Circular Villages of the Monongahela Tradition

1. Village Spatial Layouts and Social Organizations

Across time and space,a signi¤cant shift in how social groups con¤gured themselves has repeatedly taken place: families abandoned their millennial-long practice of living in small dispersed settlements to reside with other families in aggregated village settlements. Wills (1991:161) stressed the importance of this shift when he noted that “the organization of unranked social groups into village communities is a remarkably widespread phenomenon that bespeaks a profound adaptive strength.” In northeastern North America (hereafter the Northeast), villages became a ubiquitous part of the social landscape during the Late Prehistoric period (ca. a.d. 900 to Contact), following the adoption of maize horticulture as the primary subsistence strategy (Church and Nass 2002; Hart and Means 2002; Smith 1992). Despite the widespread presence of village sites in this region, archaeological studies at the community level remain at their infancy. A serious limitation on our understanding of the past peoples that once inhabited the Late Prehistoric Northeast is that their af¤liations to historically known tribes have been long lost or are ambiguous. Pre-Contact inhabitants of a region that encompasses large portions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and most of Kentucky and West Virginia include groups referred to as “Poorly Known Tribes of the Ohio Valley and Interior”(Trigger 1978:ix). Direct knowledge of native inhabitants in this area is limited primarily to what can be extracted from the archaeological record. The upper segment of the Ohio Valley has an archaeological record known best from the remains of excavated village sites. Village sites from this region have been assigned to a taxonomic unit referred to as the “Monongahela culture” (Figure 1). A robust understanding of village community organization has been hampered by widespread use of the overly broad Monongahela taxon, which was de¤ned within the cultural-historical paradigm in the 1930s and 1950s (Means 2003). The Monongahela taxon subsumes a considerable 1 Village Spatial Layouts and Social Organizations amount of variation in the material expressions of cultural practices (Hart 1993; McHugh 1984; Raber et al. 1989:39), which differed over time and space. The use of the Monongahela taxon has led to an overgeneralization of similarities and a suppression of differences within and between village sites. Individual village sites are often characterized as having been created according to a broadly de¤ned typical settlement form. By ignoring or dismissing variation between Monongahela taxon village sites, archaeologists have been unable to successfully compare these sites within a developmental sequence.Complex social relationships too often have been reduced to a level of abstraction that has little explanatory value, if considered at all. For reasons explored in Chapter 2, the phrase “Monongahela tradition” is preferred over Monongahela taxon or the more commonly used “Monongahela culture.” Although the cultural af¤liations of Monongahela tradition populations are not de¤nitively known, the manner in which they commonly con¤gured their village sites is quite evident. Ongoing excavations beginning in the 1930s demonstrated that Monongahela tradition village sites frequently consisted of a circular or oval occupation zone that formed a band around a central open space—a formally de¤ned plaza—devoid of most cultural features (George 1974; Hart 1993; Johnson 2001; Johnson et al. 1989; Mayer-Oakes 1955). That is, their village sites were ring-shaped. 1. Maximum geographic extent of the Monongahela tradition. 2 / Chapter 1 The so-called typical ring-shaped Monongahela tradition village site as described by regional scholars is a widespread, almost archetypal settlement form. Ring-shaped settlements once existed throughout much of the Eastern Woodlands, from New England and New York into Virginia and the Carolinas and throughout the Middle and Upper Ohio Valleys (Bushnell 1919; Drooker 1997:48; Grif¤n 1978:559; Hart 1993; Johnson et al. 1989; Mayer-Oakes 1955; Ward and Davis 1993). This basic settlement form has also been recorded elsewhere in North America and throughout the world, including the camping circles once formed by some native Plains Indian groups during annual buffalo hunts (Bushnell 1922:129; Dorsey 1884:215, 1894:523, 1897; Fletcher and La Flesche 1911; Fraser 1968:20–21; Guidoni 1975:31–36; Lévi-Strauss 1953:528) and in settlements located in New Guinea (Fraser 1968:31; Lévi-Strauss 1963a:136), Central Brazil (Bennett 1949:13; Fabian 1992:37; Gross 1979:329; James 1949; Lévi-Strauss 1953:528, 1963a:137; Lowie 1946a:383, 1946b:420, 1946c:482; Wüst and Barreto 1999), Puerto Rico (Siegel 1997...