Circular Villages of the Monongahela Tradition

By Bernard K. Means

Between A.D. 1000 and 1635, the inhabitants of southwestern Pennsylvania and portions of adjacent states—known to archaeologists as the Monongahela Culture or Tradition—began to reside regularly in ring-shaped village settlements. These circular settlements consisted of dwellings around a central plaza. A cross-cultural and cross-temporal review of archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic cases demonstrates that this settlement form appeared repeatedly and independently worldwide, including throughout portions of the Eastern Woodlands, among the Plains Indians, and in Central and South America.
 
Specific archaeological cases are drawn from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, that has the largest number of completely excavated Monongahela villages. Most of these villages, excavated in the 1930s as federal relief projects, were recently dated. Full analysis of the extensive excavations reveals not only the geometric architectural patterning of the villages, but enables an analysis of the social groupings, population estimates, and economic status of residents who inhabited the circular villages. Circular patterning can be revealed at less fully excavated archaeological sites. Focused test excavations can help confirm circular village plans without extensive and destructive excavations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2007
• ISBN: 9780817380496

Book preview

Circular Villages of the Monongahela Tradition

Circular Villages of the Monongahela Tradition

BERNARD K. MEANS

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2007

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Minion

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Means, Bernard K. (Bernard Klaus), 1964–

    Circular villages of the Monongahela tradition / Bernard K. Means.

            p.    cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1573-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

    ISBN-10: 0-8173-1573-X

    ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-5438-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    ISBN-10: 0-8173-5438-7

  1. Indians of North America—Dwellings—Pennsylvania. 2. Indians of North America—Dwellings—Monongahela River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.) 3. Indian architecture Monongahela River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.) 4. Central-plan buildings—Monongahela River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.) 5. Land settlement patterns—Monongahela River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.) 6. Social archaeology—Monongahela River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.) 7. Monongahela River Valley (W. Va. and Pa.)—Antiquities. I. Title.

    E78.P4M35 2007

    974.8′801—dc22

2006102622

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8049-6 (electronic)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1. Village Spatial Layouts and Social Organizations

2. A Review of the Late Prehistoric Monongahela Tradition and the New Chronology for Allegheny Mountains Villages

3. Villages, Communities, and Social Organizations

4. Building Models of Village Spatial and Social Organizations

5. Models and Hypotheses Related to Community Organization

6. Data Sources, Variables, and Analytical Approaches

7. Modeling Community Patterning from Select Village Components in the Allegheny Mountains Region

8. Comparative Analyses from Modeling Individual Village Components

9. Implications Drawn from Interpreting Community Organization through Village Spatial Layouts

References Cited

Index

List of Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Maximum extent of the Monongahela tradition

2. DeBry’s version of John White’s 1585 watercolor of the village of Pomeioc, North Carolina

3. Villages sites in Somerset County, Pennsylvania

4. Select drainages in the Allegheny Mountains region

5. Reconstruction of a Monongahela village

6. Diametric model of a ring-shaped settlement

7. An Omaha tribal camping circle

8. Map of a Zulu homestead

9. Concentric model of a ring-shaped settlement

10. Village of Omarakana

11. Yellen’s model of a ring-shaped settlement

12. Portnoy’s model of a ring-shaped settlement

13. Map of Fort Ancient Mayo Site

14. Radial model of the Mayo Site

15. Map of Fort Ancient SunWatch site

16. Circumferential model of a ring-shaped settlement

17. Hub-and-spoke model of a ring-shaped settlement

18. Circular histogram of grave orientations at Gnagey 3

19. Circumferential graph of features at Gnagey 3-2

20. Map of Gnagey 3

21. Map of Petenbrink 1

22. Map of Peck 1

23. Map of Peck 2

24. Map of Clouse

25. Map of Hanna

26. Map of Fort Hill

27. Map of Gower

28. Map of Reckner

29. Map of Powell 1

30. Map of Powell 2

31. Map of Troutman

32. Map of Emerick

33. Site plans arranged by increasing size

34. Site plans arranged by age and by increasing size

TABLES

1. Definite Allegheny Mountains region village sites

2. Radiocarbon assays for Allegheny Mountains region village sites

3. Areal extent of major social spaces at Allegheny Mountains region village sites

4. Descriptive statistics and population estimates for dwellings at Allegheny Mountains region villages

5. Dwelling clusters and population at select Allegheny Mountains region villages

Acknowledgments

A portion of the material presented in this work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (BCS-0226785) titled Modeling Somerset Monongahela Village Organization Within a Chronological Framework Developed through AMS Dating of Curated Organic Remains. My research also benefitted materially from a Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission Scholars in Residence grant. Without the generosity of artifact loans from The State Museum of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, this work would not have been possible. The State Museum of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State Archives made available all the original field records and photographs from the New Deal excavations in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and these are relied on throughout this work. Washington and Lee University’s Glenn Grant Publication Fund aided publication of this book.

My wife, Laura J. Galke of Washington and Lee University, provided a key illustration in this work, helped to further clarify its contents, and patiently supported the writing process. Finally, I would like to thank the critical appraisal of John Hart and an anonymous reviwer of an earlier draft of this manuscript. This work is stronger for their comments, but all misinterpretations or errors in this work are solely my responsibilty.

1

Village Spatial Layouts and Social Organizations

Across time and space, a significant shift in how social groups configured 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 affiliations 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 defined within the cultural-historical paradigm in the 1930s and 1950s (Means 2003). The Monongahela taxon subsumes a considerable 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 defined 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 affiliations of Monongahela tradition populations are not definitively known, the manner in which they commonly configured 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 defined 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.

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; Griffin 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 1997:109), southern Africa (Kuper 1993; Yellen 1977), and in early agricultural villages in Mesoamerica and the Near East (Flannery 1972:30–38, 2002:422).

A ring-shaped village is the subject of John White’s iconic illustration of the village of Pomeioc, located in what is now North Carolina (Figure 2). Pomeioc and some of its inhabitants were painted by White following his visit to the village in July 1585 as part of Sir Walter Ralegh’s failed attempt to establish a colony in the New World (Hulton 1984:10; Quinn 1985:68). White’s watercolor of Pomeioc depicts villagers actively interacting within a palisaded community where a ring of houses surrounds an open plaza. Several individuals are shown performing a ceremony around a rather large fire located in the center of the plaza. Monongahela tradition villages likely would have resembled Pomeioc, except that their dwellings had circular floor plans. The watercolors of Pomeioc and its inhabitants are of unparalleled value; they breathe life into an otherwise static past that often left few material traces (Quinn 1985:182). Impermanent aspects of material culture captured by White include architectural details and modes of personal dress, body adornment, and even hair styles (Hulton 1984:27–28).

Ring-shaped sites in the Eastern Woodlands are not limited to villages inhabited by maize agriculturalists of the recent past. Middle Archaic foragers in Louisiana, for example, initiated construction of the Watson Brake mound complex around 3350 B.C. (Saunders et al. 2005:631). Two curved earthworks form an oval around an open area devoid of cultural remains. The two earthworks consist of eleven mounds connected by artificial ridges (Saunders et al. 2005:632). The central open area is thought to have served as ritual space and the encircling ridges had a more domestic function (Saunders et al. 2005:631, 665). As explored in Chapter 4, Watson Brake is structured in a similar fashion to more recent ring-shaped villages of the Eastern Woodlands, where a domestic zone encircled a central ritual or ceremonial space.

The ring-shaped settlement form arose repeatedly and independently in different times and places—and among cultures of varying complexity. The phrase ring shaped was adopted in this work from Wüst and Barreto’s (1999) characterization of Central Brazilian village settlements, the layouts of which closely correspond to those of many village sites in the Eastern Woodlands. The ring-shaped village has been viewed as a fairly modular settlement form (Wills 1991:162), which readily enables its inhabitants to arrange material elements—notably dwellings—to accommodate a wide variety of social organizations present at varying scales. The layout of a ring-shaped settlement is intentionally manipulated to reinforce the local social order and often is explicitly perceived as a microcosm of the universe, rather than passively reflecting its constituent social groups (Maybury-Lewis 1989a:11; Pearson and Richards 1994:12).

The act of linking their settlement’s layout to their model of reality enhances the stability of the local group (Fletcher 1977:64). In other words, the inhabitants of ring-shaped settlements are cognizant on some level of the active role that material elements and their arrangements play in maintaining, perpetuating, and even generating social interactions (Fletcher and La Flesche 1911:138; Gross 1979:329, 337; James 1949:48; Lowie 1946a, 1946b; Means 1999a:35, 2000a:44, 2001, 2002a; Pearson and Richards 1994:12). Changes in village layouts reflect lessons learned from earlier manifestations of a community and the development of new or modification of extant social institutions to better manage increasingly large groups of people working and living alongside one another (Carneiro 1967:239; Eggan 1955:495; Gumerman 1994:9).

Ring-shaped settlements attracted the attention of ethnographers as early as the late nineteenth century, with some noting that these settlements are designed by their inhabitants according to geometric models (Dorsey 1884:215, 1894:523, 1897). Especially beginning with the work of Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s, ethnographers have argued that geometric models had social and ideological dimensions. Community-wide planning principles generated by these geometric models influence to some degree the spatial configuration of social groups—and their associated architectural elements, especially dwellings. As is evident from this work’s cross-cultural sampling of societies, presented in Chapter 4, discrete social groups of varying sizes and levels of political, social, or economic integration can arrange themselves within their ring-shaped settlements according to one of a variety of geometric models.

Ethnoarchaeological and archaeological studies in the latter half of the twentieth century argued that geometric models influence the distribution of activities within a ring-shaped settlement, usually with respect to the configuration of architectural remains (Dunnell 1983; Yellen 1977). Depending on their nature, activities are arranged spatially with respect either to individual dwellings or to the entire band of dwellings that encircle a central communal space.

That geometric models influence the distribution of activities, architecture, and social spaces associated with social groups at ring-shaped settlements should not come as a surprise. My review of these settlements indicates that geometric models influence not only the locations of social groups but also the locations of the material aspects of a settlement’s layout, resulting in a nonrandom distribution of all or some material remnants. At known ring-shaped villages, social groups are evident physically in the distributions and configurations of their dwellings. The placement of these dwellings structures interactions within the village, including the nature and location of activities with respect to individual dwellings and to all dwellings, which form an occupation zone around the centrally located plaza. One can expect village social organizations to be reflected in the spatial arrangement of some or all material remains at their village sites.

The comparatively large number of completely excavated village sites from the Allegheny Mountains region of Pennsylvania are well suited to addressing three broad goals central to this work. First, geometric models responsible for the configuration of all or some archaeologically recovered elements of Monongahela tradition village sites should be determinable from each site’s community pattern. Second, the kinds of social groups once present within these village sites should be identifiable at least to some degree from the nature and configuration of archaeologically recovered elements. Third, objectively identifying variation—if any—in village community patterns and corresponding social organizations should enable a consideration of whether these changed systematically over time. The third goal is directed toward potential social transformations that may have occurred in village communities after they emerged in the Upper Ohio Valley. This work is not concerned directly with the question of why villages first emerged in this region.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

In recent American archaeology, a continued focus on the household as the major unit of study has led some researchers to lose sight of a basic fact: households in village settlements intentionally chose to be part of a larger social entity—the community. Village sites such as those inhabited in the Allegheny Mountains region represented a particular type of community—the nucleated community—and differed from communities made of dispersed households. Yaeger and Canuto (2000) argued that the community as an entity in and of itself has largely been neglected in many household archaeology studies, and in larger-scale settlement pattern studies as well. To understand community organization, one must examine patterning evident at the level of the entire village site and not simply from one segment extrapolated to characterize an entire village site. All too often, there is at least an implicit assumption that any one segment of a village site—such as one or two households—is interchangeable with other broadly similar segments. The concept of the community is the appropriate scale for examining social relationships at and above the household level (Adler 2002:25). I consider a theoretical framework that relies on anthropological and ethnoarchaeological studies of community organization to be best suited to interpreting the archaeologically recovered aspects of village layouts in terms of village social organizations.

Studies of built environments and the social and behavioral use of space indicate that a settlement’s layout, society’s largest and most complex artefact (Parkington and Mills 1991:365, quoted in Widlok 1999:399), can shape and be shaped by the various social groups present, as well as the activities that these groups conduct within the settlement. The ring-shaped settlement is a special case of a settlement form that is clearly built according to models that attempt to impose and maintain a geometric order on the layout of the settlement as it exists in a horizontal plane. As touched on earlier, a cross-cultural and cross-temporal review of ring-shaped settlements and models developed to explain their form and shape suggests that these geometric models used to spatially order major social groups within a settlement reflect an ideal framework—a framework that frequently has a cosmological basis.

Because geometric models can spatially order both social groups and activities within a ring-shaped settlement, they generate activity structures that are geometric in their patterning. Considering more broadly both cognitive and behavioral aspects of these geometric models, one can argue that, for ring-shaped villages, community-wide planning principles exist that influence the organization of, and place certain constraints on, the intravillage distribution of the architectural remains and social spaces that were created and maintained by various social groups. In other words, a community’s activity structure is generated partly by the interaction between village social groups with the geometric models they used to plan a site’s layout. For these reasons, ring-shaped settlements should be ideal for considering how social organizations can appear on at least some level within the spatial structure of a settlement’s layout. Although writing of village settlements in general, Gillespie (2000a:7) underscored a similar point when she noted that the village is a meaningfully constituted layout around which people organize behaviors.

More than one geometric model can operate at any one time or at different stages in the occupational history of a settlement, depending on how social, behavioral, and ideological factors affect the relationships that generate the layouts of a given ring-shaped settlement. For example, one ideal geometric model may have been responsible for the distribution of village social groups and certain material elements, especially dwellings or dwelling clusters associated with the social groups. Other geometric models can then come into play that act to influence the locations of various activities. Disposal of a community’s more noxious refuse, for example, can take place in a ring outside of the main occupation zone, regardless of how social groups and their associated dwellings are distributed within this zone. Dwellings are expected to provide one of the strongest indicators of a settlement’s geometric models, either with respect to their own arrangement within a settlement or in terms of the distribution of other material elements relative to dwellings.

Thus, the basic premise of this study is that community organization can be modeled from the remains of village sites; the layout of a village settlement can reflect past social organizations. There is a wide range of possible social groups that could be represented spatially within a ring-shaped village. Social groups could range from spatially discrete and functionally redundant households to household clusters representing more formal corporate entities, such as lineages, clans, or Lévi-Straussian societies of houses (Brooks and Yellen 1987; Dancey 1988; Hart 1993; Hull 1987; Lea 1995; Lévi-Strauss 1982; O’Connell 1987; Pollack and Henderson 1992). The recently formulated Lévi-Straussian societies of houses concept describes a form of social organization where social groups form to maintain property from generation to generation, including their ownership of part of a village circle (Gillespie 2000a).

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM, MODELS, AND HYPOTHESES

The social transformations that occurred after Monongahela tradition populations—and other groups in the Northeast—shifted to seasonal or year-round co-residence in village settlements are not well understood. For the Monongahela tradition, this failure to fully understand social transformations associated with living in villages stems partly from a lack of understanding of the organizing principles that generated the layouts of their ring-shaped settlements. Not knowing until recently the age of occupation for