While population densities probably varied widely across the eastern Woodlands, dramatic social changes were underway by the sixth millennium BC, changes that justify the identification of a Middle Archaic period. Undoubtedly, these social changes were related to a nearly two-millennium-long dry and warm period - the Hypsithermal. Some have posited that, for certain regions, the climatic regime necessitated concentrations in lower well-watered locations. For other regions, the correlation is less certain. What is clear, however, is that base camps grew larger and more permanent in many areas. In Kentucky and Tennessee, clear evidence of interpersonal violence, such as scalping marks, appears during the Middle Archaic period.
At Koster, along the Illinois River, the first permanent housing also dates to the Middle Archaic period, as do low burial mounds on the bluff above (also Known as the Elizabeth site). Under those mounds were group burials of men and women presumed to have been members of important corporate kin groups. Something similar is seen at sites in southern Illinois, and along the Green and Tennessee Rivers in Kentucky and Tennessee, where burials of single bodies interred with sex-specific objects (including, here or there, a shaman buried with unusual bundles of objects) were interred in formal cemeteries. In the mid-South, the Middle (and Late) Archaic burial mounds were sometimes built of mollusk shells. These and other Middle Archaic mounds are most common from Florida westward across the Gulf Coast. Some, as at Tick Island in Florida, are formal layered burial mounds consisting of layers of burials alternating with mollusk shell midden. They were, in short, the first true monumental architecture.
The earliest dated earthen mound complex is found in southern Louisiana, at Monte Sano, and dates to 5000 BC, or the beginning of the Middle Archaic period. Ten other related Middle Archaic mound sites are known in northern Louisiana, the largest being Watson Brake, dated to 3600 BC. The site’s 11 earthen tumuli vary in height, one reaching 7.5 m. These were built around an oval 370 x 260 m2 plaza, the construction and experience of which may have instantiated social inequalities within and between corporate groups. All 11 sites might have been pieces of a larger planned regional complex, the construction of which ended by 2500 BC, well before the next significant monumental construction in Louisiana, called Poverty Point.
The most enigmatic of Archaic places, Poverty Point appears to have been a planned ‘reinvention’ of the earlier Middle Archaic tradition. Built between 1600 and 800 BC, it was a huge earthen complex covering 5 km2 and composed of 750 000 m3 of mounded earth. The site’s semicircular central plaza is surrounded by concentric rings of loaf-shaped mounds, probably used to elevate houses. Behind its amphitheater-like loaf mound and plaza core is a looming 20-m-high bird-effigy mound. Other mounds mark key points in the distance.
Poverty Point was, in short, the first sedentary town site in the eastern Woodlands. The refuse of the many hundreds of sedentary residents at this complex includes the debris from manufacturing a variety of bodily ornaments, tools, fetishes, and fired clay ‘Poverty Point objects’. The latter were superheated and used to cook food indirectly, perhaps in large central gatherings. Incised on some of these objects, carved into ornaments, or etched onto steatite bowls are representations of upper-world birds, underworld monsters, and the plants, animals, and spiders’ webs that existed between these worlds.
Along with the craft objects, these appear to have been made on-site for use on-site. Some ended up in outlying regions. However, it is possible that pilgrims visiting this anomalous central place dispersed the Poverty Point objects by carrying them back to their own homelands.
Other Late Archaic sites near Poverty Point appear to replicate the great center, albeit at smaller scales. Perhaps these were small-scale pilgrimage centers in the Poverty Point mould and, if so, Poverty Point and its outliers could have had profound historical impacts on the entire mid-South. Minimally, the people of Poverty Point appear to have acquired exotic materials from across the mid-continent and South, from Texas and Indiana to Alabama. A few Poverty Point objects turn up at sites as far north as southern Illinois.
Numerous cultural complexes that date to the Late Archaic period (c. 2000-500 BC) also feature evidence of long-distance exchange - from the Benton sphere in Mississippi to New York’s Lamoka culture and the St. Lawrence Basin’s Maritime Archaic. The exchanged goods - from groundstone ax-heads to projectile points and atl-atl weights - often assume ‘hypertrophic’ (larger-than-life) or exaggerated proportions. Hence, researchers reason that these objects were more than ordinary tools with practical use values. The exchanged objects were meant to be conspicuous, seen as well as used.
This is the period of the Old Copper culture, Great Lakes region people who made and traded copper tools, some hypertrophic. Perhaps such expansive exchange networks, if not the socially complex relations that each exchanged item objectified, were simple functions of the larger numbers of people living at sometimes large ‘base camps’ around the eastern Woodlands (see Exchange Systems). Possibly, group territories and ethnic boundaries segmented the eastern Woodlands, with groups producing styles and hypertrophic goods that projected the veneer of traditional continuity. Perhaps increased populations and territorialization, in turn, encouraged people to tend wild plants in portions of the Midwest and midSouth (or vice versa). Squash cultivation is known to date from 5000 BC, while other starchy and oily seeded plants - chenopodium, amaranth, sunflower - were brought under cultivation by the second or third millennium BC (see Plant Domestication).
There are also some indications of another sort of social change near the end of the Late Archaic period in some portions of the mid-continent: fewer or smaller base camps and more or larger mortuary centers. Pottery appeared first at about 2500 BC at Stallings Island, South Carolina, although it took a millennium for the technology to be adopted across the South’s Coastal Plain, finally picked up by Midwesterners after 1000 BC. Perhaps this was because, initially, ceramic pots here or, earlier, in the Coastal Plain were not ideal cooking containers. Many were not used over open fires, as often presumed, but might have served in social gatherings or feasts.
In the North, the sociality of pot making and using might have been related to mortuary gatherings. At this time, low mounds were increasingly used to bury human remains, some bedecked with stone pendants or gorgets, some interred with caches of skillfully chipped bifaces, and some sprinkled with red pigment. Archaeologists have named certain regional manifestations of these burial cultures Red Ocher, Glacial Kame, and Meadowood. In the South, the Tchula period people succeeded Poverty Point’s grandeur with, at best, modest mound centers populated by few people who ate, as best we can tell, few of the culti-gens known elsewhere from eastern North America, save squash.
World History
