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Late Woodland interior Virginia provides a particularly interesting case study for the examination of regional dynamics of social complexity and the emergence of systems of social and political inequality. There is little doubt of the existence of such systems on the coast of Virginia, at least by the late sixteenth century when historical documents describe the Powhatan chiefdom. As described in Chapter 1, historical documents provide few clues about the social, economic, and political organization of life in Virginia’s interior. Archaeological research has begun to ¤ll in these information gaps. Social organization was likely variable in Late Woodland Virginia, but the limited evidence necessitates consideration of temporary chiefs, similar, perhaps, to the pre-Powhatan period in Late Woodland coastal Virginia (Hantman 2001). The available information on late prehistoric settlement patterns, demography, subsistence, and mortuary ritual suggests that the concept of middle range societies is most appropriate for the late prehistoric period in the Virginia interior. This chapter articulates a series of expectations for the bioarchaeological aspects of so-called middle range societies. Such societies have been studied from a variety of social, economic, and ecological perspectives, but the role of population health in them has been largely unexamined. In the following pages, recent archaeological approaches to middle range societies are discussed and likely bioarchaeological patterns of such societies are explored. Finally, a set of hypotheses is developed for bioarchaeological patterns in Late Woodland interior Virginia. These hypotheses are tested in Chapter 4 with the skeletal data from Lewis Creek, Hayes Creek, and Rapidan mounds. The term middle range society was ¤rst de¤ned by Feinman and Neitzel (1984), and their terminology was quickly adopted by other authors (e.g., Upham 1987). The terminology is used less as an analytical concept than The Bioarchaeology of Middle Range Societies 3 as a way to refer to a range of societies without imposing arti¤cially static classi¤catory terms such as tribe and chiefdom. The advantage of this ®exibility is that it ensures wide relevance for the concept of middle range societies. The primary disadvantage is that it is a very broad term that subsumes tremendous societal variation. Commonly accepted de¤nitions emphasize a limited number of demographic and organizational characteristics , usually small-scale, sedentary, and nonhierarchical (Gregg 1991; Upham 1990). Given that no society is truly egalitarian in all respects, there is an emerging curiosity about the various social, organizational, and demographic means by which smaller-scale societies remain that way over long periods of time. As Price and Feinman note, “the important question for archaeologists considering the emergence of inequality becomes not when and how status differentiation emerged, but rather when and how it became formalized or institutionalized in society” (1995:4). The search for causality thus remains an important part of studies of prehistoric inequality , though researchers are now more likely to emphasize local factors rather than to search for global explanations and to focus on speci¤c loci of inequality—i.e., political, social, or economic—rather than an overall societal classi¤cation. In recent years archaeologists have developed several models of middle range societies, complexity, and the emergence of inequality that are not typological and are not necessarily focused on the strategies and manipulations of individual leaders. These include peer-polity interactions (Renfrew and Cherry 1986), Johnson’s (1982) distinction between simultaneous and sequential hierarchies, the concept of heterarchy (Crumley 1987, 1995; Crumley and Marquardt 1987), and the de¤nition of “network” and “corporate” strategies presented by Blanton et al. (1996). The de¤ning characteristics of middle range societies are few and relative : they are small-scale, relatively sedentary, somewhat agglomerated village settlements, with ®exible systems of inequality. The variation among these societies is great, dependent on (among other factors) local conditions of environment, resource availability, demography, individual leaders , and neighboring groups. The decoupling of inequality and complexity is fundamental to all of these models. For example, Johnson (1982, 1983) examines social complexity from an organizational perspective, de¤ning “sequential hierarchies” in contrast to the more familiar “simultaneous hierarchies,” which are structured around the control of a small number of individuals over the rest of the population. Johnson addresses an apparent contradiction: although scalar stress increases in groups of six or more, “egalitarian” hunter-gatherer societies are organized into minimum bands of much larger than six. He suggests that sequential hierarchies—in which decisions are made at each level of organization within a society—allow Middle Range Societies | 65 for the organization of larger social units. There...

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