Changing Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley

12. Blade Technology and Nonlocal Cherts: Hopewell(?) Traits at the Twenhafel Site, Southern Illinois

12 Blade Technology and Nonlocal Cherts Hopewell(?) Traits at the Twenhafel Site, Southern Illinois Carol A. Morrow MIDWESTERN ARCHAEOLOGISTS TRADITIONALLY view evidence for use of prismatic -blade technology and nonlocal cherts, particularly blue-gray cherts, as being Middle Woodland (ca. 250 B.C.-A.D. 400) in age and Hopewellian in terms of cultural manifestation. Odell (1994:117), for example, argues that blade technology developed alongside Hopewell mortuary ritual and ended when those practices were abandoned at the end of the Middle Woodland period. I examine these assumptions using data from Twenhafel, a Mississippi River floodplain village in southern Illinois (Figure 12-1) occupied during the Middle Woodland and early Late Woodland periods, approximately 200 B.C.-A.D. 600. Data presented here suggest that the use of both prismatic-blade technology and nonlocal cherts actually preceded the appearance of typical Hopewellian traits and then persisted into post-Hopewell times. The Hopewell "horizon," characterized by archaeological evidence of widespread movement of exotic raw materials, stylistic concepts, and finished goods, began perhaps as early as 100 B.C. (at least in southern Ohio), reached its zenith about A.D. 100, and then disappeared within about a hundred years. Core Hopewell areas were in the central Ohio River valley (Ohio Hopewell) and the lower Illinois River valley (Havana Hopewell), but Hopewellian artifacts are found throughout the Midwest and portions of the southeastern United States. Distinctively decorated ceramic vessels perhaps are the most characteristic Hopewellian artifacts, but finely made prismatic blades and pieces of high-quality, nonlocal chert also are commonly interpreted as Hopewellian items. A specific question addressed in this chapter is whether these two traits, blades and nonlocal cherts, correspond precisely with the appearance of Havana Hopewell pottery at Twenhafel or whether they preceded and/or postdated that appearance. During the Middle Woodland period, chert was shaped through various distinctive manufacturing technologies, including blade-core technology, biface 281 282 I Morrow N t Kilometers ---~ o 50 Figure 12-1. Map of western Illinois and eastern Missouri showing the locations of Twenhafel and chert quarries mentioned in the text. technology, and amorphous-core technology, the latter also referred to as unstructured , or expedient, core reduction (Parry and Kelly 1987). Each technology produced a different type of debitage, debris, by-products, and end products . By studying these materials, it is possible to track the form in which chert was brought to a site, to examine patterns of chert usage, and to explore issues Blade Technology and Nonlocal Cherts I 283 of recycling and reuse by later occupants of the site. An important issue is determining whether the archaeological deposits of blades and pieces of nonlocal chert represent (1) primary-use objects, (2) materials reused by later inhabitants of the site, or (3) a mix of the two. I examine the organization of specific manufacturing technologies used to shape chert into stone tools and employ the resulting information to argue that at Twenhafel blade manufacture and nonlocal-chert use continued much later than expected, with the latest deposits representing reuse or recycling of the materials by later inhabitants. Research Area Twenhafel (Figure 12-1), located in extreme southwestern Illinois on the alluvial plain near the junction of the Big Muddy and the Mississippi rivers, has traditionally been placed in what is termed the Crab Orchard tradition. The distribution of Crab Orchard pottery extends northward into the lower Kaskaskia, Saline, and Big Muddy River valleys and west, south, and east into portions of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Wabash river drainages (Butler and Jefferies 1986:524; see Muller 1986 for discussion and comparison of the Crab Orchard and Baumer traditions). Twenhafel is the largest and apparently most complex Crab Orchard site, covering approximately 40 hectares and containing twenty-five mounds and several habitation areas (Hofman 1979). Early archaeological work at the site was done by the mound-exploration division of the Bureau of (American) Ethnology (Thomas [1894] referred to the site as the Vogel Mound Group). In the 1950S, archaeologists from the Illinois State Museum worked at the site for two field seasons. Illinois State Museum archaeologist Melvin Fowler worked at Twenhafel's Weber Mound in 1957, documenting that it was a Hopewell burial mound, and Joseph Caldwell worked approximately 610 meters southwest of that mound in 1958. Caldwell's work revealed the presence of numerous trash and storage pits and at least four major periods of occupation from the Early Woodland period (ca...