Archaeology of the Appalachian Highlands

Citation preview

Archaeology of the Appalachian Highlands

Edited by

Lynne P. Sullivan and Susan C. Prezzano

The University of Tennessee Press

I Knoxville

Copyright © 2001 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville. All Rjghts Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Erst Edition. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). The binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Archaeology of the Appalachian Highlands / edited by Lynne P. Sullivan and Susan C. Prezzano. - lst ed.

p. cm. ISBN 1-57233-142-9 (cl.: alk. paper) 1. Paleo-Indians-Appalachian Region. 2. Indians of North

Ame1ica-Appalachian Region-Antiquities. 3. Excavations (Archaeology)-Appalachian Region. 4. Appalachian Region-Antiquities. I. Sullivan, Lynne P. II. Prezzano, Susan C. II I. Title. E78.A66 A73 2001 974'.0l-dc21

2001002744

Contents

Preface xiv Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction The Concept of Appalachian Archaeology

xix

Lynne P. Sullivan and Susan C. Prezzano Part I

Ridges, Rises, Caves, and Rocks Aspects of the Appalachian Environment 1. HiOtops of the Allegheny Plateau A Preferred Microenvironment for Late Prehistoric Horticulturalists

3

Robert J. Hasenstab and William C. Johnson

2. Prehistoric Land-Use Patterns in North-Central Connecticut A Matter of Scale 19 Kenneth L. Feder

3. Geomorphology of Upland Regolith in the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau Implications for Prehistoric Archaeology 31 David L. Cremeens and Jonathan C. Lothrop

4. Toward an Understanding of Prehistoric Cave Art in Southern Appalachia 49 Jan F. Simek, Susan R. Frankenberg, and Charles H. Faulkner

v

Part II

The Earliest Highlanders Paleoindian and Archaic Period Research 5. Paleoindian Populations in Trans-Appalachia The View from Pennsylvania 67 Kurt W. Carr, James M. Adovasio, and David R. Pedler

6. Paleoindian Occupations of the Southern Appalachians A View from the Cumberland Plateau of Kentucky and Tennessee

88

Leon Lane and David G. Anderson

7. Articulating Hidden Histories of the Mid-Holocene in the Southern Appalachians 103 Kenneth E. Sassaman

8. Adding Complexity to Late Archaic Research in the Northeastern Appalachians 121 Nina M. Versaggi, LouAnn Wurst, T. Cregg Madrigal, and Andrea Lain Part ill

Subregional Integration) Interaction) and Diversity in Later Prehistory 9. Early Woodland Burial Mounds of Kentucky Symbolic Elements in the Cultural Landscape 137 James P. Fenton

10. Late Woodland Palisaded Villages from Ontario to the Carolinas Their Potential for Accurate Population Estimates 149 James W. Hatch and Gregory H. Bondar

11. Late Prehistoric Cultures of the Upper Susquehanna Valley

168

Susan C. Prezzano and Christina B. Rieth

12. Subsistence-Settlement Change and Continuity in Western Pennsylvania 177 John P. Nass Jr.

13. Living on the Edge Mississippian Settlement in the Cumberland Gap Vicinity

198

Richard W. Jefferies

14. Political Economy in Late Prehistoric Southern Appalachia 222 Paul D. Welch

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/ Contents

15. Architecture and Landscape in Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Western North Carolina 238 Christopher B. Rodning Part IV

Native Highlanders and Europeans 16. The Schaghticoke Nation and the Moravian Movement Tribal Revitalization without Assimilation in Highland Connecticut

252

Lucianne Lavin

17. The Lessons of Northern Iroquoian Demography 264 Dean R. Snow

18. Cherokee Archaeology since the 1970s 278 Gerald F. Schroedl

PartV

Perspectives on Appalachian Archaeowgy 19. Engendering Appalachian Archaeology 300 Cheryl Claassen

20. Geography, History, and the Appalachian Axis Mundi

306

Charles R. Cobb

21. An Evolutionary View of Appalachian Archaeology 311 William S. Dancey

22. Ridges, Rises, and Rocks; Caves, Coves, Terraces, and Hollows Appalachian Archaeology at the Millennium

319

Patty Jo Watson

23. A Conscious Appalachian Archaeology 323 Lynne P. Sullivan and Susan C. Prezzano

References 333 Contributors 405 Index 407

Contents

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Illustrations

Figures 0.1 1.1 2.1 3.1a 3.1b 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4 .1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4 .8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 5.1 viii

Comparison of Northern and Southern Appalachian Chronology xxviii Slope-side Temperature Monitoring, Ellijay Test Site, North Carolina 9 Stone Tools Recovered at Firetown North 28 Plan View of a First-Order Drainage Basin in the Appalachian Plateau 36 Longitudinal Profile of Part of a First-Order Drainage Basin 36 Three Dominant Types of Regolith in the Appalachian Plateau 38 Soil Profiles at Site 46Ni275 40 Soil Profiles at Site 46Wall2 42 First-Order Valley Basin in the Appalachian Plateau 46 Sun Petroglyph from 3rd Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 54 Chevron Petroglyph from 3rd Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 54 Spider Mud Glyph from 1st Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 54 Shell Gorget with Spider Effigy from the Hixson Site in Tennessee 54 Shell Gorget with a Bird-Human Effigy from the Hixson Site 54 Bird-Human Petroglyph from 11th Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 55 Bird-Human Mud Glyph from 1st Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 55 Panel of Mud Glyphs from Mud Glyph Cave in Tennessee 55 Human Hand Prints in Clay from 1st Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 59 Drawing of a Barred X Mud Glyph from 1st Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 63 Drawing of Incised Decoration on Ceramic Vessel Handles from Chickamauga Reservoir in Tennessee 63 Panel of Human Face Effigies from 6th Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 63 Small Prismatic Blades at Meadowcroft Rockshelter 74

5.2

Small Prismatic Blades from the Krajacic Site, Near Meadowcroft

5.3

Rockshelter 73 Cylindrical Polyhedral Cores from the Krajacic Site

5.4

Miller Lanceolate Projectile Point from Meadowcroft Rockshelter

5.5

Site Densities for the Paleoindian Period, Early Archaic Period, and Bifurcate Point Horizon in Pennsylvania 76

5.6

Lithic Raw-Material Types Identified in Paleoindian, Early Archaic, and Bifurcate Point Assemblages from the Piedmont/Costa! Plain 79

5.7

Lithic Raw-Material Types Identified in Paleoindian, Early Archaic, and Bifurcate Point Assemblages from the Ridge and Valley 80

5.8

Lithic Raw-Material Types Identified in Paleoindian, Early Archaic, and

5.9

Bifurcate Point Assemblages from the Glaciated Plateau 81 Lithic Raw-Material Types Identified in Paleoindian, Early Archaic, and

73 73

Bifurcate Point Assemblages from the Unglaciated Plateau 82 5.10 Temporal Distribution of Riverine Sites from Four Physiographic Zones 6.1

Defined for Pennsylvania 83 Paleoindian Period Diagnostics from the Northern Cumberland Plateau and Eastern Highland Rim of Kentucky and Tennessee

96

10.1 10.2

Roofed-over Area vs. Palisade Area for All Components 159 Roofed-over Area vs. Palisade Area for Iroquoian Components

10.3 10.4

Roofed-over Area vs. Palisade Area for Monongahela Components 160 Roofed-over Area vs. Palisade Area for All Other Components 160

159

10.5

Structure Size Frequency at Monongahela Sites

10.6 10.7

Average House Size at Monongahela Sites. 164 Roofed-over Area vs. Palisade Area of Monongahela Sites by Period

13.1

Civil Works Administration Field Crew Excavating Mound No. 1 at the

13.2

Bowman Farm Site 205 Excavation of the Irvin Mound, Campbell County, Tennessee

13.3 13.4

The Croley-Evans Mound and Village, Knox County, Kentucky The Carter Robinson Mound, Lee County, Virginia 216

14.1 14.2

Comparison of Deer Remains 227 Histogram of Distances between Pairs of Contemporary Components in Northern Georgia and Neighboring Areas

14.3 16.1

163 165

205 210

231

Citico-style Shell Gorget 234 "Moravian Chapel,'' Late 1960s or Early 1970s

256

Illustrations

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Maps 0.1 0.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2

4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 8.1 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 x

I

Physiography of the Appalachian Highlands xxii Appalachian Areas x:xiv Sites in Upper Allegheny River Drainage Sample 4 Distribution of Monongahela Culture Sites, Higher-Order Streams, and Drainage Divides, Allegheny Plateau, Southwestern Pennsylvania 5 Representation of Monongahela Bluff Top and Interior Drainage Village Locations 7 Frost-Free-Day Growing Season Isolines for the Upper Ohio River Valley and Adjacent Areas 12 Farmington River Valley and Boundaries of the McLean Game Refuge 20 Cross-section of Talcott Mountain 21 Landform on which the Firetown North Site was Located 26 Topography of the Knoll, with Excavation Units at Firetown North Superimposed 27 Physiographic Setting of West Virginia 32 Corridor Land Tolsia Projects in West Virginia vs. Subdivisions of the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau and the Chert-bearing Kanawha Formation 33 Southeastern United States Cave-Art Sites 50 Distribution of Woodland Period Sites along River Valley above and below 1st Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 61 Distribution of Mississippian Period Sites along River Valley above and below 1st Unnamed Cave in Tennessee 61 Paleoindian Sites shown in Relation to Pennsylvania's Physiographic Provinces 74 Selected Paleoindian Localities, Showing Major Quarries and Postulated Lithic Raw-Material Procurement Zones 85 The Southern Appalachians 89 Fluted Point Incidences in the Eastern Woodlands 91 Physiographic Zones and Major Rivers of the Southeastern United States 104 Distribution of Middle Archaic Sites as a Percentage of Total Sites by County 111 Late Archaic Locales within the Northern Appalachian Highlands 122 Sites Used in Analysis 152 Iroquoian Sites 153 Monongahela Sites 153 Southeastern Sites 154

Illustrations

12.l 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 13.l 13.2 13.3 14.l 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 15.l 15.2 16.l 16.2 16.3 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 17.5. 17.6 17.7 17.8 17.9 17.10 17.11 17.12 17.13 17.14 17.15 17.16 18.1

The Lower Upper Ohio River Valley Region 178 Physiographic Features of the Upper Ohio River Valley 179 Late Woodland Sites in the Upper Ohio Valley 182 Monongahela Sites dating prior to A.D. 1250 184 Clemson Island Sites in the Susquehanna Valley 190 Stewart Phase and Blue Rock Phase Sites 191 Physiographic Features of the Cumberland Gap Region 200 Location of Sites 207 Mississippian Sites along the Upper Cumberland River in Knox County, Kentucky 209 Model Settlement Pattern in a Redistributive Economy 223 Settlements within the Moundville Chiefdom 225 Localization of Production at Moundville 228 Mississippian Mound Components in Northern Georgia and Neighboring Areas 231 Reconstruction of the Coosa Polity in A.D. 1540 232 Archaeological Components within the Reconstructed Coosa Polity 234 Find Spots for Citico-style Gorgets 235 The Appalachian Summit Region and Historic Cherokee Towns 239 Coweeta Creek Site in the Upper Little Tennessee Valley 243 The Present Schaghticoke Reservation in Kent, Connecticut 253 Phase 1 Surveys on the Schaghticoke Reservation, Kent, Connecticut 254 Eighteenth-Century Moravian Missions at Shekomeko, Wequadnach, and Pishgatikuk 256 The Northern Iroquoian Region of North America 265 Extent of Regional Glaciation 266 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 750 267 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 900 267 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 950 268 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1300 268 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1350 270 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1530 270 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1560 271 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1610 272 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1660 272 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1680 274 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1750 274 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1800 275 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1890 276 Northern Iroquoian Sites in A.D. 1996 276 Cherokee Settlements in the Eighteenth Century and the Cherokee Nation 279 IUustrations

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Tables

1.1 1.2 3.1 4.1 7.1 7.2

10.1 10.2 11.l 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 13.l 13.2 13.3 13.4

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Frequency of Late Prehistoric Period Monongahela Culture Components by Site Type, Drainage Basin, and Topographic Situation 6 Frequency of Late Prehistoric Period Monongahela Culture Components by Site Type, Subperiod, and Topographic Situation 11 Stream Channel and Depositional Characteristics of Upland Valley Basins in the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau 35 Radiocarbon Age Determinations for Southeastern Cave-Art Sites 52 Frequency of Middle Archaic and Total Sites in State Site Files of the Southeast 112 Distribution of Middle Archaic Sites on Bottomland and Upland Landforms in Select States of the Southeast 113 Critical Area Values and Source Information for All Components 156-57 Summary of Regression Values 156-57 Late Woodland Chronology of Central New York 169 Physiographic Setting of Pre-A.D. 1250 Monongahela Sites 185 Radiocarbon Dates of Late Woodland Sites 186 Monongahela Household Data by Period 188 Monongahela Site Size and Shape by Period 189 Clemson Island Radiocarbon Dates 192 Summary Description of Clemson Island Houses 193 Cumberland Gap Region Mississippian Ceramic Types 204 Mississippian Sites in the Upper Powell, Clinch, and Holston River Valleys 206 Summary of Radiocarbon Dates from Mississippian and MississippianInfluenced Sites in the Upper Powell, Clinch, and Holston Rivers 208 Summary of Upper Cumberland Radiocarbon Dates 211

13.5

Summary of Radiocarbon Dates from Mississippian and Mississippian-

18.l

Influenced Sites in the Upper Powell, Clinch, and Holston Rivers Cherokee Culture Chronology 281

18.2 18.3

Culture Chronology for Cherokee Lower Towns 281 Mississippian Period Culture Chronology for East Tennessee

18.4

Historical Periods Relating to Cherokee Culture

217

281

281

Tables

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Preface

Stretching from New England to northern Alabama, the Appalachian mountain chain forms not only a major physiographic province of the eastern United States but also the setting for thousands of years of Native American cultural developments. Like the stalwart, sometimes colorful, and better-known folk cultures of the more recent EuroAmerican inhabitants of these highlands, ancient native highlanders also developed vibrant and diverse traditions, but this heritage now is mainly accessible only through archaeological research. Bit by bit, and subregion by subregion, careful and persistent study of the Prehistoric and Early Historic archaeological sites that occur on (and below) the ridges, rises, plateaus, valleys, and hollows of Appalachia is making these past peoples known. Nevertheless, with very few exceptions and for sundry reasons, North American archaeologists have failed to recognize the Appalachians as a notable context for prehistoric peoples. Archaeologists tend to define regional parameters on an east-west axis in the eastern United States, thus obscuring the Appalachians, with their decidedly north-south orientation, as an integrating and integral landscape on which, and with which, past cultures evolved and interacted. Most scholars do not subscribe to the view that the natural environment is a deterministic factor in the development of human cultures, and the sheer diversity of native cultural traditions in the Appalachians is testament to their conviction. One cannot deny, however, that the lay of the land has influences on human behavior. For example, unsealable cliffs, deep gorges, and the trending directions and interconnections of valleys and passes all channel human passage, just as where fertile soils lie constrains agricultural practice. Mountainous terrain is known for tendencies to harbor cultural isolates, to present barriers to social interaction, and to include natural resources that differ from those of surrounding more level lands. How Appalachian peoples throughout prehistory met the challenges of, and were shaped by, such a setting has not been explored beyond the

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narrow confines of relatively small subregions. Perhaps archaeologists, too, have functioned as "cultural isolates" in the nooks and crannies of Appalachia that form their individual research areas. This volume takes a step toward conceptualizing the Appalachian highlands as a region with its own unique cultural "flavor" before and shortly after European contact. It does so by being the first to bring together research on the archaeology of the Prehistoric and Early Historic natives of the Appalachian highlands. This nontraditional perspective of eastern United State~ prehistory results in a collection of research by scholars whose work otherwise would not appear together. This juxtaposition of the highland portions of traditional archaeological spheres of"the Northeast,'' "the Southeast,'' and even fringes of "the mid-Atlantic" invites scholarly communication along little-worn intellectual corridors, but (ironically) following a well-worn Native American communication network: the Great Warrior Path, a trail system that extended along the spines of the Appalachian plateau and through the Valley and Ridge province between present-day New York and Pennsylvania to Alabama. The volume had its genesis in a conference entitled "Integrating Appalachian Highlands Archeology," organized by Lynne Sullivan and John Hart, and hosted by the New York State Museum in October 1996. A major goal of this conference was to facilitate and encourage communication between archaeologists working along the Appalachian chain. The very positive response from participants about attending a conference at which they met new people, heard new ideas, and learned about new data sets suggested that a publication with an Appalachian focus would be of interest and use to a larger audience. Susan Prezzano, a conference participant, agreed to help take on the task of putting such a publication together with Lynne Sullivan. The original thirty-one papers and discussion section clearly were too much for a single volume. In the spirit of collegial communication, the editors asked authors with related chapters to collaborate so as to produce one coauthored chapter. This process, along with some attrition, reduced the number of chapters sufficiently so that the chapters from Jefferies and Schroedl, who were unable to attend the conference, could be added. The resulting collection highlights current research on natural environmental contexts characteristic of the Appalachians that either were used by prehistoric peoples or affect archaeological site formation, as well as synopses of cultural developments in Appalachian subregions. The latter are organized into general time periods, and each section includes papers representing northern, southern, and intermediate subregions, a scheme intended to provide the reader with a sense of intraregional trends at different points in time. While the chapters do not cover every time period for every subregion, together they portray the breadth and vitality of research in Appalachia. The authors are scholars engaged in the research they discuss, and their chapters contain original data and/ or perspectives that come from hands-on knowledge of this region. As such, the individual chapters are valuable in themselves as reports of state-of-the-art

Preface

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research. With this send-off, we look forward to archaeological research that specifically

will acknowledge the Appalachians as a context for cultural development, that will break across traditional spheres of archaeological communication, and that will develop models tailored to the interior highland context and distinct from those developed for regions with broad, flat floodplains or miles of sandy beaches.

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Acknowledgments

The evolution of this book from a series of conference presentations required the help of numerous people. First, we thank the contributors, who in several cases were asked to collaborate with one or more colleagues to produce a synthetic paper for one subregion, and who were uniformly patient as the manuscript took shape despite several delays. We also thank the reviewers, Clifford Boyd and David Brose, whose comments helped us improve the text. Other people helped immensely with the details of organizing, assembling, and formatting. Erik Lowman, Frank Mikolic, Jonathan Kelley, and Carrie Morda, all students at Clarion University, Clarion, Pennsylvania, and Earla Meyers, Department of AGES secretary, assisted with the references and general production of the manuscript. Brad Kreps and Will Fontanez of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville Cartography Lab produced the maps for the introduction. Scot Danforth and the staff of the University of Tennessee Press were supportive, helpful, and gracious throughout the entire publication process. Our respective employers, the Frank H . Mc Clung Museum at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and the Department of Anthropology, Geography, and Earth Sciences at Clarion University, provided the necessary institutional base for communications and computer facilities . We extend a general thanks to everyone else who helped, but who we have forgotten to mention. Finally, we reserve the right to claim any mistakes as ours.

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Introduction The Concept of Appalachian Archaeology

Lynne P. Sullivan and Susan C. Prezzano "Mountain regions are among the most familiar to anthropologists as bastions of traditional cultures. Around the world, highland areas are typified by cultural and linguistic diversity, by the persistence oflocal ethnic traditions, and by recalcitrant attitudes of independence and autonomy." So notes Brush in his "Anthropology of Highland Peoples" (1984:160). In fact, the Euro-American inhabitants of the Appalachian Mountains have been portrayed as "culturally conservative" people since the late nineteenth century, when writers of the local-color literary movement described the Appalachians as a region of peculiar, quaint, and isolated hill people (Shapiro 1978). These descendants of European pioneers were said to have retained an Elizabethan form of speech, to have a disP11ctive physical appearance, to possess a stalwart, independent personality type, and to be marginal to mainstream America. Many of these stereotypes of the Euro-American inhabitants of the Appalachians, especially those of the southern mountains, linger today and serve to give Appalachia a distinctive (if not always flattering) identity among modern Americans. There has been no analogous phenomenon regarding the original inhabitants of the Appalachians, the prehistoric Native Americans whose cultures were intimately intertwined with these highland environments. No "regional identity," no models specifi~ to physically rugged environments, and, with very few exceptions, no speculations on how these ancient mountaineers interacted with one another and their "flatland" contemporaries have been offered by the archaeologists researching the diverse cultures of this region. Why is it that the Appalachians have not been envisioned or defined as a distinctive region by prehistorians? As we note in the preface, not only has the concept of the Appalachians as a region eluded archaeologists, but there is a dearth of scholarly communication across subregional boundaries. Other than a few glimmers of interest, such as the Uplands Conference regularly held in Virginia by the

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U.S. Forest Service, those researchers working in the Northeast and those in the Southeast rarely exchange information, thus truncating archaeological understanding of the Appalachian region. For the purposes of this volume, we define the Appalachians as encompassing three major physiographic provinces: the Blue Ridge (extending from the Notre Dame and Sutton Mountains of Quebec to the southern Blue Ridge of northern Georgia), the Valley and Ridge (including the Taconics of the New England-New York border, and the Appalachian ridges from New York to northern Alabama), and the Appalachian Plateau (a belt of mountains, hills, and plateaus stretching from New York to Alabama) (map 0 .1). Each prqvince is characterized by unique features and geology, yet this diversity is subsumed within a region that has a distinct character, unmistakable from the midwestern prairie, the Mississippi River Valley, or the coastal plain. While these latter areas all have prompted syntheses, treatises, or overviews of the regional prehistory (e.g., Anderson 1994a; McNutt 1996; Milanich 1994; Morse and Morse 1983; Muller 1986c), archaeologists previously have not attempted to similarly treat the Appalachians as a unique region. Rugged terrain, abundant water, temperate deciduous forests, rocky soils, narrow floodplains, and biotic diversity are defining features of the entire Appalachian region. The terrain within Appalachia includes relatively lower and higher lands, major river valleys as well as the highest elevations in the East. The elevation above sea level along some streams in the southern portion of the Valley and Ridge province dips below seven hundred feet . In contrast, the highest elevations in the Blue Ridge run over six thousand feet. While the Valley and Ridge may not be "highlands" (nor its inhabitants "highlanders") in the strictest sense, this province is an integral part of the Appalachian system. It is circumscribed on the east and west by the true highlands of Appalachia, a circumstance that restricts access to the Valley and Ridge and affords a degree of isolation. The general northeast-southwest trend of Appalachia's folded geologic strata and corresponding ridges and valleys tends to direct human movement along certain corridors, as well as to structur~ the distributions of plant and animal life. Even in the relatively lower, flatter Valley and Ridge province, the ridges can be quite steep and rise hundreds of feet above the valleys; in fact, some of these ridges are called mountains and are steep enough to warrant truck lanes on interstate highways (e.g., White Oak Mountain in southeastern Tennessee). Features such as these also undoubtedly influenced movements and interaction patterns of prehistoric peoples within both the Appalachians and adjacent areas. There is a reason the statement "You can't get there from here" is a common joke in present-day Appalachia: going against the grain of the geology in this rugged region makes for difficult passage. While the natural environment certainly does not determine the course of cultural development, the environmental setting is an indispensable factor, the field upon which these developments play out. Landscapes also are saturated with a constellation

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of cultural and individual meanings by the people who reside in them. One goal we have for this volume is to spark considerations of such interrelationships of culture and landscape in the prehistory and early history of the Appalachians. We address these issues more fully in our concluding chapter, and we hope that offering a broad theoretical perspective for research in these unique highlands provides sufficient fodder for considering the concept of Appalachian archaeology as worthy of attention. In organizing the various contributions, however, we were very aware of the coveragetopically, spatially, and temporally-of the Appalachian region. No one book could possibly cover all aspects of the archaeology of such a large area, and we did not set out to do so. Our plan was to provide a sample of up-to-date research representing both northern and southern subregions, across time, as well as to raise some issues that relate to the landscape itself. Accordingly, the volume is divided into parts relevant to the environment and to general time periods. Each part includes chapters dealing with Appalachian subareas from New England and/or New York to the southern Valley and Ridge of Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. The geographic coverage includes: the Appalachian Plateau in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee; the "core chain," including southern New England and the Appalachian Summit of the Blue Ridge in North and South Carolina and Tennessee; the Valley and Ridge in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and from Kentucky to Alabama (map 0.2); as well as reference to the Carolina Piedmont to the east, the Interior Low Plateaus to the west, and the Coastal Plain to the south. Several periods are not represented in the chapters. Such gaps reflect the research interests of individual archaeologists working in various subareas. The last section of the volume includes discussion chapters, intended to "take the pulse" of Appalachian archaeology in regard to current topics relevant to anthropological archaeology in general. In other words, these chapters examine how research in the Appalachians is contributing to broad issues of interest to most archaeologists. Three authors (Claassen, Cobb, and Dancey) provide commentary on the contributions archaeology in the Appalachians is making to various schools of archaeological theory, while Patty Jo Watson comments on the contributions of Appalachian archaeology to the Eastern Woodlands in general, including investigations of plant use and agricultural origins and the archaeology of caves and rockshelters. Our other goal is to acquaint those readers less familiar with the prehistoric archaeology of this region with research covering a variety of topics, time periods, and subregions. This goal is accomplished through the breadth of subject matter covered by the collected chapters. As an aid to those readers less familiar with the Appalachian region, the rest of this introductory chapter offers an overview of the Appalachians themselves, including brief introductions to the physical environment and prehistory of the region.

Introduction

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The Appalachian Mountains Legend has it that the origin of the name of the Appalachians lies with the expedition of sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto (Walls 1977; Redington 1978). The most popular notion is that the name derived from that of the Apalachee Indians of northern Florida, a group met by de Soto before his journey north into the highland region (Gannett 1905; Powell 1968; Drake 1965; Redington 1978). In truth, there is no evidence that de Soto named the mountain chain. Walls (1977) suggests that the name likely can be credited to early map makers who, confused by distances and locations, transposed the territory of the Apalachee farther north. Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, an artist who traveled to Florida in 1564 with the French Huguenot expedition of Rene de Laudonniere, was the first to designate the actual mountain range "Appalachian." A map by Le Moyne, dated 1565, also clearly marks the mountains as the Appalachians and shows a village called Apalatchi. In the

Map 0.1. Physiography of the Appalachian Highlands.

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eighteenth century, "Allegheny" came to be used as a name for the northern part of the mountain chain, although the name for the entire range alternated between Appalachian and Allegheny. So prominent a feature were the mountains in the developing nation that Washington Irving even suggested changing the name of the country to the United States of Appalachia or Alleghenia (preferring the latter designation) . In 1861, however, geographer Arnold Henry Guyot firmly established the chain as the Appalachians, with the publication of his "On the Appalachian Mountain System" (Walls 1977). Today, from north to south, the Appalachian Mountains are defined as including the Shickshocks in the Gaspe; Mt. Katahdin in Maine; the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire; the Catskills (but not the Adirondacks) of New York; the many ridges of the Alleghenies of southern New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia; the great Blue Ridge, which rises south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and of which the Great Smoky, Unaka, and Black Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina form a part; and the Cumberlands of eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and Tennessee. Flanking the Appalachians to the east is the Piedmont, to the west, the Interior Low Plateaus, and to the south, the Coastal Plain. The Appalachians form the headwaters of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers of the Mississippi drainage, and of rivers in western Georgia and Alabama that flow to the Gulf of Mexico. They also give rise to the Atlantic drainages, such as the Connecticut, Delaware, Potomac, Roanoke, Pee Dee, Santee, and Oconee/ Altamaha Rivers. The northern Appalachians include numerous very small natural lakes and ponds that were formed during glacial times (Constantz 1994; Brooks 1965; Redington 1978). The Appalachians are very old mountains and are among the oldest terrestrial environments on earth. They began uplifting more than 500 million years ago, during the Paleozoic, reaching their maximum height during the Triassic, some 300 million years ago, and have been steadily eroding ever since. The mountains were formed by a series of collisions of continental plates that folded, faulted, and metamorphosed geologic strata, leaving older strata overlying younger ones (Constantz 1994). The Blue Ridge, the easternmost province of Appalachia, consists of a single ridge extending from Pennsylvania to northern Georgia. In the north, this ridge is only fourteen miles wide, while in the south, it expands to some seventy miles in width. Elevations average three thousand feet along its extent (Constantz 1994). In the northern portion the rocks of the Blue Ridge are mainly metamorphic, but toward the south there is evidence of ancient volcanoes and granite replaces quartzite. There are a few Early Cambrian outcrops, but most of the strata are older, originating before the Paleozoic (Brooks 1965; Redington 1978). The Valley and Ridge province, which lies to the west of the Blue Ridge, encompasses the Great Valley. This huge trough runs nearly the entire length of the Appalachians and is known from north to south as the Hudson/ Lake Champlain, Lebanon, Cumberland, Shenandoah, and Tennessee Valleys. It varies in width from two to fifty Introduction

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2

4

6

New England Mountains, Chapters 13, 14 Northern Appalachian Plateaus (Allegheny Plateau) Chapters 2, 4, 6, 9, 13, 18 Northern Valley and Ridge Chapters 11, 12 Southern Appalachian Plateaus (Cumberland Plateau) Chapters 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14 Southern Valley and Ridge Chapter 15 Southern Blue Ridge (Appalachian Sununit) Chapters 16, 19

Map 0.2. Appalachian areas discussed by the text.

miles. Unlike the rest of the Appalachian province, the Great Valley contains much good farmland and rolling to level lands. It thus forms the lowlands of the Appalachians, but access to the valley is difficult from both the east and west ( Constantz 1994; Brooks 1965; Redington 1978). The remainder of the Valley and Ridge province is a folded mountain belt and includes almost parallel ridges, trending northeast-southwest, of erosion-resistant strata such as sandstone alternating with valleys underlain by erosion-prone rocks such as limestone. This sedimentary rock, laid down in the late pre-Cambrian, has weathered in many places to form a karst topography including sinkholes and caves. There are seventy-five hundred caves in Tennessee alone. The parallel character of the terrain created by the valleys and ridges also results in a parallel or trellised drainage pattern, sometimes with stream cuts through ridges forming water gaps. The number of parallel ridges and valleys is constant for the entire length of the province, even though the width varies from fourteen to eighty miles. In the narrow parts, the ridges are steeper. The rocks of the Valley and Ridge date to the Early Paleozoic, with the older

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Cambrian ones to the east and the later Mississippian strata to the west ( Constantz 1994; Brooks 1965; Redington 1978 ). The western portion of the Appalachians, the Appalachian Plateau province, is formed of moderately folded strata with deep valleys and plateau-like mountains. The geologic strata of the Plateau are less deformed than the Valley and Ridge, as the Plateau generally was uplifted less. The escarpment rising to the Plateau province bears many different names along its extent. Mississippian strata are prominent on top of the escarpment, while Pennsylvanian strata, which contain coal, form the eastern portion of the plateau; Permian strata lie to the west. The drainage pattern of the Plateau is dendritic because of the heavily dissected surface, which gradually loses altitude toward the west (Constantz 1994; Brooks 1965; Redington 1978). The diversity of plant and animal life in the Appalachians relates to the region's great antiquity. More recent Pleistocene climatic changes including warm, dry and wet, and cold periods worked to spread and contract the ranges of various species, sometimes leaving remnant populations in remote areas. For example, during the last glacial period (the Wisconsinan, beginning some 125,000 years ago), coniferous boreal forests dominated the Appalachian landscape and deciduous flowering plants completely disappeared, surviving in lower-lying, more southerly areas. As the last stages of glaciers receded beginning about fourteen thousand years ago, the boreal forests shrank to one-third their former size and deciduous plants slowly began to return. Today, the coniferous forests capping the higher Appalachian ridges are vestiges of these changes (Delcourt and Delcourt 1979; Constantz 1994). Most of the Appalachian forest is deciduous. The greatest expanse of forest environment, the Appalachian oak/northern hardwood forests, found between two thousand and fifty-five hundred feet, contain more than forty-five species of native hardwoods and evergreens. Elevation and latitude affect the replacement of the Appalachian oak forest biome with the northern hardwood forest. Before the chestnut blight of the 1920s, the oak forest, more accurately an oak-chestnut forest, was predominantly composed of several species of oak, American chestnut, red maple, and black cherry (Braun 1950). In the southern mountains, northern hardwoods occur from about thirty-five hundred to fifty-five hundred feet. The eastern or Canadian hemlock commonly occurs in specific habitats throughout the Appalachians. Above fifty-five hundred feet, spruce and fir forests (:iiso found at lower elevations in New England) thrive in the cool, damp climate and are found from Canada to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. Large, nearly impassable tracts ofbroadleafed evergreens, including rhododendrons that reach heights of forty feet, are a feature of Appalachian forests from the southern Green Mountains to the Georgia Blue Ridge (Connelly 1968; Redington 1978). During the Pleistocene, ninety species of mammals-more than any other area of eastern North America-were native to the southern Appalachians and the diversity oflargebodied animals rivaled that of Africa. After the ice age, fewer large-bodied mammals Introduction

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remained in the Appalachians, but wildlife continued to be diverse and abundant until European settlement. Woodland bison, elk, timber wolf, black bear, mountain lion, and white-tailed deer all were either wiped out or severely depleted by habitat alteration and gun-wielding settlers. Large flocks of passenger pigeons also became extinct. Today, larger native game birds, such as wild turkey and grouse and several species of migratory waterfowl, survive (Constantz 1994; Brooks 1965; Purrington 1984).

Appalachian Prehistory Long-term, intensive research in limited Appalachian subareas has produced large data sets for chronology building and culture history. Chronologies from lowlands or better-known Appalachian highland areas are often extrapolated to the less well known Appalachian areas. In the South, well-known subareas include the Appalachian Summit of western North Carolina and the Upper Tennessee Valley (especially the Little Tennessee River Valley). The prehistoric chronology for the Summit was established by Joffre Coe through his long-term Cherokee archaeology research program. Research conducted by the University of Tennessee in the Little Tennessee Valley in conjunction with the Tennessee Valley Authority's Tellico Reservoir project produced large data sets from numerous sites spanning nearly the entire prehistoric sequence for this portion of the Valley and Ridge province. Especially significant was the establishment of a chronology for the Archaic period based on stratified deposits (Chapman 1985). In the North, long-term research by William Ritchie in New York State and parts of New England established an early chronology that is frequently applied to surrounding areas, including portions of New England and Pennsylvania. This expansion of the New York culture history to adjacent areas is a result of the fewer research projects in these regions . In the past, archaeological research in the North suffered from a lack of large-scale excavations and the application of poor field methods (see, for example, Trigger [1981] on Iroquois archaeology). These gaps have been partially remedied by recent research programs such as those at Binghamton University and the Universities of Connecticut and Massachusetts, and by large-scale cultural resources management (CRM) projects. The cultural differences that developed between the northern and southern Appalachians are made all the more fascinating in that, historically, these subregions were home to speakers of related Iroquoian languages (the various Northern Iroquois groups and the Cherokee) that suggest common origins at some point in the distant past (cf. Fenton and Gulick 1961). One of the barriers to a broad regional perspective on the prehistory of the Appalachians is the different time scales used in the northern and southern portions. Especially confusing is the use of the same terms to denote different spans of time. Figure 0.1 compares the basic chronological schemes for the two subregions. In order to reduce confusion in this volume, we use actual dates in combination with phase designations whenever possible. Terminology for the time span

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from A.D. 1000 to 1500 is especially confusing. In the mid-Atlantic and Northeast this half-millennia before European contact is termed "Late Woodland," but in the Southeast, this time period is known as "Mississippian," while "Late Woodland" designates the period from approximately A.D. 600 to 900. The original reasoning for the use of the term "Woodland" relates to similarities in pottery traditions (i.e., crushed rock or sand-tempered conoidal jars as opposed to the shell-tempered globular jars of the Mississippian tradition ). The confusion caused by such differential use of terminology led Stoltman (1978) to call for new, pan-eastern United States period designations, but with little success because the old terms are deeply entrenched. The date people first entered the Appalachians is not well established, although Meadowcroft Rockshelter, purportedly one of the earliest dated sites in the New World, is in the Appalachian Plateau of Pennsylvania (see Carr et al., this volume). This site places humans in the Appalachians seventeen thousand years ago. These Paleoindian populations entered an environment very different from that of succeeding groups, not only in terms of habitat but also in the absence of other human populations, a condition bound to affect social organization and mobility. These earliest inhabitants once were thought to be highly mobile hunters of big game, including now-extinct megafauna, but the degree of mobility and the composition of the subsistence base of Paleoindian populations now is a major research issue for this period (ca. 10,000-8500 B.C. ) . The southern portion of the Appalachians was not glaciated, but high peaks in the Summit were treeless and the rest of this area was covered in a mosaic of grasslands, park land, closed coniferous/boreal forest, and northern and southern hardwoods. Evidence of Paleoindian sites is very scarce in both the Summit and southern Valley and Ridge. Massive weathering at the end of the glacial period caused scouring that may have destroyed such evidence (Purrington 1984; Chapman 1985 ). To the north, the highlands of New England remained glaciated until very late, which may explain the paucity of Paleoindian sites (Snow 1980). The Appalachian Plateau and Valley and Ridge regions are better known than southern portions of the Appalachians during this period (see Carr et al., this volume) partially as a result ofrecent CRM projects, such as those in Pennsylvania, that systematically test deep deposits. After 8000 B.C., the glacial period ended and the distributions of plant and animal species gradually adjusted with changing climatic conditions, and most megafauna became extinct as prehistory entered the Archaic period (ca. 7500-1000 B.C.). Evidence for human habitation in the Summit is sparse during the early part of this time, but is fairly common in the southern Valley and Ridge, although often deeply buried. In the latter region, many groups maintained residential base camps and made trips to hunt, gather, or collect needed items. In fact, populations in the Valley and Ridge may have been making forays into the Summit, rather than resident populations being present in the highest elevations during the earliest part of this time period. By 7000 B.C. there were resident populations in some valleys of the Summit area, such as the Upper Wautaga Valley (Purrington 1983; Chapman 1985). Introduction

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Fig. 0.1. · 1 Comparison of northern and southern Appalachian chronology.

NORTHERN APPALACHIANS

SOUTHERN APPALACHIANS

Historic A.D. 1500

Historic A.D . 500

Late Woodland A.D. 1000

Mississippian

Middle Woodland

A.D. 900 Late Woodland A.D. 600 Middle Woodland A.D. 200

0

Early Woodland Early Woodland 900 B.C 1000 B.C. Terminal Archaic/Transitional 1500 B.C .

Late Archaic

Late Archaic 3000 B.C.

3000 B.C.

Middle Archaic 6000 B.C.

Middle Archaic 6000 B.C.

Early Archaic

Early Archaic

8000 B.C.

8000 B.C.

Paleoindian 10,000 B.C.

Paleoindian 10,000 B.C.

In many areas, patterns established during the early part of the Archaic changed between about 6500 and 2000 B.C. during a warm, dry period known as the Hypsithermal. Fewer sites are known for this period in the southern Valley and Ridge, and although evidence suggests the presence of resident populations in the Summit area, and perhaps the first permanent occupation of the Great Smoky Mountains, before 5500 B. C. there may have been a temporary, general reduction in the number of people in the Summit subarea as well (Purrington 1983; Chapman 1985). From approximately 5500 B.C. until 4000 B.C. there are increased numbers of sites in the Summit but decreased numbers in the Valley and Ridge . Sassaman (this volume) portrays this time period as one of distinct changes in the cultures to the east and west of the Appalachians. Prior to 6000 B. C., settlement in the northern Appalachians remained very sparse, perhaps because of the lower resource potential of the vast coniferous forests that characterized the Early Archaic period. In both the Early and Middle Archaic, settlement seemed confined to coastal regions or to the lower portions of major river systems (Funk 1977; Snow 1980:174). By 3000 B. C., distinct regional traditions are established throughout the Appalachians and elsewhere in the Eastern Woodlands (e.g., Versaggi et al., this volume). These changes are accompanied by increased interregional exchange of goods. Especially notable is the exchange of steatite, throughout the Eastern Woodlands, much of which may have been quarried in the Appalachians. Population density increased in both the Summit and southern Valley and Ridge subareas. By 2000 B. C. Native Americans had domesticated indigenous squash (Curcurbita pepo), and starchy seed-bearing plants such as sunflower, marsh elder (Iva annua), and Chenopodium in many areas of the Southeast, including the southern Valley and Ridge and the Cumberland Plateau of eastern Kentucky (Cowan 1997; Chapman 1985; Selig and Smith 1998; Smith 1995b ). The first evidence of social ranking appears in the mortuary practices of groups in the southern Valley and Ridge. In the northern Appalachian Plateau region during the Late Archaic period (3000-1800 B. C. ), the Appalachian Plateau witnessed an explosion of occupation with clear evidence of increasing cultural diversity. In the early part of this century, Ritchie (1932) defined the Archaic of the Eastern Woodlands from his excavations at Lamoka Lake. While most early archaeologists tended to emphasize mobility and uniformity of Late Archaic cultures residing in the Appalachian Plateau, more modern interpretations characterize the Late Archaic as exhibiting much greater variability in settlement and social organization. For example, analysis by Versaggi et al. (this volume) indicates that the Lamoka site represents a sedentary occupation. At least three broad patterns of Archaic settlement characterize the Plateau and New England highlands. The first, the small-stemmed tool tradition, or Mast Archaic (Snow 1980), is associated with the deciduous forests of southern New England, New York, and Pennsylvania and had ties, at least formally, with traditions as far south as

Introduction

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xxix

North Carolina (Snow 1980:188). The second, the Lake Forest Archaic, extends around the Great Lakes, north into the Plateau region and east into the interior of northern New England. The third Archaic tradition associated with the northern Appalachian Plateau and highlands is the later Transitional or Terminal Archaic (1800-1000 B.C.) . This period saw an increase in sites within the Plateau, especially along the bottomlands in the Susquehanna River drainage in Pennsylvania and New York. Sites with broad spear points and steatite vessels occur in both the glaciated and unglaciated portions of the northern Plateau. Raw material for stone tools, or the tools themselves, were traded widely. For example, rhyolite tools are found hundreds of miles from rhyolite quarries. Within these broad patterns are local cultural adaptations, such as the Vestal culture (see Versaggi et al., this volume), that inhabited the hills and valleys of the Plateau. Most investigations of Late Archaic sites focus on the floodplains and use a conventional interpretation of the production and use of stone tools by men. However, Versaggi, et al. argue that women made and used expedient stone tools for the harvesting of plant resources in the uplands. Domestication of native seed-bearing plants may not have been as important in the North, and the range of some of the important native starchy-seed plants, such as maygrass, did not extend into the North. Nonetheless, archaeologists have retrieved the remains of little barley (Hordeum pussilum) and Chenopodium from several sites in the northern Appalachian Plateau (Wurst and Versaggi 1993). Although pottery dating to 2500 B.C. is found on the Coastal Plain in the Southeast, it is not until 900 B.C. that pottery is known in the Valley and Ridge, and perhaps by 700 B.C. in the Appalachian Summit. Before A.D. 200, Summit groups interacted extensively with groups in the Georgia Piedmont, as evidenced by similarities in ceramic styles. After this date, a shift from stamped to cordmarked pottery by groups in the Summit is described by Keel (1976:231) as a reassertion of"the basic conservatism of the mountain folk" since most of the earliest pottery in this area is cord or fabricimpressed. Unlike some other Appalachian subregions, in the Summit, pottery manufacture (signaling the beginning of the "Woodland" period) is not accompanied by major changes in life-styles, such as increased sedentism and dependency on cultivated plants and the use of burial mounds. Between 300 B.C. and 600 A.D. a greater number of sites in the Summit are located on floodplains, perhaps indicating an increase in horticultural or harvesting activities (Bass 1977; Purrington 1983). Such changes did take place in the southern Valley and Ridge, but later than in surrounding areas to the west, north, and south. Between 900 B.C. and A.D . 200 in the Little Tennessee River Valley, large, heavily occupied sites that contain evidence of substantial shelters, suggest that groups were staying in one place for longer periods of time than previously and that populations continued to increase (Chapman 1985). In the northern Appalachians, within the Plateau and Valley and Ridge regions pottery manufacture is not as ancient as in the South. Stewart ( 1997) identifies early coarse xxx

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wares that are contemporaneous with the manufacture of steatite vessels during the Terminal Archaic (1800 B.c.) in eastern Pennsylvania. He argues that these clay vessels served utilitarian purposes, whereas the steatite vessels were associated with ceremonies. Ceramics manufacture increased by the Meadowood phase (1000-400 B.c.), an Early Woodland complex located from western New York around Lake Erie into southern New England. Meadowood is sometimes associated with Adena-like mortuary sites. The nature of Early Woodland period sites suggest little change in settlement patterns from the Archaic, with small seasonally occupied camps the most prevalent type of occupation (Versaggi 1998). Middle Woodland occupations are also very similar to Late Archaic but with fewer sites recorded anywhere in the Northeast. The earliest convincing date, at about A.D. 175, for the presence of the important tropical cultigen maize in the Eastern Woodlands derives from the Appalachian highlands Ice House Bottom site in the Little Tennessee River Valley of eastern Tennessee (Smith 1992). Early dates also derive from outside of the Appalachians in Ohio (Smith 1992). Recent investigations of Princess Point phase sites near Lake Ontario document the development of Northern Flint corn by as early as A.D. 500 (Crawford and Smith 1996), suggesting a similar timetable for the adoption of maize in both northern and southern portions of the Eastern Woodlands. The earliest dates for maize in the northern Appalachian Plateau, besides Adavasio's controversial date of 300 B.C. from Meadowcroft, cluster around A.D. 800 (Wurst and Versaggi 1993). Evidence from the Appalachian highlands and elsewhere in the Eastern Woodlands suggests maize did not dominate agricultural production anywhere east of the Mississippi until about A.D. 800 (B. D. Smith 1992a; Selig and Smith 1998). As noted above, before A.D. 200, Appalachian Summit groups interacted more heavily with groups in the Georgia Piedmont. Between A.D. 200 and 600, trade networks extended from both the Summit and southern Valley and Ridge to Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia. Mica from the Appalachian Summit area of western North Carolina was extensively mined and traded to groups as far away as present-day Florida. The Summit also was the source of quartz crystals, and possibly copper, steatite, and chlorite schists, that were exchanged in pan-eastern Woodland networks during this time (Purrington 1983; Chapman 1985). Groups began building burial mounds in the southern Valley and Ridge around A.D. 700, and these were used until at least A.D. 1200. Although burial mounds came into use later than in Kentucky (see Fenton, this volume), artifacts accompanying burials in the Little Tennessee Valley indicate use of similar artifacts and trade with Adena and Hopewell groups to the north. Adena mounds are found sporadically throughout the Appalachian Plateau and into New England. By A.D. 600, changes in cultural patterns are quite evident throughout the region. In the southern Valley and Ridge, the use of burial mounds is well established, and mortuary patterns suggest some social ranking. The nature of habitation sites is unclear because there is limited recovered evidence of structures. Throughout the Introduction

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Upper Tennessee Valley, pottery dating to this period is associated vvith shell concentrations, but no villages or clusters of dwellings. Archaeological components dating between A.D. 600 and 1000 in the Appalachian Summit are not identified. Why this period is so difficult to identify in the archaeological record of these two subregions is an important question that awaits resolution. From about A.D. 1000 until Europeans started landing on the shores of North America, there is abundant evidence of vibrant, diverse cultures throughout the Appalachians. Especially interesting is the distinct divergence in social and political organization, and in material culture, between the northern and southern portions of the region. In the North, groups maintained a relatively egalitarian structure without status ranking based on heredity, while in the South, some groups (especially those in the Valley and Ridge) developed centralized political leadership based on heredity and an elite kin group (compare Prezzano and Reith with Welch, both this volume) . Of interest is the fact that the Late Prehistoric groups of the Appalachian Summit (ancestral to the Cherokee), although proximal to the southern Valley and Ridge, were less politically centralized (see Rodning, this volume). Some northern groups lived in multifamily longhouses, while those in the South resided in single family dwellings, among other differences. As Cobb points out (this volume), the reasons for this diversity have not been addressed. By A.D. 1000, groups in the southern Valley and Ridge were building platform mounds in villages often surrounded by palisades, as were those in the southern portion of the Summit. Smaller settlements associated with these larger towns sometimes were located in the surrounding countryside. Many aspects of the material culture of this time period, including architecture and stone tools, are similar in these two subregions, but others, notably pottery, are quite different. The degree of dependence on cultivated foods, including corn, likely varied between individual communities and subregions (cf. Welch and Jefferies, both this volume). Rodning (this volume) discusses possible changes in the Summit area during the century just before European contact, as does Welch for the Valley and Ridge. In the northern Appalachian Plateau region, two basic community patterns existed after A.D. 1000. Within the glaciated Appalachian Plateau, ancestral home of the Five Nation Iroquois, and the Valley and Ridge province, a typical community contained multifamily longhouses placed parallel to each other and surrounded by a palisade (see Hatch and Bondar, Prezzano and Reith, and Nass, all this volume). In the Upper Ohio drainage of the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau, Monongahela circular to oval houses concentrically arranged around a central plaza have commonalities with communities in the southern Appalachians and across much of the Midwest (Hatch and Bondar, this volume) . Larger sites in both the Upper Ohio and Susquehanna drainages and evidence of increased warfare suggest concerns with defense (Nass, Prezzano and Reith, and Hatch and Bondar, all this volume).

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Because of similarities in Late Woodland ceramic styles throughout much of the Northeast, archaeologists traditionally extended the better known economic and social developments of pre-Iroquoian cultures of New York into New England (Chilton 1996). Recent evidence suggests that most Late Woodland cultures of New England remained predominately foragers living in temporary to semipermanent hamlets until the Historic period. Much of what is known about the Late Woodland in New England derives from large river valleys in southern New England, not from occupations in the highlands. Further investigations into the relationship between community patterns and social and political organization in the northern Appalachians certainly is warranted and needed. The relationship of Late Prehistoric groups in the Appalachians to historically known tribes is straightforward in some subregions and much less so in others. Schroedl (this volume), for example, discusses some of these problems for the southern Valley and Ridge and the Appalachian Summit. Even though both subareas have ties to the Cherokee, the nature of these links is not clear in the Valley and Ridge. Europeans brought a new order to the Appalachians, originating far from the highlands, that forever changed the lives of indigenous highland peoples. The timing and effects of European contact were not uniform throughout Appalachia. Contact in New England, for example, was early and sustained, while in the interior South, early contact often was followed by many years of little or indirect interaction. Continuity and change in material culture had different trajectories in the South and North. For example, ceramic vessels in the North disappeared within fifty years of European contact, but in the South, native pottery continued long after intense interaction with Europeans. Interactions between native groups during the Early Historic period also varied, as it was sometimes advantageous to ally with one European group or another against new or longstanding indigenous enemies. In some areas, native populations were decimated by European diseases or forced to move or change as a direct result of European intervention. Lavin (this volume) discusses how in such circumstances, the highlands became a refuge where mountain people could maintain aspects of their culture. Many northeastern and mid-Atlantic coastal and Piedmont groups, including the Mahican, Delaware, and Nanticoke, sought protection in the underpopulated wilderness of the Appalachian Plateau and established refugee villages composed of many cultures. The story of Cherokee removal and resistance (see Schroedl, this volume) also speaks of the strong ties of a people to mountain lands. Perhaps it is no accident that some of the largest native groups remaining in the eastern United States, such as the Onondaga and Cherokee, might well be characterized as "persistent, recalcitrant, independent, and autonomous" highlanders.

I ntroduction

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Part I

Ridge~ Rise~

CaveSy and Rocks Aspects of the Appalachian Environment

1

Hilltops of the AUegheny Plateau A Preferred Microenvironment for Late Prehistoric Horticulturalists

Robert J. Hasenstab and William C. Johnson The Appalachian plateaus extend along the western flank of the Appalachian Mountains. They include the Allegheny Plateau, drained by the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in Pennsylvania and adjacent New York and West Virginia. The plateau is made up of peneplains, or flat, ancient ocean bottoms long ago drained, transformed into sedimentary rock, and deeply dissected by networks of dendritic streams draining into the Ohio River and forming a terrain of steep-sided valley walls with narrow valley bottoms and plateau tops (Fenneman 1938:290-319). As Wilkins states for the plateau portion of West Virginia, "The mountains rise very abruptly from the narrow stream valleys. . . . The only habitable areas are stream valleys, an occasional bench area, rock shelters, and ridgetops" (1978:17). The majority of the Allegheny Plateau, namely, everything south of the Allegheny River in New York, is unglaciated. The portion under study here is predominantly mixed mesophytic forest (Braun 1950). Evidence of prehistoric occupation in the Appalachian uplands extends from Paleoindian times through the Late Prehistoric period: on the plateaus of Pennsylvania (Cresson n.d.; George 1983; Herbstritt 198la; Johnson et al. 1989; Mayer-Oakes 1955), in West Virginia (Fuller 1981; Moxley 1982; Wilkins 1978) as well as in the adjoining mountain provinces of Tennessee (Bass 1977; Benthall and Manning 1988), North Carolina (Purrington 1967), and Virginia (Barber 1994; Barber and Tolley 1984). Of all these occupations, the Late Prehistoric horticultural villages seem most anomalous, since-presumably-they would have favored the river valleys with their rich alluvial soils. Furthermore, the uplands have cooler climates and are therefore considered marginal for horticulture. Yet despite these assumptions, numerous villages occur in

3

uplands on remote hilltops. Since most of these sites are palisaded, they are presumed to have been occupied by refugees driven out of the valleys by overpopulation and consequent hostility (Dragoo 1977:44; George 1983; Mayer-Oakes 1955). This chapter examines the horticultural potential of uplands in two parts of the Allegheny Plateau: the Upper Allegheny River drainage basin (UARDB) of southwestern New York and the Lower Monongahela and Lower Youghiogheny River drainage basins of southwestern Pennsylvania (LMRDB and LYRDB). It argues, contrary to common assumption, that these upland habitats offered advantages to Late Prehistoric horticulturalists in terms of longer growing seasons and fertile soil.

Study Areas Upper Allegheny River Drainage Basin A survey of Late Woodland hilltop forts was conducted in the Upper Allegheny River Drainage Basin (UARDB) of southwestern New York by the 1973 State University of New York-Buffalo Archaeological Field School, under the direction of the late Marian E. White, in which one of the coauthors participated (Hasenstab 1975). Prior to that, Schock (1974) investigated the sites as part of his dissertation research, and before him, Houghton reported "a long series of ... hilltop forts" (1922:46-47) in this plateau region-each on a high hill and with a distinct palisade embankment. Related sites in the UARDB are reported in northwestern Pennsylvania, including the Kane Earthwork (Ritchie 1929; Schock 1974:284-85) and the McKinley Earthwork (Smith and Herbstritt 1976). Farther east are the Boorum Vorhees and Corn Pit sites in Hebron, Pennsylvania (Roberts 1990:2), and across the state line in Bolivar, New York, is the Smith site (Lounsberry 1997). Extant investigations of these hillMap 1.1.

4

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I

Locations of sites in Upper Allegheny River drainage sample: (1) Little Valley, (2) Pickens, (3) Humphrey, (4) Golden Hill, (5) Smith, (6) Burnt Hill.

Hasenstab and Johnson

top sites reveal maize remains and evidence of village habitation in the form of middens and a wide range of tool types. This chapter examines a sample of six hilltop sites on the Allegheny Plateau of New York, derived from the coauthor's dissertation research (map 1.1). All these have similar settings: they are located near headwater streams and are on flat-topped hillsrepresenting the plateau surface-overlooking deeply dissected stream valleys. They are all several hundred feet above the adjoining valley floor and are in remote locations, many kilometers from the mainstem Allegheny River, raising the question of whether the Allegheny floodplain was used for horticulture.

Map 1.2. I Distribution of Monongahela culture sites, higher-order streams, and drainage divides in the Allegheny Plateau section of southwestern Pennsylvania .

.···..- Drainage Divide

0

Monongahela Site

ki l ometers

Hilltops of the Allegheny Plateau

5

Lower Monongahela River Drainage Basin A subset of 220 sites comprised of 240 components was selected from 422 Late Prehistoric Monongahela sites in the lower Upper Ohio River Valley of southwestern Pennsylvania and adjacent portions of West Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland (Johnson and Athens 1997). The sample study area encompasses the Lower Monongahela River Drainage Basin (LMRDB) from essentially Morgantown, West Virginia, to Pittsburgh as well as the LYRDB, situated west of Chestnut Ridge, the western-most ridge of the Allegheny Mountains section to the east. This is the Monongahela culture "core" area. Within this area, 33 (14 percent) of the components are located on river terraces, 38 (16 percent) are on stream terraces, and 169 (70 percent) are in the uplands (table 1.1 and map 1.2). Uplands, as defined here, include hilltop ridges, saddles, and benches. The majority of upland Monongahela sites are situated on benches (52 percent) or saddles (33 percent). These settings include lower ridges, which extend from the drainage divides. These features include benches and saddles favored by the Monongahela for siting their villages and, we argue, their maize fields. The highest of these ridge systems represent the divides between tributaries of the Monongahela, Youghiogheny, and Ohio River drainages. These divide ridges include not only those ringing tributary drainages

Table 1.1

I

Frequency of Late Prehistoric Period Monongahela Culture Components in the Lower Monongahela and Lower Youghiogheny River Drainage Basins by Site Type, Drainage Basin and Topographic Situation Site Type Villages Topographic Setting

N

Youghiogheny River Basin (Allegheny Plateau Section)

River terrace Stream terrace Upland Subtotal

2 42 47

75.0 33.3 75.0 71.2

Monongahela River basin

River terrace Stream terrace Upland Subtotal

11 18 96 125

Study Area totals

River terrace Stream terrace Upland TOTAL

Drainage Basin

Hamlets and/or Farmsteads

Unknown

Total Components Column%

Row%

N

Row"Ai

N

0 4 8 12

0.0 66.7 14.3 18.2

1 0 6 7

25.0 0.0 10.7 10.6

4 6 56 66

6.0 9 .1 84.9 100.0

37.9 56.3 85 .0 71.8

8 9 14 31

27.6 28.1 12.4 17.8

10 5 3 18

34.5 15.6 2.7 10.3

29 32 113 174

16.7 18.4 64.9 100.0

14 20 138

42.4 52.6 81.7

8 13 22

24.2 34.2 13.0

11 5 9

33.3 13.2 5.3

33 38 169

13.8 15.8 70.4

172

71.7

43

17.9

25

10.4

240

100.0

Row"Ai

N

Note: The number of discrete Monongahela components exceeds the number of recorded Monongahela sites. Each component, therefore, is tabulated as a separate reoccupation of the same locus/setting.

6

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Hasenstab and Johnson

Monongahela River

KEY:

0

Map 1. 3.

I

Monongahela Village Site

Schematic representation of Monongahela bluff top and interior drainage divide village locations.

but also river bluffs between the tributary drainages and the mainstem river valleys (map 1.3). Thirty-six percent of these sites are located directly on tributary divides, while 48 percent are located within three hundred meters of these divides. Within the study area, where component function can be discerned, 80 percent of the components are villages (table 1.1). Of the upland components, 86 percent are villages, while only 14 percent are classifiable as hamlets/farmsteads. In contrast, only 61 percent of classifiable components on river and stream terraces are villages. Many of the upland Monongahela villages have yielded evidence of intensive maize cultivation and consumption. Farrow (1986) examined the contribution of maize to the diet of the inhabitants of four Early Monongahela Drew phase villages in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. Three of the sites were upland villages: Hughes Farm, Gross Farm, and Duvall (Dunnell 1962, 1980b ). Parenthetically, all three upland villages were situated on Brooke series soils, which form on limestone bedrock (Farrow 1986:154; see Agricultural Soils on the Allegheny Plateau, below). The mean proportions of carbon derived from C-4 plants for each upland village population ranged from 70.l percent at the initial Drew phase Gross site to 80.0 percent at the

Hilltops of the A/kgheny Plateau

I

7

later Hughes Farm site, indicating that the Monongahela had incorporated maize "as thoroughly as any other group recorded either archaeologically or in historic times" (Farrow 1986:163, 166). Carbonized maize remains, as well as those of other cultigens, are regularly recovered, albeit in low frequencies, from Monongahela sites, including those in the uplands (Adovasio and Johnson 1981:77, table 6). The low incidence of maize recovery may be a function of the way in which it was stored or prepared by Monongahela villagers. At the recently reported mid-fifteenth-century Kirshner site, an upland site in the Youghiogheny drainage, copious remains of carbonized maize were recovered from sernisubterranean roofed storage pits and from a sub-plowzone sheet-wash deposit. Evidence indicates that the village's maize caches were torched by raiders and were thus accidentally preserved (Babich et al . 1996), suggesting that maize storage on Monongahela sites may have been far more common than the excavated evidence reveals.

Microclimate in the Appalachian Highlands An important factor affecting horticulture throughout the uplands of the Appalachians is rnicroclimate, in particular cold-air drainage (NOAA 1974:259, 284, 320, 399, 423). As Yoshino describes it, "The air layer near the ground grows cold on clear calm nights. If the ground is sloped, the cold air begins to move to a topographically lower place according to gravity" (1975:407). This is a special problem on the severely dissected Allegheny Plateau, where valley walls are steep and the valley bottoms narrow and level over great lengths. Cold air accumulates in the valley bottoms and does not run off, causing, for example, the famous smog problem around Pittsburgh. Aside from producing smog, "cold air drainage is an important factor in determining growing season [because] the first and last freezes of the season usually occur . .. where clear skies [produce cold air drainage and] the temperature at nearby locations ... may differ by several degrees" (NOAA 1974:399). The result for valley bottoms is "a shortening of the growing season by causing freezes later in the spring and earlier in fall than would otherwise occur" (NOAA 1974:320). South of the study area, in West Virginia, "appreciable differences exist between the bottoms and upper slopes of the numerous valleys that entrench the Allegheny Plateau" (NOAA 1974:423). This phenomenon has been studied extensively throughout the Appalachian highlands (see U.S. Weather Bureau 1893), for example, in Virginia (Blair 1913), in Ohio (Smith 1914), and as far north as the St. Lawrence River Valley on the island of Montreal (McLeod 1905). The most comprehensive study was done by Cox (1923) in the highlands of North Carolina. There, sixteen different valley profiles were monitored for tempera-

8

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Hasenstab and Johnson

Ellijay Test Area Minimum Temperature, °F: Spring Mean/ 54.0/ Fall Mean 37.7

~

4000

Q)

LL

.!:

3000

c 0

·~

> iii

2000

Q)

1000

Average Number of Frost-Free Days Horizontal Scale:

0

2000

167

4000

feet

Fig. 1.1.

I

Results of slope-side temperature monitoring over a four-year period at the Ellijay test site, North Carolina.

ture variation. Weather stations were installed at intervals along transects from valley bottom upslope to ridgetop. These collected temperature data twenty-four hours a day for a four-year period. Minimum nightly temperatures were derived at each station. The highest minimum temperatures, and consequently longest growing seasons, occurred along the ridge slopes, while the shortest growing seasons occurred at valley floors and ridgetops. Figure 1.1 illustrates the observations at one of the test sites: Ellijay. Here, ridge-slope minimum temperatures were seven to eight degrees (F) higher than those of the valley bottom and the frost-free period was up to twenty-three days longer. Cox describes these ridge-side zones as "thermal belts or frostless zones . . . of varying width in which frost is never observed[,] . .. found on certain slopes between valley floor and summit" (1923:2). These "thermal belts" are described more fully by Blair ( 1916) and by Hardy:

Another favorite area for winter living is the ((thermal belt)) section of the southern mountains. Thermal belts are small areas along the mountain slopes that tend to have higher minimum temperatures than other adjacent or nearby areas less favorably situated. This is because cold air on quiet nights tends to drain into lower valleys, while higher elevations above the thermal belts are cold because of their elevation. ... As a result ((thermal belts)) part way up the mountain sides may support vulnerable vegetation long after frost has killed aU.green both above and below. Often in the dead of winter the contrast of a belt ofgreen flanked by brown both upslope and in the valley is most striking. (NOAA 1974:284-85)

Hilltops of the Allegheny Plateau

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9

Similar bands of green vegetation along frost-free belts are described elsewhere in the Appalachian highlands (Hutt 1923:105-6; U.S. Weather Bureau 1893:365). This phenomenon on the Allegheny Plateau will be discussed below in terms of the two sample study areas.

Agricultural Soils on the Allegheny Plateau It is commonly assumed that Native Americans favored valley bottom soils for horticulture because of their fertility and, more important, because of their workability. Yet many horticultural villages were located in remote uplands away floodplain soils. The Pickens site in the Upper Allegheny Valley is located nineteen kilometers from the Allegheny River (Hasenstab 1975). Many Monongahela sites are located deep in the interior near the heads of major fourth- and fifth-order tributary streams and many kilometers from extensive stream or river terraces (see, e.g., Johnson and Athens 1997). Did these prehistoric horticulturalists travel great distances to maintain their fields? Did they operate satellite horticultural hamlets remote from their villages? Or could they have cultivated local soils surrounding their villages? Certain upland soils may have offered advantages to Late Woodland horticulturalists. Cremeens and Lothrop (this volume) describe ridgetop soils on the Appalachian plateaus as residuum, or freshly decomposed regolith (bedrock). Where calcareous shales or limestones exist, these regoliths would have produced high-pH residuums unsubjected to millennia of lime-leaching and acidification by hurnic material. High pH or lime content was critical to Native horticulture, as nitrogen-fixing bacteria depend on it and were the chief means of providing soil nutrients to maize (Hasenstab n.d.). Another soil requirement would have been moisture, as it is important to maize and bean plant growth and critical to the growth of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Where porous bedrock overlays impervious bedrock and comes to the surface, aquifers occur. One would expect Late Prehistoric villages in the uplands of the Allegheny Plateau to be located near aquifers, not only to provide access to springs for drinking water but also to provide soil moisture for horticultural fields.

Testing the Preferred-Microenvironment Hypothesis: Microclimate The Allegheny Plateau would have been a risky region for growing maize, given that the frost-free period ranges locally from 90 to 170 days and that the growing season required for eight-row northern flint maize-the kind grown prehistorically-was 120 days (Galinet 1967).

Upper Allegheny Valley The UARDB of southwest New York and northwest Pennsylvania would have been a particularly marginal area for growing maize, as the frost-free period ranges between 100 and 150 days (map 1.4; Frederick, Johnson, and MacDonald 1959:14; 10

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Hasenstab and Johnson

Pearson et al. 1940:table 2). At Kane, Pennsylvania (near the Kane and McKinley Earthworks) it is 95 days, while at Bolivar, New York (near the Smith site), it is 112 days, and across the border at Coudersport, Pennsylvania, it is 102 days (NOAA 1914-25, 1951-80). Maize horticulture would have been risky in the valley bottoms, given the incidence of unseasonable killing frosts. Pack (NOAA 1974:259) notes "minimum, or night time temperatures drop to the 40s and upper 30s with some frequency during the summer season in the interior portions of the Plateau Division. It is not uncommon for temperatures to approach the freezing level ... during June and the

Table 1.2

I

Frequency of Late Prehistoric Period Monongahela Culture Components in the Lower Monongahela and Lower Youghiogheny River Drainage Basins by Site Type, Subperiod, and Topographic Situation

Site T Hamlets and/ or Farmsteads

Villages Topographic Setting

N

Row%

N

Row%

River terrace Stream terrace Upland Subtotal

6 20 29

42.9 54.6 74.1 64.4

4 5 12

42.9 10.8 18.5 26.7

Middle Monongahela period

River terrace Stream terrace Upland Subtotal

2 1 30 33

28.6 50.0 100.0 84.6

4 1 0 5

57.l 50.0 0.0 12.8

Late Monongahela/ Protohistoric period

River terrace Stream terrace Upland Subtotal

0 7 7 14

0.0 87.5 77.8 77.8

0

2

0.0 12.5 11.l 11.l

River terrace Stream terrace Upland

14 57

33.3 66.7 86.4

7 6 6

46.7 28.6 9.1

TOTAL

76

74.5

19

18.6

Subeeriod Early Monongahela period

Study Area totals

e Total Unknown

Comeonents

N

Row%

2 4

14.3 2.7 7.4 8.9

7 11 27 45

15.6 24.4 60.0 100.0

1 0 0

14.3 0.0 0.0 2.6

7 2 30 39

18.0 5.1 76.9 100.0

1 0

100.0 0.0 11.1 11.1

8 9 18

5.6 44.4 50.0 100.0

20.0 4.8 4.6

15 21 66

14.7 20.6 64.7

6.9

102

100.0

2

7

N

Column%

Note: Early subperiod includes Drew phase components. Middle subperiod includes Campbell Farm phase components and those Youghiogheny phase components without associated European trade goods. Late subperiod includes Foley Farm phase components and those Youghiogheny phase components displaying European trade goods or diagnostic Native American-made artifacts with secure early-seventeenth-century provenience.

Hilltops of the AUegheny Plateau

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11

Map 1.4.

I

Frost-free-day growing season isolines for the Upper Ohio River Valley and adjacent areas. Map based on means abstracted from NOAA annual summaries for Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio for 1951-80 and for New York for 1921-50.

latter half of August." Pearson et al. report, "In .. . Cattaraugus County, where the difference in elevation between the valleys and uplands ranges from 100 to 1,800 feet, there are many local differences in the length of growing season . . .. Local elevations may have somewhat longer frost-free seasons than local depressions. Many local 'frost pockets' exist where cold air settles at night during spring and fall" (1940:6).

In the valley at Bolivar, above which the Smith site is situated some two hundred meters or higher, summer frosts are common. Of the ten years recorded at the valleybottom weather station, three had late spring frosts on or after June 20 and two had early fall frosts in August (NOAA 1914-25). This means that half the time a frost was experienced in the middle of the growing season.

Monongahela Basin The LMRDB and LYRDB exhibit frost-free periods between 140 and 180 days (map 1.4). The Monongahela core area and the mainstem Ohio River Valley constitute a microniche with a frost-free season greater than 170 days, while areas peripheral to the mainstem valleys display frost-free seasons of less than 140 days. Growing season data (Johnson and Athens 1997; NOAA 1951-80) suggest that relative elevation above a valley floor significantly lengthens the frost-free period. Along the Monongahela River in West Virginia, the Morgantown Lock and Dam station at 825 ft ams! (above mean sea level) displayed a mean frost-free season of 164.5 days, almost 7 days less than that of the nearby Morgantown Federal Aviation Administration Airport station located at an elevation of 1,240 ft ams! on a spur of Chestnut Ridge. Even more surprising was the difference between the Blairsville 6ENE and 7E stations. As their designations indicate, the stations were actually located 6 and, later, 7 miles east of the Blairsville Post Office on a terrace of the Conemaugh River. This would seat the two stations somewhere on Chestnut Ridge at elevations of2,034 ft ams! and 1,840 ft ams!, respectively. The frost-free period for the Blairsville station is 165.1 days, while downstream on the Conemaugh River the Salina 3W station at 1,109 ft ams! is only 145.5 days, 20 days shorter. As noted before, Chestnut Ridge marks the western edge of the Allegheny Mountain section and has a cooler climate than the Allegheny Plateau section to the west.

In Potter County, north-central Pennsylvania, William L. Roberts (1990) recorded frost-free seasons at Late Woodland ridgetop villages and compared these with data from the valley floors below. The area displays a mean frost-free season of about only 120 days (NOAA 1951-80). Roberts (1990) demonstrated as much as a 30- to 40day advantage in frost-free growing season of upland village locations over adjacent valley floors, suggesting that maize could have been grown reliably in the uplands around villages.

Hilltops of the Allegheny Plateau

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13

Testing the Preferred-Microenvironment Hypothesis: Soils Upper Allegheny Valley Two of the sites in the study area-Smith and Burnt Hill-are located in Allegheny County and are surrounded by major areas of Cattaraugus Channery Silt Loam (CSL) and lesser areas of Culvers Channery Silt Loam, both of which are rated fair for corn cultivation (Pearson and Cline 1956:sheets 7 and 9, table 5) . Any highly rated soils in the county are restricted to valley-bottom locations, thus, the selection of fair soils around these villages represented the best choice available. Soils surrounding the sites in Cattaraugus County are generally rated higher (CCSWCD 1996). The three sites in the Humphrey cluster are surrounded by or adjoin areas of Ishua Channery Silt Loam, and one of these sites adjoins both Carrolton CSL and Kinzua CSL. The 3 to 8 percent phase of these soils are all rated as prime farmland. Although the soils surrounding the villages are mapped as steeper phases (not rated prime), the sites themselves are on gently sloping ground, so that the soils could be construed as prime farmland. The Little Valley site is situated on Steamburg Silt Loam, which is rated as prime farmland. Thus, nearly all the hilltop sites in the UARDB are located on some type of Channery Silt Loam, named after channers, or tabular fragments of shale or sandstone which occur in the soil (see Pearson and Cline 1956:45). These soils are rated fair or prime for corn cultivation, so that villagers could have grown maize on them, especially if the soils were derived from glacially pulverized calcareous shales and were overlaying aquifers.

Monongahela Basin An examination of the soils surrounding upland Monongahela villages east of the mainstem Monongahela River in Fayette and Westmoreland Counties, Pennsylvania, indicates that most, if not all, of these sites are located on Westmoreland-GurnseyClarksburg association soils. These deep to moderately deep, well-drained to somewhat poorly drained soils are formed over interbedded sandstone, shale, and limestone. They are formed in uplands on nearly level to moderately steep slopes influenced by limestone (Kopas 1973:3, General Soil Map; Taylor et al. 1968:2, General Soil Map). An examination of specific soil types within a half-kilometer radius around a sample of upland village sites indicates the predominance of Westmoreland Silt Loam or Westmoreland CSL. In Fayette County, Westmoreland CSL (0 to 3 percent slope) is exceeded in productivity for maize by only one limited alluvial soil, while in Westmoreland County, Westmoreland Silt Loam ( 5 to 12 percent slope) is one of three of the most productive soils for maize (Kopas 1973:13-15, table l ; Taylor et al. 1968:9-11, table 1).

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Hasenstab and Johnson

Settlement as a Response to Climate Change In the Upper Allegheny Valley, the general lack of Late Prehistoric sites has led to the belief that the area was abandoned after A.D. 1500 (Schock 1974:277-79). A similar lack of sites exists on the Allegheny Plateau to the east, along the Upper Susquehanna River, "leading many researchers to conclude that the Susquehanna valley was abandoned during that period" (Prezzano 1993:402- 3). Dragoo reports for the Upper Allegheny Valley that "a few sites which may belong to this late phase . . . are situated upon hilltops" and suggests "this may have been a period of considerable stress from outside sources upon the area and such hilltop sites were of a defensive nature" (1977:44). Indeed many of the hilltop sites contain shell-tempered ceramics, reflecting later occupation, and nearly all are palisaded (see Hasenstab 1975; Lounsberry 1997). This movement of villages into the uplands some time around A.D. 1500 coincides with the onset of the Little Ice Age or Neo-Boreal episode (Baerreis and Bryson 1965; Bernabo 1981; Bryson and Wendland 1967). In the Monongahela basin, there seems to have been a contraction of Monongahela territory at the onset of the Middle Monongahela period, about A.D. 1200/ 1250, and a temporary abandonment of large areas on the eastern and northern margins of Monongahela territory (Johnson and Athens 1997). The interior uplands separating the Monongahela and Ohio basins also appear to have been at least partially depopulated or underutilized at this time (see, e.g., Fuller 1981). This depopulation of the periphery and areas more marginal for maize horticulture is correlated with the appearance of much larger villages in the Monongahela core area, particularly on upland hilltops, and with a brief climatic decline about A.D. 1200-1250, marking the end of the Neo-Atlantic climatic episode and the initiation of the cooler Pacific episode (Baerreis and Bryson 1965; Bernabo 1981; Bryson and Wendland 1967). As noted above, it is commonly assumed that upland Monongahela villages were located on hilltops for defensive purposes, arising from increased population pressures in the major stream valleys (George 1983; Mayer-Oakes 1955). More recently, Hart (1993) has argued that the exploitation of the interior uplands by Monongahela populations about A.D. 1200/ 1250 resulted from increased population density and a packing of the more favorable river and stream terrace zones, leading to exploitation of the least desirable of the zones, the uplands, to harvest mast crops and associated fauna! resources. This expansion formed the "basis of regional divided-risk strategies; agricultural production shortfalls in one setting may have been offset by production in other areas" (Hart 1993:113). While not denying that many hilltop sites on the Allegheny Plateau may have been selected with an eye to defense, we argue that these were not occupied exclusively by refugee populations driven from presumably more favorable econiches and productive

Hilltops of the Allegheny Plateau

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15

horticultural land on the major stream valley floors. Nor were they merely one facet or aspect of divided-risk strategy, which evolved after about A.D. 1200/ 1250. Monongahela populations, for example, had been exploiting the interior uplands since the beginning of the Late Prehistoric period. In the Early Monongahela period, 60 percent of the sites were in uplands and 40 percent were on stream and river terraces, while in the Middle period, 77 percent were in uplands and 23 percent on terraces (table 1.2). While there is clearly a trend toward an increasing number of sites in the uplands, particularly for villages, there still seems to be relatively few village sites located on river and stream terraces so as to control these putatively superior environmental zones or, particularly, to force weaker competitors from this favored resource area. We would argue that the uplands, rather, represent the preferred environmental zone. The choice of upland locales for seating villages and maize fields seems to have been a deliberate and proactive economic strategy. Not only are most upland villages located on or adjacent to extensive tracts of prime soil such as Ishua or Westmoreland CSL, but the sloping terrain of the uplands would have buffered maize crops from damage caused by late spring and early fall killing frosts caused by cold-air drainage. It is Hart's (1993:74, 85 ) characterization of the uplands as the most marginal of the environmental zones because it displays the shortest frost-free-day growing season with which we take exception. Native horticulturalists would have placed maize fields according to local conditions of soil and rnicroclimate, not according to regionally

abstracted isotherms.

Comparison with Other Times and Places As mentioned, many of the upland sites documented throughout the Appalachian highlands are attributable to the Archaic and earlier Woodland periods (for the Monongahela area, see Fuller 1981; Herbstritt 198la). Francis B. King (1989:personal communication) has suggested for the Monongahela area that the same beneficial airflow pattern that buffered upland maize crops would have also protected ridgetop nut groves from late killing spring frosts. Wilkins (1978) reports that many of the Archaic period uplands sites in the Appalachian highlands were nut-gathering stations. He also argues that a higher concentration of oak trees on the hilltops would have attracted mast-feeding game such as deer and turkey. Sharp and Sprague ( 1967) have shown that acorn production on white oaks in Pennsylvania is dependent on spring temperatures during flowering and fruit-setting stages. Similarly, in North Carolina, Hutt (1923:106) describes the striking by spring frosts of pecan orchards and black jack oak stands in low areas while higher up the trees remain unaffected. Thus, the cold-air drainage would favor acorn and hickory harvests in the uplands as compared with the valleys.

16

I

Hasenstab and Johnson

These would have attracted both Archaic and Woodland nut gatherers as well as masteating game and the hunters who preyed on them. The Late Prehistoric horticulturalists would seem to have adapted a preexisting Archaic-Woodland subsistence strategy to a new economic base. Settlement with cold-air drainage in mind was a concern among horticulturalists in neighboring areas, for example, the Five Nations Iroquois area to the north. The Iroquois occupied the foothills of the northern edge of the Allegheny Plateau. Their settlement pattern in terms of microclimate was first recognized by Gibson in a study of twenty-nine Onondaga and Oneida Iroquois village sites. He notes that "nearly all of these sites must have had a fairly fast cold air drainage down past them. This would have held off frost and given a longer growing season to the agricultural fields around the sites" (1971:2). The same would have applied to the St. Lawrence Iroquois at the village of Hochelaga on the island of Montreal, where maize was cultivated on the slopes of Mount Royal (Hasenstab n.d. ). A study of cold-air drainage there has documented an eight-degree (F) difference in minimum temperature between the top of Mount Royal and its base (McLeod 1905), which would imply a longer growing season on the hill slopes than on the floodplain.

Conclusion We have argued in this chapter that the uplands of the Appalachian highlands were zones preferred for prehistoric settlement rather than being marginal environments into which people were driven by overpopulation and hostility. The location of Late Prehistoric maize fields and associated villages and hamlets on the Allegheny Plateau is seen as an adaptive response to the reality of living in a highly dissected terrain that also displays a relatively short frost-free-day growing season. This adaptation may have become increasingly important as the climate deteriorated first at the end of the NeoAtlantic climatic episode and then as the succeeding cooler Pacific episode gradually graded into the Neo-Boreal during the sixteenth century.

In sum, we argue that Late Prehistoric settlement of the uplands of the Allegheny Plateau may have been as much a response to a deteriorating climate and shortening frost-free-day growing season as it was attributable to the stress of increasing demographic pressures. Length of growing season would have become critical as it approached or even fell short of the 90 to 120 days required for eight-row northern flint maize. Given the unseasonable frosts in the valley bottoms, the cultivation of rich floodplain soils would have become highly risky, though tempting. The slopes and ridgetops, while perhaps not as fertile as the bottomlands, would have offered more predictable growing seasons and thus more reliable yields.

Hilltops of the Allegheny Plateau

I

17

Acknowledgments Robert Hasenstab, author of the Upper Allegheny study, would like to thank Lucas Mahoney of the Cattaraugus County Soil and Water Conservation District for providing interim soils data. William Johnson, the author of the Monongahela study, would like to thank the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) for funding a portion of this study. We thank the Rochester Museum, State University of New York-Buffalo, the PHMC, and the West Virginia Division of Culture and History for access to their respective site files.

18

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Hasenstab and Johnson

2

Prehistoric Land-Use Patterns in North-Central Connecticut A Matter of Scale

Kenneth L. Feder The purpose ofthis chapter is to make a "small" point-or, rather, a point about the significance of small-scale landforms in a prehistoric settlement pattern. Often, these are land forms that are too small to be discerned on standard USGS, 7.5 minute, 1:24,000 topographic maps. This chapter also makes a "small" point about scale in designing archaeological surveys. The example to be used in making this point comes from research conducted in the Farmington River Archaeological Project (FRAP) in the field seasons of 1995, 1996, and 1998.

The Farmington River Archaeowgical Project The Farmington River Archaeological Project (map 2.1) was initiated in 1978. Until the late 1970s, archaeological research in Connecticut had focused on the excavation of sites located in the Connecticut River Valley and along the coast. It had been assumed that these especially rich habitats were the major centers of prehistoric occupation in the state. To be sure, some sites had been excavated in Connecticut's smaller river valleys, but no systematic surveys had been conducted in these presumed marginal areas. This situation changed dramatically in the late 1970s. Surveys were initiated by Kevin McBride ( 1984b) and William Wadleigh ( 1979) of the Public Archaeology Survey Team in northeastern Connecticut and by the author in the Farmington Valley in north-central and northwestern Connecticut (Feder 1981, 1988, 1990; Feder and Banks 1996). These surveys had as their primary goals the illumination of land-use patterns outside the Connecticut Valley and away from the coast. Data collected in

19

Farmington,/ River / Valley

j

~ I

N

Map 2.1. I Map of Connecticut with location of Farmington River Valley and exploded view of the boundaries of the McLean Game Refuge.

these and other surveys made it clear that these presumed marginal areas had not been merely secondary habitats utilized irregularly or even seasonally by inhabitants of the Connecticut Valley or the coast, but instead seemed to represent separate and distinct prehistoric settlement territories. During the nearly twenty years we have been surveying and excavating sites in the Farmington Valley, we have encountered a richly textured record of prehistoric and historic settlement beginning about ten thousand years ago. With a wide array of site types-in terms of size, seasonal indicators, and in activities reflected in artifact assemblages-the Farmington Valley seems to have possessed its own, self-contained set-

20

I

Feder

tlement system, separate and distinct from any pattern located within the Connecticut Valley or along coastal Connecticut. The apparent cultural distinction between ancient people living in the Farmington and Connecticut Valleys can be explained, at least in part, topographically. The Farmington Valley's eastern margin is demarcated by a north-south trending, nearly vertical, interdigitated traprock and sandstone escarpment with a maximum elevation of approximately three hundred meters. This geological feature clearly separates the Farmington from the Connecticut Valley. Even today, ·when paved roads climb the mountain and connect the two valleys, it serves as an economic and social boundaryand even a psychological barrier. It is not surprising that the escarpment seems to have functioned in a similar way in the prehistoric past. Known locally as Talcott Mountain, the escarpment consists of three chronologically distinct extrusions of basalt separated by intervening layers of sandstone (Calogero 1991). The most recent igneous layer-the Hampden flow-is generally covered by a subsequent thick blanket of sandstone and faces to the east. The other two basalt strata-the chronologically intermediate Holyoke flow and oldest Talcott flow-are exposed in section along the steep, west-facing slope of the escarpment, facing into the Farmington Valley (map 2.2). AB such, these basalts were readily available to people living in the Farmington Valley, but less so to those living in the Connecticut Valley to the east. Some sections of both of the earlier flows are fine-grained and exhibit conchoidal fracture. Relatively sharp and exceptionally durable edges can be produced by percussion. Tools made from these fine-grained basalts have been found in abundance at prehistoric sites in the Farmington Valley. Tools made from these basalts generally are not found in great concentrations in the Connecticut Valley to the east. Also, along some of the margins of the Holyoke flow, the overridden sandstone was metamorphosed by heat radiated by the molten basalt, into a fine-grained, sometimes vitreous, flintlike material possessing conchoidal fracture (Calogero 1991). This hornfels is far less grainy than even the fine-grained Holyoke or Talcott basalts and

Map 2.2. I Cross-section of Talcott Mountain.

Shuttle Meadow Formation New Haven Arkose

Holyoke Basalt

l

Prehistoric Land-Use in North-Central Connecticut

I

21

was used extensively by the aboriginal inhabitants of the Farmington Valley in the manufacture of chipped-stone tools. The high percentages of basalt and hornfels flakes and tools recovered in sites in the Farmington Valley, distinguish these sites from those located in the Connecticut Valley, often just a few kilometers to the east.

Archaeology in the McLean Game Refuge Central Connecticut State University has been investigating the archaeological record of the McLean Game Refuge as part of the Farmington River Archaeological Project since 1993. Located in the Connecticut towns of Simsbury and Granby (and in a small corner of Canton), the refuge consists of about thirty-five hundred beautiful, very valuable, undeveloped acres of essentially unspoiled habitat. The land contained within the game refuge is typical of the Connecticut uplands specifically as well as of the New England province of the Appalachian physiographic division generally. This province, including all of New England, Newfoundland, and the Maritime provinces of Canada, is located at the edge of the Appalachian division. It is characterized by hilly, well-drained uplands with altitudes generally below 450 m (1,500 ft), local mountains with altitudes above 1,500 m (5,000 ft; not in Connecticut but to the north), and a lengthy and irregular coast (Hunt 1974). The other provinces of the Appalachian division share similar characteristics, differing primarily in elevation, not in essential properties. It is not surprising, therefore, that within a pattern of abundant local prehistoric cultural diversity between even adjacent river valleys in central Connecticut, we nevertheless find some broadly common threads in material culture and settlement patterns among the ancient cultures that settled across all of the Appalachian provinces as we now define them (see this volume). For example, projectile point morphology shows many consistencies throughout the division. The temporally diagnostic triangular and pentagonal projectile points found at the Firetown North site to be discussed here and other point forms recovered in the McLean Game Refuge certainly are recognizable to those whose geographic focus is Connecticut and Massachusetts, but they also are familiar to archaeologists working in New York State, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia and the Carolinas. It is interesting to note that our modern perspective, that delineates a wide geographic swath of eastern North America as belonging in the same physiographic division on the basis of physiography and geomorphology, may reflect similar perceptions on the part of the ancient inhabitants of the region. These ancient people seem to have recognized that a generally similar subsistence strategy would be successful across the region-and this facilitated their expansion through it with a common lithic technology. The McLean Game Refuge itself specifically possesses a number of different land forms, habitats, and natural features . These include wetlands, streams and their flood-

22

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plains, alluvial and kame terraces, eskers, kettle ponds, and uplands with exposures of diabase generally more coarsely grained than either the Holyoke or Talcott basalts and, therefore, less amenable to chipped-stone tool making. The varied habitats contained within the refuge would have afforded prehistoric human groups a wide range of resources on a seasonal basis. It seemed likely, therefore, that the area would have been exploited by the prehistoric inhabitants of the Farmington Valley and that the refuge possessed significant archaeological potential. Beyond this, because the refuge is located approximately 3.2 km from the Farmington River, its investigation provides an opportunity to examine an aspect of aboriginal settlement in the Farmington Valley that is poorly understood, that is, the use of upland areas away from the floodplain of a major river. Our approach in surveying the refuge has been intensive, slow, and deliberate. We have kept the distance between test pits universally small. In all initial reconnaissance surveying of the refuge, test pits were placed at 10-m intervals; test-pit interval in given areas decreased to 5 m after the recovery of prehistoric material. Also, we have used one-eighth mesh hardware cloth to examine all test-pit matrix.

Sites, Distributions, Settlement Patterns, and Landscape Signatures Our rationale for this level of survey intensity is simple: the long-term goal of the McLean survey is not simply to find archaeological sites that then can be excavated, at least not sites as they are commonly defined. In most archaeological survey projects, the site concept is taken as axiomatic. There rarely is any attempt to explicitly define or operationalize the concept. It is clear, however, that in most instances, the term "site" is used implicitly to mean any discrete, bounded location where humans lived, worked, or carried out a task and where the physical evidence of their behavior can be recovered by the archaeologist. Certainly the site is a standard concept in archaeology and an essential analytical unit. Nevertheless, some have called into question the usefulness and even the validity of the site concept, at least as it is used ordinarily. For example, Dunnell (1992a) maintains that the archaeological record does not consist of geographically discrete locations where artifacts and features are found. Instead, he views the archaeological record as virtually unbroken across the landscape, reflecting the broad and geographically continuous use of that landscape by human groups. Using a similar line of reasoning, Ebert (1992:245-46) argues that the site concept presupposes that the archaeological record is like a series of discrete snapshots of the past, with each site viewed as a separate photograph in time. Ebert maintains that, contrary to this, the archaeological record is actually more like a single, lengthy, time-exposure photograph, a picture with infinitely overlapping images accumulating across the dimensions of space and along the dimension of time. Some parts of the archaeological image are brighter-these would be distinct locations used more intensively (what we

Prehistoric Land-Use in North-Central Connecticut

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call sites)-but the image is, nonetheless, nearly continuous and ubiquitous. A focus on those "bright spots," in Ebert's view, distorts our understanding of an overall land-use pattern. Applying this "distributional" (Ebert 1992), "landscape" (Marquardt and Crumley 1987; Rossignol and Wandsnider 1992), or nonsite (Dunnell 1992a) approach, our goal in the McLean survey was broader than site discovery in the usual sense of this phrase. Our purpose was, and continues to be, not to find sites necessarily, but to illuminate the broader pattern of prehistoric land use for this region of southern New England. It has long been understood in archaeology that, as a result of the particular subsistence base of a given group, its relations with neighbors, local environmental variables, as well as historical factors a people use a region in a spatially ordered way, leaving patterned distributions on the landscape. The term we ordinarily use for a spatially ordered system of land use is settlement pattern. The archaeological reflection of that settlement pattern is called by Marquardt and Crumley (1987:7) the "landscape signature" of a region. The landscape signature is reflected in the geographical locations of, towns, villages, fishing camps, hunting sites, quarries, transportation features and facilities, shrines, burial grounds, and so on. The landscape signature is, therefore, a material representation of a cultural pattern of the use of land and space. In attempting to realize the goal of an understanding of a settlement pattern, Marquardt and Crumley (1987) point out that a significant problem results if archaeologists design strategies to search for sites, when "site" is defined narrowly as a place where people lived or buried their dead. As they point out, within the landscape signature of an area, along with habitations there are unoccupied or infrequently occupied places that are difficult to discern archaeologically because so few material remains were deposited. As they further point out, unoccupied areas of ceremonial significance, mountain passes through which human groups traveled, short term encampments, and even uninhabited buffer zones between different groups of people, all are part of a pattern of land use, but may .be invisible to archaeologists surveying an area by applying techniques designed to find only discrete, dense accumulations of settlement refuse. Clearly, to more fully expose the landscape signature of a group of people, a much more intensive survey strategy is required than if one is looking only for habitation sites. In other words, if you are looking only for Ebert's "bright spots" in the archaeological record, one set of survey techniques will suffice. On the other hand, if one hopes to expose more completely the nature of prehistoric land use (to more thoroughly reveal Ebert's metaphorical time-lapse photograph of a past land use pattern), a different set of procedures-more intensive and extensive, more time-consuming, and more expensive-is called for. The landscape approach to survey causes us to reassess in particular the scale at which we had previously evaluated the archaeologi-

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cal potential of a given area. Certainly, it is standard procedure in surveying to examine carefully 7.5-minute USGS topographic maps of an area in an attempt to isolate those landforms that are of a type where sites have been located previously. AB Napton and Greathouse (1997:182) state in their chapter in the new (seventh) edition of Field Methods in Archaeology, "The 7.5-minute series provides accurate large-scale details of terrain, vegetation patterns, streams, roads, and many other types of features. These quadrangles are frequently used as base maps upon which archaeological (and other) projects are laid out and site locations plotted." Significantly, Napton and Greathouse cite the accuracy of these maps in relation to "large-scale details." After all, in these 1:24,000 scale maps, 1 in represents approximately 2,000 ft (1 cm represents 240 m). From a human perspective on the ground, this is far too large a scale to accurately convey the topographic complexity of a region to be surveyed. At this scale, you lose important small-scale details that almost certainly were critical in ancient land-use decisions. The scale at which people perceived their surroundings and the scale upon which they based land-use decisions is far different from-that is, much smaller than-the scale of our most commonly used maps aiid, therefore, smaller than the scale employed by many archaeologists when designing site survey strategies. For example, if, as almost certainly is the case, human groups chose areas to use for various purposes, at least in part based on topographic relief, they made these decisions based on the presence of landforms of a scale far too small to be discerned on the standard USGS 7.5-minute topographic quadrangle maps.

Firetown North Our discovery of the Firetown North site in the McLean Game Refuge provides a useful lesson in this regard. The site was located through the process of test pitting briefly outlined above. In 1995, a randomly selected test pit transect placed at the eastern margin of the western one-third of the refuge intersected the site. Lithic artifacts were recovered initially in a linear sequence of three test pits (as indicated previously, in initial testing, pits were 10 m apart); one of the pits produced a substantial number of hornfels flakes along with most of a triangular, hornfels biface. The location of the Firetown North site is instructive. The test-pit transect that intersected the site traversed a pretty typical mixture of land types and slopes present in the refuge. Midway through the south-to-north line of test pits, the transect climbed a short, relatively steep slope and then ran along atop a narrow, flat knoll. An unnamed, south flowing, deeply incised, quite small, but permanent stream runs along the western edge of the base of the knoll. This small stream flows into Bissell Brook, the major watercourse passing through refuge land. Bissell Brook flows into Salmon Brook, which is, in turn, a tributary of the Farmington River. The flat top of the knoll on which the site is located sits about 5 m above the unnamed, small stream. The flat top of the knoll is no more than about 22 m at its widest. From the point

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where the slope flattens at the southern tip of the land form to the point where it rises again to the north, becoming rough and irregular, is about 80 m (map 2.3). The Firetowi:l North site was located on this 80 x 22 m plot of flat, elevated land. The small, unnamed tributary of Bissell Brook is visible on our topographic maps, but until the field crew walked out into this section of the game refuge, we did not know that the flat-topped knoll existed. Remember, in the 7.5-minute series maps, a single centimeter represents 240 m of actual distance. Therefore, the small eminence upon which the Firetown North site was located-which was, along with the stream, a major reason for the site's location-is a rectangle on that USGS map 3.3 mm long by .9 mm wide (covering an area of just 2.97 mm2, or a rectangle .13 in long by .04

Map 2.3. I Perspective map of the landform on which the Firetown North site was located.

Contour Interval= .5 meters

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Feder

Magnetic North

••

Excavation Unit

Test Pit

Contour Interval= .5 meters

-20

-10

-0

I

10

Map 2.4. I Topographic map of the knoll, with excavation units at Firetown North superimposed.

in wide with an area of .0052 in 2 ). In other words, one deciding feature of the landscape and a key reason for the placement of the Firetown North site is effectively invisible on a map with a 1:24,000 scale. We excavated four 2 x 2 m units at the Firetown North site in 1996 and four additional 2 x 2 m units in 1998 (map 2.4). Artifacts recovered include a hornfels Levanna point, another very small hornfels triangle, and a few pieces of aboriginal ceramics, one with a punctate design. Additionally, we recovered a narrow, pentagonal quartzite point, a pentagonal hornfels point, a large, bifacially flaked equilateral triangle of hornfels

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Fig. 2.1. Sample of stone tools recovered at Firetown North.

(much like the one initially found in testing the site in 1995), both sections of a quartzite point that had snapped along its midpoint, a triangular quartzite biface (possibly a preform), a large array of cutting and scraping tools, two probable harnmerstones, and abundant hornfels, flint, quartz, and quartzite debitage (fig. 2.1). By far the most abundant lithic raw material found at Firetown North was hornfels, constituting more than 75 percent of the lithic assemblage of more than fortytwo hundred flakes . Seven of the Firetown North hornfels flakes were thin-sectioned by Barbara Calogero and Anthony Philpotts of the University of Connecticut (Calogero and Philpotts 1997). Their analysis indicates that the inhabitants of Firetown North used Farmington Valley gray hornfels, which possesses silt-sized grains of quartz and clumps of magnetite. Macroscopically, much of the local hornfels looks, at least superficially, like Hudson Valley flint . Experiments with the hornfels shows a breakage pattern not unlike flint, though the hornfels is softer and exposed surfaces are not nearly as lustrous or as slick to the touch as fresh flint surfaces.

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No discrete archaeological features were identified at Firetown North. There were only a few small fragments of calcined bone recovered, no seeds or nut fragments, and no discrete concentrations of charcoal. There were, however, small charcoal fragments diffusely scattered in all eight 2 x 2 m Wlits excavated at the site. Vertically, cultural material was clustered in a relatively thin stratigraphic layer. Chippage was scattered across a vertical band no more than about 21 cm thick. There was an apparent concentration in an even narrower layer no more than about 9 cm in thickness and, further, most of the eight excavation Wlits show a distinct peak in flake count at the same 3-cm stratigraphic level. Charcoal concentration also reached a peak in this same layer. Charcoal recovered from this 3-cm level scattered in one 1 m 2 quadrant in one of the excavation Wlits (NlOW4) was submitted for radiocarbon analysis. The date derived from this charcoal sample is 950±90 B.P. (Beta-101930)-a calibrated date of A.D. 1040. Certainly the Firetown North site is small, covering only a very few square meters. It appears to have been a very short-term occupation by a small group of people. Tools and debitage recovered indicate that stone tool manufacture and maintenance were carried out at the site. Little else is certain. The entire north-south extent of the site was little more than 30 m, and its eastwest spread was only about half this. Had our test-pit interval been even a little more than three times the 10-m spacing we used, we might not have intersected the site at all. In fact, I used a 25 -m test-pit interval in a previous survey (Feder 1988) and others have used similar intervals. Kintigh (1988) has shown mathematically that as testpit interval approaches the mean diameter of sites in a region, site detection approaches 100 percent, but the percentage of sites detected declines as a function of the amount by which test-pit interval exceeds mean site size. Considering the patchiness of flake distribution across the site, a 25- or 30-m interval might very well have resulted in a failure to detect Firetown North. Beyond this, this site was situated on a diminutive land form whose existence would have been entirely unknown to us had we not approached our investigation of land use at the same scale as that employed by people making land-use decisions in prehistory-in other words, had we relied, for example, on available aerial photographs or topographic maps. Firetown North is only one of several such locations encountered in the McLean Game Refuge survey (Feder and Banks 1996). These sites-using that term in the broadest sense here-cover small areas, have few or no distinct features, and have sometimes insubstantial accumulations of artifacts, mostly debitage. They are associated with landforms that are not visible on standard USGS Quadrangle maps with their 1:24,000 scale. They represent an as yet poorly understood class of archaeological localities reflecting one or more categories of land use that are discovered only serendipitously or else not at all when employing a survey strategy that relies on available, but inappropriately scaled topographic maps to prioritize areas according to assumed archaeological sensitivity.

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The short-term use of spatially restricted locations by fimctionally specialized task groups whose purposes may include, but are not limited to, resource collection or processing likely contributed to survival to a far greater degree than that implied by the limited archaeological visibility of such sites. The virtual invisibility of small landscape features on USGS topographic quadrangle sheets and the difficulty in finding the archaeological occupations located on them are not a reflection of their lack of significance, but only an indication of a failing in our methodology. Important elements of a prehistoric culture's landscape signature and, indirectly, a land-use pattern, may be reflected in small sites and we need to design our sampling strategies expressly so as not to miss them. Small sites on small landforms are an important part of a pattern of land use and can be found only if the scale at which we search for them is suitable.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the field crews for the 1996 and 1998 field seasons in the McLean Game Refuge: field director Marc Banks and excavators India Black, Erik Bouchard, Jean Marie Cerasale, Amanda Cohen, Jen Colacico, Chad Finney, Rachel Gaylord, John Leum, Andrea Rand, Tina Tarantino, Randi Veklund, Cris Wibby, and Joe Yanielli. Also, thanks are due to Jerry Sawyer for analyzing the charcoal recovered at the site and for preparing the radiocarbon sample. Thanks to Barbara Calogero and Tony Philpotts for their thin-section analysis of the hornfels flalces and thanks to Jen Colacico for her analysis of the chipping patterns of Farmington Valley hornfels. Thanks to Marc Banks for producing the topographic map of the site and thanks to Erik Bouchard and John Leum for the descriptive statistics of the lithic assemblage. I would also like to express my great appreciation to the Board of Directors of the McLean Fund for allowing us to conduct our research in the refuge. Finally, a special thanks to Steve Paine, the manager/caretaker of the refuge for all of his assistance, cooperation, and interest.

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3

Geomorphology of Upland Regolith in the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau Implications for Prehistoric Archaeology

David L. Cremeens and Jonathan C. Lothrop In this chapter we swnmarize some recent findings from geomorphological studies of regolith in the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau and their implications for prehistoric archaeology. ("Regolith" refers to the unconsolidated mantle of earth materials overlying bedrock.). We consider how certain aspects of landscape evolution in low-order upland stream valleys of the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau affect the preservation and integrity of prehistoric archaeological sites in these settings. The work presented here is based on ongoing cultural resource management studies conducted by GAI Consultants on the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau in West Virginia (map 3 .1). These studies have involved survey, testing, and excavation of prehistoric archaeological sites in several parts of the state. The study areas encompass a variety of environmental settings on the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau, including valley floodplains, terraces, and footslopes, as well as upland ridges and associated low-order stream drainages. Geomorphology and pedology studies have been carried out in conjunction with the archaeological field investigations to aid in ( 1) predicting site location, (2) modeling site formation on individual prehistoric sites, and (3) assessing integrity of archaeological deposits. In recent decades, geoarchaeological studies of open-air prehistoric sites in North America have focused most commonly on sites in valley bottom and footslope settings, often associated with high-order stream drainages (e.g., Perring 1992; Gardner and Donahue 1985; Gladfelter 1985; Mandel 1992; Foss, Timpson, and Lewis 1995) (high-order drainages involve streams of regional significance). This is not surprising, given the potential for alluvial (stream), colluvial (hillside), and aeolian (windborne) depositional processes that affect the preservation and burial of prehistoric sites in

31

these settings. In part, however, this also reflects the common assumption that prehistoric sites in upland settings associated with low-order drainages (i.e., involving streams of local significance) will be near-surface phenomena associated with residual soils, thus requiring little need for geoarchaeological investigation. Recently published geomorphological studies in the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau and the results of the present investigations, however, provide new insights into erosional and depositional processes during upland landscape evolution. In the upper reaches of drainage systems, regolith transport, involving a sediment we term "co-alluvium,'' can affect prehistoric site preservation in a number of ways, resulting variously in buried or stratified sites and redeposited prehistoric sites. These findings have important implications for archaeological studies of prehistoric sites in the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau, particularly for predictive modeling, site formation and integrity, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction.

Map 3.1.

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I Physiographic setting of West Virginia.

Cremeens and Lothrop

t -=10 Z0 30Ml

0

Map 3.2.

I Locations of the Corridor L and Tolsia Projects in West Virginia versus subdivisions of the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau and the chert-bearing Kanawha Formation.

Appalachian Plateau Characteristics Findings in this chapter stem from geoarchaeological studies conducted in West Virginia sections of the Appalachian Plateau physiographic province. The Appalachian Plateau consists of relatively flat-lying, predominantly elastic rocks that are higher in altitude and younger in age than surrounding provinces (Thornbury 1965). The Plateau is bounded on all sides by out-facing escarpments and consists of cyclic sequences of Mississippian~to-Perrnian-age sandstones, shales, and coals. Limestone is uncommon. The province is highly dissected, generally having the greatest average slope in the Appalachian highlands (Mills and Delcourt 1991). This deeply dissected landscape was formed by erosion of the flat-lying rocks, resulting in narrow, sinuous ridges and meandering valleys in a dendritic pattern. Landform development on the Plateau reflects differences in local precipitation, base level, geology, and possibly local uplift (Outerbridge 1987). The highest elevations in the Appalachian Plateau occur along its eastern margin in West Virginia, where altitudes exceed 1,200 m. With the exception of a ridge-and-valley section along its extreme eastern margin, the majority of West Virginia encompasses subsections of the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau. Findings presented here derive from research in the Allegheny, Logan, and Parkersburg Plateaus, subsections of the Appalachian Plateau in central and southwestern West Virginia (map 3.2).

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Hills/ope Regolith Three dominant types of regolith occur in the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau: residuum, colluvium, and alluvium. Residuum is nontransported regolith, formed in place by the disintegration and decomposition of bedrock; it is typically found on ridgetops and shoulder slopes. The second type of regolith-colluvium-consists of a mantle of poorly sorted debris on slopes below ridgetops that has been moved downslope by a variety of mechanical processes, including seasonal creep, tree-throw, fauna! turbation, sliding, and flowing (Mills et al . 1987; American Geological Institute 1976; Soil Science Society of America 1997). Colluvium is often a diarnicton and may be stratified. ("Diarnicton" refers to unsorted, land-derived sediments containing a wide range of particle sizes [Flint 1971].) Colluvium is the most common type of surface deposit throughout the Appalachian region (Mills and Delcourt 1991). Finally, alluvium consists of unconsolidated detrital materials deposited by streams on valley floors; it is usually stratified, and is often well sorted. For settings mantled with transported regolith (alluvium, colluvium), evaluating the time frame of sediment movement is critical to understanding both the geomorphic history of the resulting landscape and the context of any associated prehistoric archaeological resources. In a geoarchaeological study of a terrain segment, we typically need to ( 1) reconstruct which sediments have been transported and when they were transported, (2) identify where deposits are stratified, and (3) define which transported sediments have been sorted and which have not. Fortunately, current geomorphological investigations of the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau share a number of these research goals (e.g., Jacobson, Miller, and Smith 1989; Kochel 1987; Mills and Delcourt 1991; Montgomery and Buffington 1997). Two areas of current geomorphological interest include the systematic establishment of chronologies for surficial deposits, based on reliable radiocarbon dates, and more detailed quantitative analyses of the sedimentology and stratigraphy of surficial deposits, to more fully understand their mode of emplacement (Mills and Delcourt 1991). For prehistoric archaeologists working in the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau, collaboration with geomorphologists and pedologists is crucial for the accurate evaluation of Holocene upland sediments and their associated archaeological remains.

Geomorphology In the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau, the upper reaches of drainage systems, or networks, include zero-order valley basins (ZOVBs) and first-order valley basins (FOVBs).

Zero-order valley basins are "cove," or embayed, areas with intermittent streams and no stream channel development (Jacobson 1985). These are the highest altitude, farthest upstream slopes, found immediately below the ridgetops. Because there is no channel development, there is essentially no mechanism for alluvial deposition in ZOVBs. These are areas of active erosion and downcutting in the drainage network (table 3.1).

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Table 3.1 I Stream Channel and Depositional Characteristics of Upland Valley Basins in the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau Valley Basin Type Basin Characteristic

Stream channel development Depositional regime

Zero-order Valley Basins

First-order Valley Basins

First-order Drainage Basins

None

First-order stream

Perennial streams and tributaries

Erosional downcutting, colluvial, or co-alluvial

Colluvial and co-alluvial

Alluvial

ZOVBs feed into first-order valley basins. FOVBs are open valley systems in which flow lines converge to an axis, and which contain an intermittent stream channel. Colluvial channels have been defined as small headwater streams, at the tips of a channel network, that flow over a colluvial valley fill and exhibit weak or ephemeral fluvial transport (Montgomery and Buffington 1997). First-order drainage basins (FODBs) contain perennial stream channels and tributary streams. Figure 3.1 shows the plan view of a hypothetical FODE; this encompasses the perennial stream, the intermittent stream channels that feed it, and associated FOVBs and ZOVBs. In this figure, the perennial stream of a FODB drains into a higher-order stream and associated valley. In county soil surveys for the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau in West Virginia, residual soils are typically mapped on ridgetops and shoulder slopes. Colluvial soils are delineated on sideslopes, footslopes at valley wall margins, and on valley floors of zeroand first-order valley basins. Alluvial soils are mapped on floodplains and terraces of higher-order perennial streams. Regarding colluvial soils, Mills and Delcourt ( 1991) indicate that the age of the parent material varies with topographic setting; for example, the residence time of colluviurn is most restricted in basins. A few recent geomorphology studies have focused on stratigraphy and episodic deposition of colluviurn during the Holocene in the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau. Jacobson's (1985) work in the Buffalo Creek area of Marion County, West Virginia, determined that thick, diarnicton colluviurn filling ZOVBs and FOVBs resulted from large-scale debris flows dating to the Early Holocene, or earlier. The flows originated in zero-order valley basins, or coves, and then merged into extensive fans at the mouths of the coves. This relict diarnicton colluviurn is now being entrenched and eroded. The colluvial channel landscapes, between the truncated "fingers," are younger, largely

Geomorphology of the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau

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/

~ESIDUUM

/

/

/

/ / .

/

// / / / / / / /.

/ e\.O~ / "'(\~/

// / /

/intarmitta

/~

// / /J ' / /, /

/

Straa

First-Order Valley Basin

a Higher-Order Stream

Fig. 3.la.

I Schematic plan view of a hypothetical first-order drainage basin in the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau, showing aerial distribution of regolith types, including co-alluvium.

Fig. 3.lb.

I Schematic longitudinal profile (A-A ' in fig. 3.la) of part of a first-order drainage basin, illustrating distribution of regolith types relative to position on slope.

fil

11ffl' BURIED SOIL A

b

stratified, and partially sorted. The intermittent flow characteristic of these channels may rework some of the accumulated sediment, although it does not govern the deposition, sorting, or transport of the valley fill (Montgomery and Buffington 1997). The result is that most of this sediment is stored in the younger channels. In a separate study, Kochel (1987) described Holocene debris flows in the Appalachians of central Virginia as resulting from catastrophic storm events (e.g., hurricanes). The episodes of deposition were separated by periods of stability, during which soils formed on exposed surfaces that were later buried by subsequent debris flows. In discussing debris flows in the Central Appalachians, Jacobson, Miller, and Smith (1989) defined debris as poorly sorted to diamictic hillslope sediment transported with variable fluvial reworking. The resulting sediment is co-alluvium, the hybrid of colluvium and alluvium. Co-alluvium occurs in ZOVB and FOVB settings (particularly in the valley floors) and along valley wall footslopes in higher-order valleys. A schematic profile transect across a FODE (A to A' in fig. 3.1) shows the transition from colluvium to co-alluvium to alluvium as a continuum with increasing stratification and sorting downslope. The remnant surfaces of the older, entrenched colluvium can be correlated with associated well-developed soil profiles. The old colluvium contains argillic (clayenriched) Bt and fragipan (silica-cemented) Bx horizon subsoils that indicate a certain maturity because of the greater degree of pedogenic development; this older colluvium may date to the Middle or Early Holocene, or earlier. In published county soil surveys, these older colluvial sediments are usually mapped, but the co-alluvial sediments in the ZOVBs and FOVBs are typically not delineated, as a function of both scale and definition. Fewer studies have dealt with the archaeology and geoarchaeology of colluvial landscapes. Most of these consider the disturbance of archaeological sites by mass movement, debris flow, and burial (Butzer 1982; Waters 1992). Archaeological remains found in colluvial landscapes are generally not considered to be in their original behavioral context (Waters 1992). Rather, the remains are incorporated into the moving debris. However, mass movement deposits and the scars they create on slopes can provide microhabitats used by humans (Brumley and Dau 1988; Wilson 1990). The interaction of rainwater with the regolith in ZOVB and FOVB settings results in the differential concentration of water at various points on the landscape (fig. 3.2). In residuum, the primary functions of water include leaching, wetting and drying, and freezing and thawing. The result is well-developed soil horizons on a stable landscape. In colluvium, the same soil formation processes can occur; in addition, however, water becomes concentrated enough through surface and subsurface flow to lubricate the regolith to the point where plastic deformation can occur. The result is regolith or soil movement by creep, earthflow, debris flow, or slopewash (Pierson and Costa 1987; Small and Clark 1982). Over extended periods, more than one episode of regolith

Geomorphology of the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau

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RESIDUUM

leaching

sorting

ALLUVIUM '------..;:c;.;:;o_-.;..;.A-.LL_u;..;v-.1u_M;.;,;.__ _ _ _ coLLUVIUM entrainment lubrication

Fig. 3.2.

I

Ternary chart showing three dominant types of regolith in the unglaciated Appalachian Plateau with associated water functions, stratification and sorting vectors, and the occurrence of co-alluvium.

movement may occur at a location. Because the movement episodes are separated in time, the mass becomes stratified. Occasionally, these depositional episodes are separated by enough time that, during a hiatus, a soil forms at the surface. Buried soils are remnants of former land surfaces. Further increases in water content result in suspension or entrainment functions. In order to sort, water must accumulate and flow. Where colluvium grades to alluvium-the co-alluvial zone-water content increases enough that its function gradually changes from lubrication to initial sorting (fig. 3.2). Finally, in alluvium, water becomes concentrated enough to entrain and transport; the result is better sorted and stratified sediments. Two case studies reported below illustrate how stratified prehistoric sites can occur in co-alluvial settings in first-order valley basins.

Archaeological Case Studies in West Vi1lJinia During recent archaeological investigations in West Virginia, we have identified a number of prehistoric sites in co-alluvial settings. At two sites discussed below, these stratified co-alluvial deposits contain the archaeological remains of several prehistoric occupations. However, energy flow in these co-alluvial depositional settings appears to vary to the extent that, in some cases, the prehistoric archaeological remains will be preserved in an undisturbed, stratified context, while in other instances, prehistoric components have been partially disturbed by co-alluvial reworking and redeposition.

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Cremeens and Lothrop

These findings are based primarily on recently conducted archaeological studies of two proposed highway alignments in West Virginia: the Corridor L Highway and the Tolsia Highway. Performed for the West Virginia Division of Highways, archaeological field studies have included survey, testing, and excavation of prehistoric sites identified in project alignments.

Corridor L Project: Site 46Ni275 Archaeological investigations on the Corridor L project in central West Virginia included study of a 40-km segment of this proposed highway in Nicholas and Braxton Counties (Hart et al. 1994) (map 3.2) . The alignment traverses portions of the drainage basins of the Gauley and Elk Rivers, and a divide between these two drainages. Initial survey identified forty prehistoric archaeological sites; GAI conducted testing at twenty of these localities to evaluate site significance. Roughly half of these twenty sites occur on residual landscapes, with the remainder evenly divided between colluvial and alluvial settings. Of the colluvial sites, three were found in geomorphic settings that are conducive to co-alluvial processes (i.e., colluvial fan or colluvial valley fills ). Data recovery excavations were performed at two prehistoric sites, including one (Site 46Ni275) located in an upland valley co-alluvial setting. Site 46Ni275 is located in Nicholas County, in a first-order valley basin at a relatively high altitude of 610 m. The site lies on a toeslope/ terrace landscape adjacent to Shant Branch, a north-flowing, first-order stream in a straight valley completely mantled with colluvium. Sediments on the valley floor consist of relatively coarse, poorly sorted materials, with large stones and boulders partially supported by a sandy loam matrix. The soil horizon sequences observed at Site 46Ni275 indicate at least two episodes of co-alluvial deposition on a portion of the site (fig. 3.3). This conclusion is based on observations of buried-soil profiles. Buried soils are delineated with Ab (buried topsoil) and Bwb (buried subsoil) horizons in the profile sequences. The upslope portion of the site displayed an AC-Ab-BAb-Bwb-BC-C horizon sequence, while a smaller, downslope sector of the site revealed an AC-Ab-BAb-Ab ' -Bwb-BC-C sequence. The upslope sequence represents at least one episode of co-alluvial deposition overlain by historic colluvium (the AC horizon) . The downslope sequence represents two or more episodes of co-alluvial deposition, also superimposed by historic colluvium. The Ab horizon of the upslope sequence was traced across most of the site, and was continuous with the Ab horizon of the downslope sequence. However, radiocarbon dating and vertical provenience of diagnostic artifacts suggest that the Ab horizon of the upslope sequence temporally correlates with the Ab ' (lower buried A horizon) of the downslope sequence. The upslope portion of the site was relatively stable during that period of time in which the lower portion experienced an additional episode of deposition. This interpretive scenario is illustrated schematically in figure 3.3. The Bw horizons observed in the site's soils indicate a weak degree of development relative to more mature Bt and Bx horizons found in old colluvium. Geomorphology of the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau

I

39

The co-alluvial landform at 46Ni275 has undergone localized, episodic debris flow or earth flow deposition. Between flow episodes, weakly developed/ young soils formed on exposed surfaces. These soils were then either buried in place by a subsequent flow or were blended or mixed with sediment as part of the next flow. Prehistoric archaeological remains at Site 46Ni275 consisted of a locally dense accumulation of Archaic and Woodland habitation debris on this landform immediately west of Shant Branch. Total site dimensions measured 55 x 15 m, the long axis of the site oriented parallel to the channel of Shant Branch. Following identification and site delineation, archaeological investigations focused on the central portion of the site, where artifact density was greatest, ranging up to 2,600 artifacts per square meter. Testing and subsequent data recovery excavations at Site 46Ni275 documented the two distinct profile sequences in the upslope and downslope portions of the site described above. Fieldwork at Site 46Ni275 recovered approximately 44,000 lithic artifacts, most of these representing debris from reduction of Kanawha formation chert obtained from nearby outcrops (Price 1921; Reppert 1978) (map 3.2). Diagnostic projectile points indicate a series of Early through Late Archaic, Transitional, Fig. 3.3.

I Schematic illustration of soil profiles at site 46Ni275, lithologic units, and associated radiocarbon determinations. SOIL PROFILE DOWNSLOPE

LITHOLOGIC UNITS

SOIL PROFILE UPSLOPE

HISTORIC COLllNIUM

AC

C-14 AGE {YEARS BP)

(J (j

0

BAb

0

~2470