over the Southeast and Midwest, originally thought to have been earliest in the Mississippi Valley. The Cahokia site in East St. Louis, Illinois, is the largest Mississippian site, with some 100 mounds including Monk’s Mound, the largest earthen mound in the whole hemisphere. See the photo of this mound (p. 275) dwarfing a car on the highway next to it. Mississippians built platform mounds, flat-topped pyramids with ramps leading up to the top, where the temple apparently stood. They look very much like earthen versions of Mesoamerican pyramids. Not only do we have many postmold patterns of structures, but also historic documentation from early colonial observers, who recorded the last remnants of the native chiefdoms in the eastern U.S. before they became extinct or were changed by this outside influence. What is the evidence of social and even economic inequality, as well as ceremony and religion, in Mississippian culture? At Cahokia, the walled compound around Monk’s mound separated houses inside and outside of it. Circles of wooden posts left features we call “woodhenges” that may have been for astronomical observations. In mound 72 were successive burials of important individuals with great numbers of wealth items, caches of stone points and pottery, copper, thousands of shell beads, mica, and piles of human skeletons suggesting sacrificial victims, perhaps servants or retainers of the important deceased. Though Cahokia was apparently abandoned by A.D. 1250, other regional temple mound centers were common in the eastern U.S. One of these is Moundville, Alabama, with similar multiple platform mounds and elite burials, plazas, and large village areas. Again your text does not do it well for the Florida area. The map of Mississippian sites (p. 277) shows only one in Florida, right in downtown Tallahassee (Lake Jackson mounds, which had elite burials with copper plates and huge shell bead necklaces). There are many others, including the Safety Harbor platform mound and Phillipe Park mound right on Tampa Bay. It looks like they may have been from chiefdoms that were NOT supported by intensive maize agriculture, however. It is hard to grow corn in south Florida, and the bounty of the coastal resources may have made farming unnecessary anyhow. The early Spanish accounts described sixteenth-century non-agricultural tributary chiefdoms among the Calusa and other historic native American groups. How can we identify economically stratified, hereditary chiefdoms archaeologically? It is difficult to
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In Conjunction with the INTRODUCTIO
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USF's public archaeology program. T
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Same as Midterm, above, but coverin
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Students seem to like all the exerc
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Student Exercise 10: ETHNOGRAPHER A
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traditionally studying non-Western
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consideration landowners, descendan
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historic archaeology because we can
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11. It tries to see both synchronic
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ooks and drawings of monuments; and
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meaningful to the prehistoric peopl
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acquisition of the material (from t
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INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

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