Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Chronological Culture Change And Organization In The Middle Ohio Valley

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Edward Henry, PhD Candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, will investigate ancient geometric earthen monuments in Eastern North America. This research will explore collective labor efforts within contexts of ritual action, their role in social integration, and their reflection of ideological participation. While the research focuses on the past it also has the potential to inform on the present. Ritual and community focused labor are factors which today still serve to establish and maintain social order. Scholars have noted that participatory engagement in ritualistic labor events can help create and solidify social bonds, reproduce ideologies, and reinforce sociopolitical and economic agendas. Using archaeology to assess the construction of ceremonial earthen monuments by ancient small-scale societies provides a context to explore the material indicators for social complexity, how it emerges, and is organized. A better technological and chronological understanding of how, and how quickly, earthen monuments are built by Adena and Hopewell (500 BCE-600 CE) societies of Eastern North America. These groups are seemingly mobile and do not have a state-like leadership hierarchy. Nevertheless, these people organized to build geometrically complex enclosure sites, large burial mounds, and maintain a continental exchange network in exotic goods. Examining how, how quickly, these practices of ritual landscape modification spread across the Ohio River Valley provides one understanding of emergent social complexity where massive labor feats were conducted outside a sociopolitical structure grounded in a rigid hierarchy. Mr. Henry will examine how ditch-and-embankment geometric enclosures were built across the Bluegrass Region of Central Kentucky in the Middle Ohio Valley. This region is considered the heartland of Adena and Hopewell societies in ancient Eastern North America. Examining these ritual sites in Kentucky provides a view south of the Ohio River, where chronological understandings of enclosure construction needs refinement. A better historical understanding of enclosure construction, use, and abandonment will help indicate how quickly social changes associated with the emergence of Adena and Hopewell (e.g., a hunting and horticultural economy, ceramic technology, new animalistic iconography) spread. In addition, this work will show how particular ritual practices were adopted across the region. By excavating multiple areas of eight earthen enclosures across Central Kentucky, Henry will see how the landscape was modified during each sites construction and determine if differences exist in traditions of ritual labor. He will examine the construction profiles of embankments and ditches with trenches and open large (ca. 4 x 4 meter) excavation blocks inside enclosures to explore the activities carried out within their boundaries. This robust dataset will be used to examine the organization and spread of social complexity in ancient Eastern North America. The historical component of this research will be relevant to the background of modern American Indians. This research will provide specialized archaeological training to students pursuing degrees in anthropology and archaeology.