Early and Middle Woodland Landscapes of the Southeast

4. Like a Dead Dog: Strategic Ritual Choice in the Mortuary Enterprise

4 Like a Dead Dog Strategic Ritual Choice in the Mortuary Enterprise r . ber le clAy My deliberately provocative title is an attempt to move archaeological discourse away from more predictable, Western-oriented channels toward those that might be novel yet informative. It is taken from the words of a coastal New Guinea informant commenting on the “correctness” of a mortuary ritual sequencehehadwitnessed.InTokPidgin,hiswordswere“Oletroimweynating long bik bus, olsem dok e dai pinis” (They buried him carelessly in the jungle , just the way you would throw away a dead dog). The deceased in question had been buried, as was custom, in an unmarked grave within the walls of a traditional men’s house enclosure (B. J. Clay 1977: 85; R. B. Clay 1972). However , he was buried in the wrong enclosure, belonging either to a clan other than his or, worse yet, to his wife’s clan. My informant indicated that this made itimpossibleforhiskinsmentoconductthefinalfeastandexchange(B.J.Clay 1977: 121) some ten years after his death. Following such a feast, his bones might be recycled in a rain magician’s rain magic; whereas his bones were not important in the final analysis, the mortuary ritual following his death was. Thisforward-lookingcomplicationinritualperformancewasthemostcritical problem associated with the individual’s burial in the wrong place. Importantlyfor thisvillage,the stagedmortuaryenterprise looked forward to prescribed rituals establishing and reinforcing chained exchange relationships through time and across generations between kin groups, not backward to memorializing the dead. Practices are changing somewhat today, primarily under Western influence: concrete grave markers are now being built by some to mark graves, though they seem to mark the performance of past ritual feasts as much as they memorialize the dead. I suggest that this New Guinea example of mortuary practice, although a world apart, is relevant to interpreting the Ohio Valley Middle Woodland mortuary landscape. Specifically, it emphasizes how ritualized mortuary performances incorporate planning ahead, not simply looking back. Still, this Like a Dead Dog: Strategic Ritual Choice in the Mortuary Enterprise 57 ethnographic example is not a heuristic analogy for the Ohio Valley Middle Woodland. Instead, it is an invitation for Woodland archaeologists to move beyond “Western,” perhaps peculiarly American, ways of thinking about death and burial. A Recent History of the Memorialization of the Dead In a recent book for the general public, George Milner made the following comment regarding Middle Woodland burial mounds (2004: 95): Once built, the mounds served as major landmarks that marked longstanding connections to particular areas. For example, many Adena mounds in the rolling country of Central Kentucky sit on locally high spots. They would have been a clear reminder that many generations had preceded the people that currently lived nearby. Thus, the Adena mounds and associated wooden structures were quite likely highly visible symbols of rights to particular territories; after all, survival rested squarely on undisputed access to the land. This expresses a widely held view that burial mounds were built to mark territory : more elegantly, that the mounded countryside became a landscape of memory and ownership created by collective acts of ritualized mortuary behavior.ContraSeemanandBranch(2006:109),whosuggestthatthismay be traced most directly to recent archaeological thinking in Britain and its application in the U.S. Midwest (notably in Charles 1992), I see its deep roots in a very Euro-American tradition of memorializing the dead. Early on, this tradition was reflected in the republic’s memorializing of its own past, most notably in the garden or memorial cemetery movement, which replaced the more haphazard burial of the dead in congested urban cemeteries and countless rural burial plots. Current historiography recognizes that the American cemetery beautiful/ memorial movement stemmed from the French example established with the Pere Lachaise cemetery outside Paris in 1804 (Linden 2007: 53). There it is interpreted as a conscious attempt through burial “memorialization” to transcend the social disruption caused by the recent French Revolution and reestablish a sense of order expressed in an elaborate, man-made mortuary landscape. Likewise, in the new American republic, the development of the cemetery beautiful was an attempt to bridge the social dislocations created by the American Revolution and, coinciding with the deaths of its younger revolutionaryheroes,reestablish a sense of orderandpermanencyinthe fractured American social experiment (Jasanoff 2011). Beginning with the Mt. Auburn cemetery in 1831 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, the movement pro- 58 R. Berle Clay duced many other memorializing cemeteries across the expanding frontier over the mid-nineteenth century. Coincidentally...