Archaeology of the Lower Ohio River Valley

321 Pages·1983·65.25 MB·English

by  Jon Muller

ARCHAEOLOGY of the
Lower Ohio River Valley

ARCHAEOLOGY of the
Lower Ohio River Valley
Jon Muller
Left
~
Coast
Press
Inc.
Walnut Creek, California
Left
~
Coast
Press
Inc.
LEFT COAST PRESS, Inc.
1630 North Main Street, #400
Walnut Creek, CA 94596
http://www.LCoastPress.com
Copyright © 2009 by Left Coast Press, Inc.
Replaces edition of this book produced by Emerald Group Publishing under
ISBN 978-0-12-510331-2 in 2007. Originally published by Academic Press in 1986
in the New World Archaeological Record Series.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available from the publisher.
ISBN: 1-59874-451-8
978-1-5987 4-451-4
Printed in the United States of America
@TMThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992.
09 10 11 12 13 5 4 3 2 1
In memoriam,
Carl and Muller
~Max

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
1.
Background to the Archaeology of the Lower Ohio Valley 1
Early Ohio Archaeology
Modern Ohio Valley Archaeology 13
Terminology 23
2.
Environments of the Lower Ohio Valley 25
Localities 25
Climate, Vegetation, and Landforms 28
Ecology and Economy 32
Economics and Politics 42
3.
The First Settlers 45
Introduction 45
Early Climate and Environment 46
Early Paleoindian 52
Late Paleoindian 54
Early Archaic (Post-Dalton) 56
Middle Archaic 57
vii
viii Contents
Late Archaic 67
The First 9000 Years 80
4.
Early and Middle Woodland 83
Introduction 83
Early Woodland 90
Middle Woodland 95
The Transition to Late Woodland: Allison-La Motte Culture 120
Conclusions 124
5.
Late Woodland 127
Introduction 127
Lewis Phase 131
The Stone Forts 150
Other Late Woodland Complexes 153
Terminal Late Woodland Complexes ]
Overview of Late Woodland 167
6.
Mississippian 169
MissiSSippian Culture 169
Mississippian in the Lower Ohio: Kincaid and Angel 178
Other Related Complexes 247
MissiSSippian Overview 251
7.
Late Mississippian and Historic 253
Depopulation 253
Carborn-Welborn Phase 255
Fort Ancient and Oneota 259
Historic Indians in the Lower Ohio 262
The Europeans 265
Conclusions 271
References 273
Index 297
Preface
The Ohio River Valley is at the center of eastern North America, forming a natural
boundary between the Northeast and the SoutheasL As a boundary area,
unfortunately, it has not received much attention in its o\vn right in discussions
of the history and prehistory of the eastern United States. The elaborate mound
building cultures of the upper Ohio River Valley were, of course, often described
in the earliest days of American archaeology, The archaeology of the lower portion
of the same river valley remains less known, even to people living in the region.
'{et the area was occupied as long as any other area in the East, and it had its own
mound building tradition of considerable scale and interest. The archaeology of
the region also played an important part in the definition of many widely used
archaeological methods and concepts. This book provides the only available
synthesis for this region that takes into account the considerable amount of
archaeological research done since World War II. The origins of this book lie, in
part, in the almost twenty-year-Iong archaeological research program undertaken
by the author and his colleagues at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale,
This volume describes the archaeology of the region from the confluence of
the Ohio River with the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois, to the Falls of the Ohio
River at Louisville, Kentucky. Although this archaeological region holds together
culturally better at some times than at others, there is sufficient continuity to justify
its being treated as a region. The approach taken is temporal and regional. The
chapters each treat different periods of development beginning with the first human
settlement before 10,000 B.C. and continuing up to the time of early European
intrusions into the region, Within each chapter, different localities are described
and suggestions are made about how these fir into an overall explanation of cultural
development. The explanatory framework is primarily ecological, with a strong
emphasis on population growth and adaptation, Of course, population "pressure"
is an entirely relative matter-what may be a population level creating stress at
one level of technology may be underpopulation given other productive or
distributive systems. No claim is made that these variables account completely for
the changes and developments in the lower Ohio River VaHey, but they do provide
a consistent and explanatory viewpoint from which to assess the need for other
causal factOrs in explaining cultural evolution in this region,
ix