Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Lower Ohio River Valley

1. Introduction

1 / Introduction The Ohio River, one of the longest rivers in North America, extends nearly 1,600 km from the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ohio River served as an important transportation and communication route for pioneers and settlers seeking access to the interior part of eastern North America. Once they cleared the land and built their towns, Ohio Valley farmers and merchants shipped their crops and goods down the Ohio to markets in St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and beyond. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Ohio River divided the warring Confederate states to the south and the Union states to the north. Even today , the Ohio River serves as a cultural boundary between distinctively different Southeastern and Midwestern ways of life. Clearly, the Ohio River has played important roles in the historical development of the United States, serving as both a corridor through which people, goods, and information moved and as a border or boundary dividing distinct regional cultures. Given the social, economic, and political significance of the Ohio River in the history of the United States, it should not be surprising that it maintained just as prominent a role in the lives of the valley’s prehistoric Native Americans. Based on more than 100 years of archaeological research, we now know that the ancestors of modern Native Americans lived in the Ohio River Valley for at least 12,000 years prior to the arrival of Euroamerican settlers in the mid-eighteenth century.This book focuses on the earliest Native American in- 2 / Introduction habitants of the valley—those groups that practiced what anthropologists call a hunter-gatherer way of life. Very simply, the valley’s earliest people subsisted by exploiting the naturally available plants and animals that once lived in and on the rivers, floodplains, and uplands of what is now the Ohio Valley. In eastern North America, including the Ohio Valley, ancient Native Americans pursued this hunter-gatherer way of life for at least 9,500 years, starting more than 12,500 years ago and continuing to about 3,000 years ago, or before present (B.P.). After that time, domesticated plants, first native (goosefoot, sunflower , etc.), then tropical species (maize, beans) introduced from Mexico, became increasingly important parts of the subsistence base of Woodland (3000 to 1000 B.P.) and Mississippian (1000 to 400 B.P.) groups. Despite the increasing dietary significance of cultivated plants, however, later people continued to use and modify many aspects of hunter-gatherer technology and organization first developed by the valley’s early inhabitants. In many ways, the hunting and gathering way of life never disappeared from the region—it was simply a matter of adding other subsistence strategies to the hunting and gathering core that already existed. The Region Along its ca. 1,600 km course to the Mississippi River, the Ohio River flows through numerous environmental and physiographic zones that once supported highly diverse plant and animal communities. Just as diverse were the hunting and gathering societies that populated this extensive and highly variable landscape , making it difficult to discuss the full range of their cultural variability. Therefore, this book focuses on one part of that vast river system—the section known as the Lower Ohio Valley. The Lower Ohio Valley region consists of the western one-third of the Ohio River watershed, extending from the Falls of the Ohio River near Louisville to the Ohio-Mississippi River confluence (Figure 1.1). Previous archaeological research indicates that even within this portion of the valley, considerable cultural variability existed during much of the prehistoric past (Muller 1986:ix). The region’s rich and diverse archaeological record provides an excellent opportunity to explore patterns of diachronic change and synchronic variability associated with the development of culturally complex hunting and gathering societies that lived in parts of the valley by about 5,000 years ago. I selected the Falls of the Ohio River, known locally as the Falls, as the upriver or eastern boundary of my study area because, prior to the construction Introduction / 3 of nineteenth-century dams and canals, it represented the only natural impediment to peoples’ movement up or down the river. In addition, the Falls appears to have marked some kind of social boundary throughout much of prehistory (Burdin 2004; Griffin 1978:551; Jefferies 1997:483...