THE RISE OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES IN NORTH AMERICA

Although there is some dispute it is highly likely that prehistoric societies in North America never reached the level of  socio-political complexity (i.e., city-state level) as they did in the Old World, in the Andean region of South America and in Mesoamerica. Nonetheless, some North American Indian groups did display many of the characteristics that we commonly equate to complex Chiefdoms, e.g., status differences based on inheritance, economic systems based on redistribution and settlement hierarchies with central places. Of these groups more archaeological research has focused on the Eastern Woodlands, e.g., Adena, Hopewell and Mississipian Mound Cultures, and the American Southwest. e.g., Hohokam, Mogollon and Anasazi. Each will be discussed in more detail later in this lecture.

1. Environment

North America is a wedge-shaped continent; it is widest in the north and tapers toward the south.  Most of it lies north of the 30th parallel in temperate and subpolar latitudes. North of the Rio Grande there are mountain ranges along both edges of the continent (worn down 400 million year old Appalachians in the east and the 10-15 million year old Rockies and coastal ranges in the west). The lowlands between the 2 mountain chains include the Canadian Shield, the Great Plains of the western United States and the Mississippi River Basin.

Today polar tundra covers the northern part of the continent from Alaska to the coast of Greenland. South of this treeless frozen area lies evergreen forests that stretch southward to New England. This area gives way to deciduous forests which covered much of the eastern United States until the beginning of this century. These forests thin out towards the west where they gradually merge with the grasslands of the Great Plains. West of the grasslands lie the steppe, desert and alpine environments of the Rockies, the Great Basin and the American southwest. Evergreen forests appear again along the Pacific coast of the continent and stretch northward from the middle of California to Alaska.

This range of environments supported a diversity of animal and plant life which in turn brought about diverse subsistence economies by the North American peoples.

2.  Early Cultures in North America

            A. By 6500 BC the inhabitants of the Great Plains of southeastern Colorado participated in communal buffalo drives during late May or early June; for example, the Olsen-Chubbuck Site has remains of bison suggesting that 75-100 individuals could have carried out the work in a single morning.

            B. On the California coast at the same time early peoples lived in semi-subterranean pithouses and covered their dead with red ocher, collected marine shellfish in the intertidal zone and dove for abalone; they caught deep-water fish with baited hooks and shallow-water species with nets. They hunted deer throughout the year and seals and sea lions during the winter/early spring. In late summer they moved to temporary campsites a few miles inland to gather acorns and seeds.

            C. In the coastal areas of Labrador, Newfoundland, Maritime provinces, eastern Quebec and northern New England economies and material culture were relatively homogeneous, i.e., subsistence economies based on birds, fish and mammals and incorporated differences in the local availability or abundance of particular species (salmon and cod north and swordfish south). Material culture included chipped and ground stone implements, bone artifacts, decorated concretions and quartz pebbles, red ocher and burial mounds. When snows came coastal peoples broke up as households and bands and retreated inland to favored hunting sites which overlooked the places where caribou herds crossed rivers or lakes. This Great Basin, coastal and inland foraging pattern occurred throughout North America up to about 1000 BC in some places and beyond that time in others.

3. Eastern Woodland Cultures

Although communities have occupied the Eastern Woodlands for perhaps more than 15,000 years evidence for their way of life becomes apparent during the Archaic Period (8000 to 1000 BC [Paleoindian Period prior to this]). E.g., during the 8th millennium BC small bands camped in the bottomlands and on sandbars along the rivers of Tennessee; their members lived in skin or bark shelters; hunted deer and elk; trapped small animals, captured turtles during the spring.  They occasionally ate freshwater mollusks and harvested hickory nuts, acorns and berries in the late summer/early autumn. A late summer camp at the Koster Site (lower Illinois River Valley north of St. Louis, Missouri) had about 25 residents who dispersed to collect shellfish and harvest and store hickory nuts in the fall. The households hunted deer and relied on their food stores until they returned to Koster the following spring.

Between 4500 and 4000 BC many communities began to return regularly each year to campsites on rivers and lakes that overlooked rich shellfish beds or spawning grounds. They built relatively permanent houses at Koster and sites on the Tennessee River Valley and along the upper Tombigee River in Mississippi. In some areas they abandoned these dwellings when rising waters inundated them and returned after the floods had receded. Some of these riverine or lakeside settlements may have had as many as 100 residents. As a consequence of the settlement and subsistence practices deep refuse mounds of discarded mollusk shells and debris accumulated around the campsites.

Cemeteries and less formal burial grounds were another aspect of this increased sedentism. Most of the 4th millennium BC graves contained individuals only about 1/4 of which had grave goods of any kind. Grave goods became somewhat more common during the 3rd millennium BC. A few graves in Wisconsin and Michigan contained implements that were cold-hammered from the pure native copper that outcrops around Lake Superior. A small number of individuals from cemeteries in western New York had projectile points embedded in their bodies while a few were mutilated (e.g., their heads, hands or feet had been severed from their bodies). The presence of weapons (like spear throwers) in the graves of women and children suggests that they not only hunted but may also have been involved in the violence and low-level feuds that characterized these relatively egalitarian kin-based communities in which leadership and authority were based largely on age, experience or skill rather than ascribed status (inheritance).

Women of this period played major roles in their subsistence economies which seem to have consisted of overlapping but complementary spheres of activities that were organized to some extent by gender. Women played a major role in plant cultivation; gourds and squash were domesticated by 5000 BC and used as containers in ritual contexts. In the 2nd millennium BC they cultivated a number of local species, such as, sunflowers, sumpweed and chenopodium; these harvests were used to supplement the hickory nuts and other wild plant foods they gathered and stored during the fall. Women also harvested freshwater mollusks from the streams and oxbow lakes of the Savannah River watershed in South Carolina and Georgia.

Between 1000 and 700 BC peoples in the lower Mississippi River Valley began to erect monumental earthworks at Poverty Point; this site overlooked the Mississippi River floodplain 2000 miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico near the confluences of half a dozen rivers. The earthworks consisted of 6 semicircular embankments (80 ' wide x 10 ' high) and several platform mounds.  The largest of these mounds rises nearly 70 ' above the surface of the bluff; it has been estimated that the construction of the mounds required 1350 persons working for 210 days (not including those who provided food, etc. to the workers nor the part-timers from the local hamlets and villages).

Poverty Point was probably the center of a widespread exchange system which brought raw materials and finished items from various upstream localities, some of which were more than 600 miles away, and from settlements along the Gulf coast. Materials included argillite, copper, slate, steatite and mollusk shells. This sudden elaboration of exchange was accompanied by the intensification of social relations.

Poverty Point was not the only settlement in eastern North America that witnessed an intensification of construction and exchange activities during the 1st millennium BC. The Adena communities of the Ohio Valley continued the tradition of northern groups, like the Maritime Archaic peoples of Labrador, of erecting burial mounds.  By 500 BC they had erected another 300-500 mounds in the River Valley. Although not on the scale of Poverty Point earthworks they involved the labor power of a number of local communities whose members cooperated in digging, moving and piling the earth that went into the mounds. Some of the mounds were used over considerable periods of time and their construction was part of an elaborate funerary ritual; albeit none exhibited social differences.

By 2000 years ago Adena burial customs changed.  Individuals or small numbers of bodies were placed in burial chambers located in wooden structures that were subsequently covered with earthen mounds and often enclosed with circular earthworks. The grave goods were often lavish and frequently included objects made from raw materials that were obtainable only in distant localities. In some instances they also included severed human heads (trophy skulls). The later Adena burial mounds suggest the continuing importance of social relations based on kinship and residence and the elaboration of status differences or ranking within some communities.

Between 200 BC and AD 400 the inhabitants of the small hamlets that lived in the Miami and Scioto valleys of southern Ohio began to erect enormous earthworks. At Hopewell   38 mounds spread over 110 acres were enclosed by a rectangular earthwork; a gigantic complex of circles, squares and octagons connected by causeways, covering about 4,000 person/hours of labor were involved in digging, moving and piling the earth that formed a typical Hopewell mound. The mounds contained several thousand burials of diverse types (from cremations to crypts). There were also charnel houses (where corpses and cremated individuals were interred before the structures were burned to the ground and covered over with earth). The grave goods of the Hopewellian elite were richer than those found in the earlier Adena tombs; copper earspools and breastplates; pearl beads; and ornaments made from mica, tortoise shell and silver. Many of the Hopewell tombs contained objects made from raw materials that came from distant localities. The carefully executed objects also suggest that some individuals were part-time artisans who worked with galena, mica and even obsidian.

Pottery vessels and ornaments resembling those from the Hopewell burial mounds in southern Ohio were also placed in elite tombs in villages in the Illinois River Valley. One of these was Scovill, a settlement located in the rich bottomlands of the valley, whose inhabitants hunted mallard ducks and planted squash and gourds in the late spring before they dispersed to hunt deer and other animals in the uplands in the summer. They returned to the bottomlands in the late summer to harvest their crops and to gather other economically important plants, such as nuts, knotweed, wild rice, marsh elder, grapes and plums.

Beginning around AD 150 communities in a broad band stretching from northern Louisiana to Georgia performed elaborate burial rituals on the tops of platform mounds where the residences of important personages and charnel houses for the dead were erected. These rank-ordered kin communities (Weeden Island Culture) were contemporary with the Hopewellian groups to the North. Each local Weeden Island community may have had its own ritual specialist who performed during the burial rituals and whose knowledge was the ideological cement that bound together the members of the community and provided linkages among them, their ancestors and nature.

Around AD 900 a series of regional groupings known as the Mississippian Culture appeared in various parts of the eastern United States, i.e.,-- the lower Mississippi River Valley, the Caddoan area centered in the Arkansas and Red River valleys, the southern Appalachian of Alabama and Georgia, the middle Mississippi and the river basins emptying into that portion of the valley, the Oneota of the upper Mississippi Valley and the Fort Ancient communities of the middle Ohio River Valley. Of these, the middle Mississippi was the more elaborate and overdeveloped. The site of Cahokia, located in the bottomlands at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois Rivers near St. Louis, was the center of a stratified society that coalesced about AD 1050 and collapsed about 2 centuries later. There were more than 100 mounds at this 3,300 acre settlement; 250 acres near the center where several of the largest mounds were located were enclosed by a wooden palisade. More than 30,000 people lived at Cahokia between the 11-13th centuries.

During the 11th century a small platform was built and aligned along a north-south axis with the largest structure in the settlement. Two individuals were buried in this mound within a century of each other. Little is known about the first burial. The second individual was accompanied to his grave by a number of other people. He was buried on a platform made of more than 20,000 shell beads. Near him were bundles of bones from earlier burials. A little further away 6 men were buried in separate tombs with lavish grave goods, i.e., rolls of sheet copper, stacks of mica sheets, semiprecious stones and finely chipped arrowheads that were never used. More than 50 women, similar in height, weight and and age (18-23) were possibly strangled and buried at the same time in a nearby pit. Four men (whose heads and hands had been cut off) were buried between the central figure and the young women. The raw materials used to make the goods placed in the tomb came from the Gulf Coast, Yellowstone, the Great Lakes, and the Carolina piedmont.

Cahokia's ruling elite appropriated significant amounts of labor power from its residents and from those of smaller neighboring settlements. It also acquired raw materials that moved up and down the river systems that merged near the city. By 1400 the population of Cahokia had dwindled to 4000-5000 individuals. 300 years later the first French explorers of the region found its mounds overgrown with vegetation. The decline of Cahokia was the outcome of processes in which successor groups proliferated on its periphery while the inhabitants of outlying settlements and regions reasserted their autonomy and control over the raw materials, goods and labor power of their own members. The results were that the margins were tribalized and exchange and warfare intensified, particularly among the proto-Iroquois societies of the eastern Great Lakes region and in the lower Mississippi Valley.

4.  American Southwest

The American Southwest is a small area with diverse habitats. The low-lying deserts, which stretch westward from Tucson and Phoenix to the Colorado River and southward into Chihuahua, Mexico, exhibit little temperature variation from one season to the next. North and east of the desert lie the steep forest-covered mountains and deep, narrow valleys of the Mogollon Rim which stretches in a broad band across central Arizona and New Mexico. North of the mountains lie the high mesas and deep canyons of the four corners area where the boundaries of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico converge; much of the land is flat or gently sloping and the wooded mesas are separated by grass-covered bottomlands.

More than 11,000 years ago the inhabitants of the southwest were hunter/gatherers who camped near springs and killed various animals, including mammoths that came to drink at the waterholes. 5,000 years later their descendants were also hunters and foragers who relied more intensively on plant foods and on fish and birds from the lakes and rivers. They dug up tubers, roots and whole plants with wooden digging sticks. They carried the plant foods they harvested in tightly woven baskets. They ground the seeds and nuts they collected on flat milling stones; they boiled their food by dropping hot rocks in baskets that had been waterproofed with a lining of pitch. They wore robes made from animal skins that had been sewn together and sandals woven from plant fibers; a few individuals wore necklaces made from Pacific Ocean seashells.

During the 1st millennium BC communities in various parts of the southwest, e.g., the desert of southern Arizona and Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico, incorporated plants originally domesticated in Mexico into their subsistence economies.  The hunting/gathering bands bands of Chaco Canyon, which foraged in the open grasslands during the summer months, returned to the canyon in the fall to collect pinyon nuts and to harvest the squash, beans and maize from the gardens they had planted earlier in the year. For centuries agriculture remained a relatively minor subsistence activity in the lives of the foraging communities in the southwest; agricultural products merely supplemented their wild food resources. After about AD 200 small sedentary hamlets and villages appeared in various parts of the region, e.g., the Hohokam area of Southern Arizona, the Sonoran Desert and the Colorado Plateau. The earliest of the permanent settlements varied in size from a few pithouses to 25-35 households. Some of the farming towns that were built and occupied after AD 700 may have had 500-1000 residents.

Before AD 500 a typical pithouse in the Mogollon Rim had a floor area of 330 square feet which suggests 10 individuals may have participated in the production-consumption activities. By AD 1000 the settlements contained 3 times as many rooms as their predecessors but each dwelling was about a third the size suggesting that the organization of the residential groups was transformed through time. In the earlier settlements the domestic groups were made up of extended families that lived in a few large dwellings; in the later villages the household consisted of 2-4 individuals. The shift in the size and composition of the domestic groups was accompanied by a reduction in the size of the cooking vessels.

Between 1000 BC and AD 1000 the social organization of the hunter/forager and farming communities of the southwest was composed of relatively autonomous largely self-sufficient households.  Households (extended families) were linked to one another by a continually shifting web of kinship and marital relations. Many of the later communities also contributed significant amounts of labor to the construction and maintenance of structures (kivas) that were presumably used by the village as a whole as places where rituals were performed and where discussions shaped how labor and other resources would be allocated.  For example, such discussions might include how raw materials and finished goods could be obtained, such as turquoise, copper bells, or seashells  from distant places in Mexico or on the Gulf and Pacific coasts. Such items were usually obtained when individuals in one community exchanged gifts with friends, kin or partners who lived elsewhere or with visitors from distant settlements.

Around AD 700 peoples in various parts of the southwest began to abandon their pithouses and to build rectangular, above-ground structures. Later villages dating to the 10th century and after consisted of 1 or more apartment houses, often with 2-3 stories and several hundred rooms which were variously used for the everyday life activities and storage.

During the 10th century the inhabitants of Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico built 12 towns, the largest of which was Pueblo Bonito. The 800 rooms that made up this crescent-shaped apartment block rose 4 stories above the ground and overlooked an enclosed plaza and more than 30 semisubterranean kivas that were roofed with pine logs carried down from the mesa tops. The residents entered the rooms by ladders that were placed against the outside walls of the building. The large towns, i.e., Pueblo Bonito, Penasco Blanco and Una Vida, may have served mainly as food storage areas and ritual centers for the inhabitants of the isolated household and the 70 or so small hamlets located throughout the 20 mile long canyon on the mesas overlooking its bottomlands and in areas linked by an extensive road system.  Besides the towns and roads the inhabitants of the canyon, between the 10 and 13 th centuries, also built an elaborate water-control system.

The inhabitants of Chaco Canyon and its environs were farmers. The women planted and tended crops and foraged for wild plant foods; the men hunted and acquired raw materials and finished goods from distant areas. Between AD 920 and 1120 the Chaco community made turquoise ornaments from raw materials they brought from sources near Santa Fe, which was about 100 miles to the east. These objects were manufactured not only in the towns but also in the smaller outlying settlements and isolated homesteads. The other exotic materials they acquired during the 10-11th centuries were seashells from the Gulf of California and copper bells, cotton fabrics, macaws and parrots from Mexico. Some of the objects produced in the canyon found their way to Hohokam communities in the deserts of southern Arizona and to Mexico. It has been suggested that slaves were also exported to the south from Chaco Canyon. Their source may have been the cliff-dwelling communities of southern Colorado, e.g., Mesa Verde and beyond.

The social conditions and exchange networks that sustained the settlements in Chaco Canyon collapsed after AD 1130. Some inhabitants of the canyon abandoned their homes and moved to new localities; others remained and relied increasingly on hunting and foraging to supplement the crops tended by the women. Those who remained, either in the small hamlets or in the outlying settlements north of the canyon, began to develop new links or social relations with the communities from the Mesa Verde region of southern Colorado.

The Hohokam communities centered in the Gila and Snake River valleys of the southern Arizona desert also rose to prominence during the later part of the 1st millennium AD. The population of several of the pithouse villages located along the rivers increased, presumably after their inhabitants dug irrigation canals to extend the amount of land under cultivation. These kin-organized, possibly rank-ordered, communities began to rely increasingly on the water management systems they built during the 8-9th centuries. The construction and maintenance of these systems required significant inputs of labor each year. During the 11th century the communities may have attempted to recruit this labor from groups that occupied fortified or easily defended hilltop settlements in the Phoenix area.

Around 1250 a new type of architecture and social grouping appeared in the Hohokam settlement at Casa Grande in the Phoenix Basin. Residential structures with extensive storage facilities were built on old palisaded platform mounds. The residents of these large households had greater access to labor power and to wealth than their contemporaries in the same community. This suggests that large households may have been wealthier than smaller ones by virtue of having more individuals who could contribute labor power and that social ranking may have intensified during the 13th century after the communities in the Tucson Basin and Mimbres area had rejected the kinds of objects and styles associated with the Hohokam communities around Phoenix.

Often the intensification of social relations means that the members of certain households or domestic groups expect to receive gifts from their kin and neighbors. Under some conditions the latter may make these gifts to higher-ranking individuals or families. However, in other circumstances they may distinguish between a gift and a demand and refuse to participate in exchange relations that have the capacity to become oppressive and exploitative. Communities throughout North America repeatedly made the choice not to participate for long periods of time in tributary relations. They typically resisted attempts to turn gifts into tribute.

This lecture concludes discussions on New World complex societies.  Our final lecture will deal with much of the data presented throughout this course, particularly in terms of who actually owns all the materials collected to support interpretations of the past.  In the end we must ask ourselves "Who owns the past?"