The umbrella term Woodland is a confusing one. Like Archaic and Paleo-Indian, Woodland has a special meaning in American archaeology. It is important here to distinguish the archaeological term Woodland tradition from another, quite useful term, eastern woodlands. The latter is a geographic designation generally indicating the eastern half of native North America, those millions of acres of primeval forests cut by countless coursing "river roads."
Woodland tradition, by contrast, refers to a widespread archaeological manifestation, traditionally defined by the presence of three key traits: the manufacture of distinctive ceramics, the incipient development of agriculture, and the construction of funerary mounds. Throughout much of eastern North America—including the Midwest, the Southeast, the Northeast, and the eastern Great Plains—the Woodland period follows immediately after the Archaic tradition (which, of course, lacks the three hallmarks listed above). Although their age varies considerably by location, most Woodland characteristics appeared in most areas by about 1000 b.c.
The Woodland people of eastern North America can be traced to their Paleo-Indian roots. At present, most archaeologists believe that the Paleo-Indians, the First Americans, arrived via the Bering Strait sometime prior to 11,000 b.c. The Paleo-Indians of the American West were hunters of large game animals such as mammoths, extinct forms of bison, and the American horse and camel. But in eastern North America Paleo-Indians probably followed a more generalized ecological adaptation, one not as easily disrupted by the disappearance of one or two key resources. As it turned out, this broad-spectrum lifestyle preadapted their descendants to the more focused plant-collecting economies that characterized the eastern woodlands during later periods.
As Archaic populations increased, people of eastern North America became more efficient, intensifying their own food-collecting strategies, increasing economic exchanges with others, and improving their ability to store food for the future. In this way, even as their food-producing economy escalated, they learned to protect themselves against year-to-year resource fluctuations. Inevitably some groups harvested more effectively and produced more food than their neighbors. Others excelled at trade and barter. As time passed, primary access to the more valued exotic items came to rest in the hands of a relatively small elite. In response to growing competition over scarce resources, the older, more egalitarian social forms of Archaic society came to be more rigid and controlled.
The Archaic adaptations at Poverty Point, Louisiana, foreshadowed the creativity that would soon be evident elsewhere across the eastern woodlands. Between 2000 and 1000 b.c., native people began a long-term interaction with local plant species they found growing wild—especially squash, sumpweed (marsh elder), sunflowers, and goosefoot. As people harvested the wild bounty, they usually selected only the best plants and kept only the best seed for replanting. Given sufficient time, such selection would activate genetic pressures for such seeds to germinate more quickly than did those of untended plants in the wild.
The Woodland farmers of eastern America came to be inextricably involved in the life cycles of these plant crops. Their gardens, so informally planted at first, became increasingly significant by providing a dependable, managed food supply that could be stored for use in late winter and even into early spring.
So it was that these early Woodland pioneers initially domesticated the native annual plants of eastern North America. Seasonally occupied campsites, surrounded as they were by organically rich trash deposits, provided ideal habitats for wild plants and incidental domesticates. These new and vigorous seedbeds in turn attracted further human attention. Tethered to the major river-valley trenches, Native American people reoccupied special places and key locales over extended periods of time. As human populations increased, the interaction between people and plants intensified.
Note something special here. Archaeologists once spoke of a "Neolithic revolution," the time when humans took control over nature, domesticating plants and animals to provide a predictable and secure food source and to escape the uncertainties of nature. With the invention of agriculture, the thinking went, the requirements of storing grain created a demand for durable, heat-resistant storage vessels—and therefore, some genius thought up pottery. So viewed, agriculture and pottery were seen as together paving the road to the great civilizations of the past.
Yet no such overnight food-producing rebellion ever happened—at least not in eastern North America. The entire process of initial plant domestication was extremely casual, without any radical change in human diets or human habits. The effects of such incidental plant domestication can readily be seen at a place like Russell Cave (Alabama), where foraging Archaic people lived and worked beneath the cave's huge overhang for thousands of years. Then, sometime between about 1000 b.c. and a.d. 500, the character of Russell Cave changed markedly as the site became tied to the changing lifestyles of settled village farmers.
Just as agriculture did not develop overnight, neither did the manufacture of fired pottery. Pottery showed up in parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and the Florida coastal lowlands toward the end of the preceding Late Archaic period. The earliest ceramic vessels look like flowerpots, remarkably similar to the earlier steatite (soapstone) bowls from the same area. Some of these early ceramic pots were even tempered with steatite fragments, and it is tempting to assume that early southeastern potters were consciously imitating these early stone bowls. Although the evidence is difficult to interpret, many archaeologists think that these early northeastern ceramics were invented locally and then spread throughout the eastern woodlands between 2500 b.c. and 500 b.c.
Russell Cave reflected the changes that characterized much of the eastern United States during this time. Apparently these farming people left their settled villages when food supplies ran low and transformed Russell Cave into a temporary winter campsite. When they quit the cave in the springtime, they probably rejoined other Woodland groups at summer encampments, settlements far larger than any known during the preceding Archaic period.
Like agriculture and pottery, the third defining Woodland characteristic—burial ceremonialism—actually shows up during the late Archaic period (at Poverty Point, for instance). Before long, the funerary-mound complex was to sweep across the eastern United States. In fact, one burial mound of this period stands only a few hundred feet from the entrance to Russell Cave.
The Adena culture is the most visible manifestation of the new American ceremonialism. Distributed across the American midlands to the Atlantic Coast, at least five hundred Adena sites have been documented, most of them dating after 500 b.c. In the early Adena period, burial ceremonialism was relatively simple. The deceased was commonly laid out in a shallow, sometimes bark-lined pit, and a small mound was erected over the spot. During later Adena times the dead were generally interred in more elaborate log tombs. The original mound often grew in size as subsequent bodies were interred and covered over. Sometimes burials were sprinkled with red ocher or other colored pigment.
The Adena Mound, excavated in 1901, is located near Chillicothe, Ohio. Its earlier stage began with construction of a large, subsurface bark-lined tomb containing extended and cremated burials, and continued with the addition of log tombs and more burials. The second stage was composed of distinctly different soil that had been heaped over the dead who were not buried in log tombs.
The famous Hopewell complex (200 b.c.-a.d. 500) was first recognized at a sprawling mound group near Chillicothe, Ohio. This astonishing site initially contained at least thirty-eight conical mounds, most enclosed by an extensive geometric embankment, obviously laid out with great precision. As nineteenth-century investigators began to explore the strange constructions, it became immediately clear that the ancient people who had built these mounds had cared deeply about their ancestors. Not only had they built huge earthen monuments to encase their dead, but their respect was reflected in the magnificent objects prepared especially for the graves. Mica was brought in from the distant Appalachian Mountains, volcanic glass from Yellowstone, chert from North Dakota, conch shells and shark's teeth from the Gulf of Mexico, copper from the Great Lakes. They fashioned mystical and exotic artworks from these raw materials, then placed these offerings inside tombs to memorialize their dead. Unfortunately, many of the Ohio mounds were later mined and looted for their treasures.
Denoting neither a particular culture nor a political power, the term Hopewell is today used to describe North America's first Pan-Indian religion—stretching from Mississippi to Minnesota, from Nebraska to Virginia—as well as the broad network of contacts among different Native American groups in these areas between about 200 b.c. and a.d. 500. For the first time these native people, who shared neither language nor culture, were drawn together by a unifying set of beliefs and symbols. For centuries, the Hopewell network dominated eastern North America.
While the Hopewell people enjoyed a certain degree of agricultural productivity, even this marginal abundance created problems. By a.d. 400 the Hopewell population had grown so large that it threatened to outstrip and degrade its environment. Towns got bigger, and as new communities sprang up, they built on top of the critical agricultural hinterland. No longer was there plenty of unused land encircling each village. Living in sedentary villages became a risky strategy, particularly because the Hopewell people did not store up much extra food. What if the gardens failed? What if the local acorn did not mature? What if a particularly harsh winter killed off the local deer herd, or if the local fish run failed because of droughts or floods? Every Hopewell community experienced, at one time or another, occasional shortages. Starvation was not unknown.
As their new lifestyle posed more problems, the Hopewell people responded by banding into huge networks of reciprocal trading partners. Far-flung communities joined forces, looking to one another for support in lean years.
Exotic raw materials were funneled into regional Hopewell centers, where artists crafted them into fine objects of art that today represent some of the most impressive Native American art ever made. These items were in turn distributed to distant leaders. Food may also have been traded, following established lines of trade.
This so-called Hopewell interaction sphere developed into the first large-scale trade network in precontact North America. It not only forestalled famine but also dispersed tons of exotic items across the eastern half of the continent.
Hopewell culture was in decline by a.d. 400. Although carrying on for a time in a few core areas, the trade network eventually collapsed, perhaps from competition by more advanced agricultural systems, perhaps because a drying climate depressed overall food production.
By a.d. 800 a new cultural development took hold in the eastern woodlands. This new tradition, known as Mississippian, was based on new strains of maize imported from Mexico. Elsewhere, on the Great Plains, the Plains village tradition succeeded the Woodland tradition. In the Northeast, the Woodland lifeway persisted, with great diversity, up to and beyond European contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most archaeologists believe that Iroquois-speaking people developed out of the local Woodland tradition. Elsewhere, as in the Far West, so-called Archaic lifeways continued for millennia, extending into the historic period; in such places, Woodland characteristics never appeared at all.
See also
Archaic Indians;
Mound Builders;
Paleo-Indians.
William F. Keegan, ed., Emergent Horticultural Economies of the Eastern Woodlands (Carbondale, Ill.: Center for Archaeological Investigations, 1987); Stuart Struever and Felicia Antonelli Holton, Koster: Americans in Search of Their Prehistoric Past (New York: Doubleday, 1979); David Hurst Thomas, Exploring Ancient Native America: An Archaeological Guide "Harvesting the Eastern Woodlands," (New York: Macmillan, 1994).
David Hurst Thomas
American Museum of Natural History
