Early and Middle Woodland Landscapes of the Southeast

17. Social Landscapes of Early and Middle Woodland Peoples in the Southeast

17 Social Landscapes of Early and Middle Woodland Peoples in the Southeast dAv id g. A nderSon Exciting and important things were happening during the Early and Middle Woodland periods in the Southeast, the interval from roughly 3,200 to 1,500 calendar years ago, as made clearer by the chapters in this volume. In any regionwhereavastamountoffieldworkanddatacollectionhasbeenoccurring , as has been the case for many decades in the Southeast, there is a continual need for papers and volumes directed toward synthesis and interpretation. Robert Mainfort and I argued for continued efforts along these lines some ten years ago, in an earlier volume that made an effort at synthesizing Woodland archaeology in the Southeast (Anderson and Mainfort 2002a: xvi). We noted then that while such volumes take a lot of work to produce, they are necessaryandindeedessentialguidesto our region’sprehistory,distillingand making sense of immense amounts and disparate kinds of information. We specifically encouraged our younger and presumably more energetic, and theoretically and intellectually more nimble, colleagues to produce such volumes . Happily, what Alice Wright and Edward Henry and their colleagues and contributors have produced fits the bill nicely. Rather than producing broad syntheses of specific geographic regions or topics such as plant and animal use, as the contributors to our earlier volume attempted, the authors in the present volume have directed their efforts toward delimiting the social landscape of Woodland peoples in different parts of the Southeast, from a number of theoreticalandmethodologicalperspectivesandemployingmany kinds of archaeological data. While local area syntheses are an inevitable byproduct , the larger landscape approach ties the chapters in the volume together , much as peoples in the Woodland period in the Southeast were connected in various ways, and should not be viewed in isolation. A theme running through the chapters in the volume is that, to paraphrase Tim Pauketat (2001), “landscape history matters” in southeastern archaeology . That is, domestic and ceremonial features such as houses and work areas, 248 David G. Anderson or mounds, earthworks, and plazas, as well as intervening fields, forests, and waterways, should be thought of not as finished creations but as continually changing venues upon which communal activities are registered. Landscapes are thus processes in time, reflecting the history and traditions of the people who live in and shape them. Wright and Henry (chapter 1) argue that to understand past societies from a landscape perspective, a multiscalar analytical perspective must be employed, examining variation in the archaeological record over both space and time and at multiple scales. Landscapes subsume the social, biotic, and terrain features created, used, and experienced by humans , and ideally our research should strive to encompass both the totality and the changing nature of this landscape. Typically archaeologists have tended to focus at one level or scale of analysis, such as a site or group of roughly contemporaneous sites, sometimes also looking at changes within them over time. Now, however, while sites regarded as “centers” still receive appreciableresearchattention,theyareincreasinglyseenaspositionedwithin changing networks of settlement, land use, communication, and interaction. A second theme running through many of the chapters is the demonstration that information recovered from sites excavated long ago, such as Crystal River, Kolomoki, and Tunacunnhee, can be reexamined and reinterpreted from contemporary perspectives, with new and important things learned in the process. Indeed, where new fieldwork is occurring, in many cases it has beeninspiredbyareanalysisofoldermaterials.Theexaminationofoldcollections reminds us that no site, whether it is surviving or not, is ever definitively reported and interpreted, highlighting the critical importance of responsibly curating the records and material remains of our research (e.g., Sullivan and Childs 2003). The materials we are collecting now, if properly conserved and curated, will almost certainly be examined by many researchers in the future. A third theme is that variability and not uniformity characterizes Woodland occupations in the Southeast and that the archaeological record at many sites is more complex than our reporting traditions, which tend to encourage standardization and simplification in classification, might tend to indicate . That is, as Wright demonstrates in her chapter examining the myriad of features found at the Garden Creek Mound in North Carolina (chapter 7), we have to avoid assuming that there are standard patterns of structure size and shape, or burial practice, or that sites can be accurately described using taxa such as “vacant ceremonial center” and “special activity loci” or, in more functional terms, that they were used solely for aggregation or feasting or, alternatively, mundane day-to-day activities. Any such assessments must be demonstrated and not assumed, and the default inference...