North American Archaeology

The Woodland Tradition-From Hopewell into Late Woodland

Many Hopewell sites were dug during the Speculative Period, so a range of elements are missing from the cultural inventory

Hopewell is one of many cultural manifestations labeled Middle Woodland appearing in Illinois around 2300 BP, lasting until about 400 AD. Classic Hopewell actually developed in Ohio, probably growing out of the Adena

The cluster of traits --artifacts, burial customs including special mounds and a mortuary cult rooted in a veneration of the dead, as well as a vast trade network-- is called the Hopewellian Interaction Sphere and is recognizable across the east.

Several centers:

• Illinois, sometimes called Havana
• Ohio, called Scioto
• Missouri/Kansas, called Kansas City
• With outlyers throughout the region

Trade segment actually covered the continent from the Rockies to the Atlantic and Gulf Coast

Major Characteristics:

Monumental Architecture includes earthworks and burial mounds

• Usually built along the fertile river/stream valleys on elevated landforms
• Mounds are large, conical or domed, built by hand
• Often raised walls or low ridges of earth nearby in linear or geometric form surrounding mounds or mound groups - function not known. They tend to be free of debris or use information.
• Dead placed in extended position fully fleshed in log tombs, but sometimes cremated
• Pits dug into the ground or on low platforms then covered
• Sometimes primary mound was raised over a charnel house where defleshing occurred
• Later increments with additional burials raised the mound with some as large as 90-100 feet in diameter and 15 feet tall, with as many as 214 burials (Crooks Site, LA).

Mounds contained rich caches of grave goods from exotic materials

• Mica sheets cutout into geometric or zoomorphic forms
• Copper used for ear spools, headdresses, masks, bracelets, beads, chest ornaments celts, panpipes
• Busycon (giant sea snail) shells from the Gulf Coast used for cups with central whorl cut into beads
• Freshwater pearls used as beads for anklets or armlets or sewn onto garments
• Figurines carved from stone or modeled from clay were very realistic
• Special class of mortuary pottery-deep bowls with expanding or globular base
• Platform pipes with realistic effigies of birds, animals and people
• Mostly in the Scioto area, a few huge ceremonial bifaces of obsidian imported from Yellowstone National Park
• Bear teeth strung as beads or pendants, as were cut wolf or bear jaws
• Alligator teeth and skulls, baracuda jaws and shark teeth
• 22 different types of exotic materials, 16 of them minerals, only two or three local to Ohio
• All objects tended to be smeared with red ocher

Skill in manufacture seems to indicate an artisan class
Finely wrought articles were beautiful by any standard, but have extra value in their manufacture
Possession alone would bring prestige, but symbolic value must have been substantial

Ohio is the Classic core area, but certain artifacts are all over the interaction sphere

• single and double cymbal copper ear spools
• busycon shell bowls
• copper panpipes
• mica sheet Mirrors(?)
• uniformly styled pottery types of local manufacture but broad pattern of shape and decoration

Inferences?

1. Central theme of power in the interaction sphere was in the mortuary ritual and trappings
2. Calling it religious is an unprovable claim, but such motivation is not unreasonable - term cult is often applied
3. Implies a superordinate priesthood or class of people with superior status
4. Implies a stratified society
5. Monumental architecture implies a measure of social control (labor tax?)

Daily Life

Difficult to ascertain due to destruction of sites and due to emphasis on mortuary complex during last century

Subsistence base

Recent work in Illinois and other locations gives evidence of a fairly typical Woodland subsistence base

Lower Illinois Valley

Clear Lake site showed deer as dominant meat food, but also turkey, muskrat, beaver, duck, raccoon, buffalo, elk, turkey, rodents, shellfish (snails too!), and several fishes

Apple Creek site had caches of pigweed, lambs-quarter, plus evidence of grape, hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans with probable cultivation of sunflower, squash/gourds, goosefoot

Maize, beans not well known but present

A good example from the Scoville site on the lower Illinois (late Hopewellian from 450 AD) shows how rich the environment could be

Four ecozones within a half hour's walk from site-1.8 mile radius, about 10 square miles would produce each year:

• 182k-426k bushels of acorns, 100- 840 deer, 10k-20k squirrels, 200 turkeys with other materials not measured but vast (estimate of 6 million mallards in whole Illinois River valley, for example)
• At Scoville, 92% of meat was from deer, 4% from turkey; 72% of nuts were hickory and walnuts 27%.
• Site was not occupied from spring to mid-spring and mid-late autumn, coinciding with waterfowl migration, indicating they left site to harvest them

Settlement

Houses show a variety of shapes

• Illinois sites show oval pattern
• Ohio also oval but some with round-cornered rectangular shape

Bark or mat covered with no obvious internal posts, wigwam-like

Some large rectangular houses at a few sites18-25 feet and rectangular, but one at Seip Mound in Ohio was 44 x 48 feet. Some lay under mounds, so some burial association is possible. One littered with mica fragments indicating a specialist's area

Ceramics

A sensitive record of aesthetic style

A general utilitarian ware, grit tempered and either cord roughened or cord-wrapped stick

Usual form is flat or conoidal base with flared mouth

1-2% is a burial ware --form is similar with squat vessel or jar with constricted neck

But decorations are variable with rocker or roller stamping in zigzag patterns, bird designs, geometric and cursive designs

Bird designs including flamingos indicate importance of birds

Late Woodland

In some areas there is a fairly straightforward transition into Late Woodland and eventually into historically known tribes

• In New York, Owasco culture from 1000-1300 AD is descended from Hopewell and generally accepted as ancestral to Iroquois
• There is a shift of subsistence toward use of gardening with corns and beans added, but with hunting, fishing, gathering still very important
• In Owasco some ceramic traits are directly Hopewellian, pipes were still made, but of pottery
• Also some evidence of stockades surrounding longhouses. At Getman site, 5-6 longhouses (one of them 22 x 114 feet) inside a one acre stockaded village

In other areas, the Hopewell declines, but Late Woodland remains intriguing

Effigy Mounds of the Driftless Zone (NE Iowa, NW Ill, SE Minn, SW Wisc.) are evidence of a continued moundbuilding tradition, but with a difference- mounds not always burials
--may be territorial or clan markers, shapes of human, animal, bird figures
--some indication of ancestry to Winnebago, but disputed

Farther west on the Plains, the populations were smaller, with some burial mounds, but nothing like the size and burial good range of Hopewell.
--there is evidence of the cultivation of corn, beans late
--some probably retained Woodland lifestyle until Contact, especially High Plains and Prairie Provinces
--some changed from contacts with groups to the SE of the Mississippian

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larry-zimmerman@uiowa.edu
University of Iowa Anthropology
08.20.98