Webb's Two Views of Adena Settlement

Figure 6: The Paired Post Circle in it's Isolated Location, The Crigler Mound

Combining mounds, circles, ceremonial circles, and large earthworks, Webb's legacy contained an unresolved tension between two interpretations of Adena settlement which has gone largely unnoticed by the casual reader of Adena archaeology or exploited by those with a particular view of Adena development. In an informal sense, his thinking polarized around two views which might be called the C and O and the Elkhom settlement patterns after the respective sites which he excavated and which appear to have influenced his thinking.

At the C and O locale in Johnson County, which is situated beside the rails of the Big Sandy Subdivision of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, Webb (1942) excavated two mounds located 1600 feet apart on the floodplain of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. Both had been built over a series of circular paired post patterns. He saw evidence for Adena residential dispersion in mound spacing along the river floodplain, with circular houses set apart from each other, each followed by a burial mound superimposed over the post circles and representing the mortuary activity of the small, local group (Webb and Snow 1945:312). In effect, Webb incorporated the details of his Morgan Stone house reconstruction in a dispersed residential pattern with the burial mound as focus of the domestic unit.

Expanding his interpretation of Morgan Stone, the mounds represented the graves of important local persons. Lesser individuals in these local hamlets were cremated and disposed of in the village.

His interpretation, which I will call the C and O pattem, has had an important and lingering impact on subsequent archaeological discussion. At one level it has been the basis for a genre of artistic reconstructions such as that in Meyer-Oakes' Prehistory of the Upper Ohio Valley (19SS: Fig. 4), an early and simple example. Dragoo's later reconstruction of the Cresap Mound (1963: Fig. 3) represents another conception, one in which the size of the mound has been markedly increased, and, given the size of the mound, there has been a predictable escalation of ritual activity by the funeral parties. Secondly, the C and O pattern has continued to fuel the related belief, held by many archaeologists, that the villages are still there, somewhere around the mound. The corollary to this second point is if archaeologists would only look for them and eschew their fascination for the mounds and the contents of their graves for the mundane reality of domestic precincts, they would find nearby villages. Modern mound excavation specifically addressing this question (e.g. Niquette et. al. 1988) has yet to reveal these hypothetical villages.

In any event, at a slightly later date in his archaeological career the Crigler mound and its ambiguous sub-mound circle clearly led Webb in a different interpretive direction, to what I would call the Elkhorn pattem. It is an excellent example of how Webb failed to carry through and resolve conflicting insights with a final synthesis. Instead it left the question to be solved by his unresponsive Adena trait list (Webb and Snow 1945).

As he interpreted it (Webb 1943b), the Crigler post circle was the exception to his Adena house reconstruction. As such, it also casts doubt on the validity of the dispersed C and O pattem of Adena settlement.

Webb's interpretation of Crigler viewed both mounds and post circles as isolated ritual structures linked to isolated ritual, perhaps mortuary events. It is this reconstruction which seems most valid today and it has been Seaman (1986) who has most precisely redefined the function of these isolated precincts with his suggestion that the post circles were mortuary camps, not domestic houses.

In contrast, for Webb, there was, finally, his vision of Adena settlement as wrapped up in his Adena trait #1. In a sense this interpretation backed away from Crigler and returned to C and O "with a vengeance". In his 1945 summary volume with Snow, under the heading of trait #1 and without extensive elaboration on his part, Webb presented the North Elkhom complex of sites as the Adena settlement pattern in microcosm. All were made parts of one site l5Fal.² The mounds were the cemeteries, the ceremonial circles were the ritual centers in which, following Morgan and analogy to Southwestern kivas, kinship rituals were conducted, and Peter (together with nearby Grimes) was the "setdement." Perhaps his most extensive discussion of the settlement complex was put forth in his discussion of Adena trait #l "Large Earthworks Associated with other Adena Manifestations" (Webb and Snow 1945:29-30). In his summary, Webb concluded:

A typical group, but by no means one of the largest, is the Mt. Horeb site, Fayette Counq, Kentudcy... Here a large eaxthwollc which encloses a small Adena visage, has another Adena visage in the general vicinity, and in the immediate neighborhood are two Adena burial mounds, and two Sacred circles one of which has been proven by excavation to have been built by Adena. Such groups of related structures pointing to an extensive Adena community usually are found in the vicinity of a fairly large stream; often located on its high bank or on the hid crests overlooking the valley.

The Achilles heel of the ELkhom pattern as representing any sort of cultural reality is Peter Village. Because of recent, limited excavation (Clay 1984, 1985, 1988b), we know somewhat more about the site than did Webb. Although I am far from certain what the finalinterpretation of that large enclosure will be, several points are critical.

First, the features which defined it as an enclosure--its stockade, followed in time by a ditch and interior bank (Clay 1984, 1987) --are very early and preceded much of what we recognize now as Adena (i.e., pre-2S0 B.C.). Furthermore, the record of the filled ditch stratigraphy suggests that the Adena period of use of the enclosure was probably quite short (1988a:110). Finally the activities at the site, as they are known, revolve around enclosure construction and the acquisition and manufacture of artifacts from barite and galena. Prodded by observant colleagues, I hesitate to can Peter a "village" any more. At the same time, for various reasons (Clay 1987), I see Peter as less "ritual" than the nearby Mt. Horeb ceremonial circle.

The Peter endosure is best summarized today as a large, special activity site preceding the buSc of Ohio Valley Adena in time but sporadically used at a later date by Adena artisans. It had scattered parallels in the Ohio Valley in areas where there are concentrations of Adena sites. Although it is probable that not an were involved with barite or galena exploitation and perhaps trade, they could have been involved with an early levd of general interregional exchange.

Peter, however, is only the most glaring "problem" with the EUchom Complex. In addition, until proven other vise by absolute dating, the other elements of the complex (mounds and ceremonial circles) are best considered coincidental neighbors over the years, neither contemporaneous nor organically linked in a functioning settlement system. The attraction for all through the years may have been the mineral ores, but this stiU does not give them any historical unity.

Others have found justification for their own views of settlement development, without the luxury of any additional data, in Webb's inability or unwillingness to reconcile his C and O and Elkhom patterns. For example, it was primarily Dragoo (1964:6-7) who suggested that what he caked the "Elkhom Complex" was late, reflecting a developing tendency for Adena earthworks, drarnaticaUy manifest in late Adena, to occur in clusters together with large nucleated villages. This developmental interpretation has been used by others (e.g. Shryock 1987), who have been driven principally by preconceptions about social evolution, to argue for a significant change in settlement pattern through time in Adena due to a supposedly increasingly effective agricultural economy which cannot be documented.

Such views are probably wrong. There is currently no evidence from mortuary Adena for nucleation of domestic Adena through time. Increasing complexity of mortuary shes may have occurred, which is a comment on increasing social complexity in the Ohio Valleys and will be discussed below, but it is not evidence for the nucleation of population aided or abetted by an agricultural economy.

In one sense Webb's characterization of the C and O pattern was perhaps more accurate, Adena domestic sites clearly were scattered. However, this view was based on the nowinappropriate interpretation of post circles as domestic houses. More accurately, rather than indicating the scattered nature of Adena houses, these sub-mound structures indicate the scattered, and often isolated nature of the paired post mortuary camps; the C and O case is simply another example of the Crigler case, with its considerable complexity due to the use of the C and O locality over an extended period of time.

However one looks at Webb's dilemma, considering the sites he excavated, he never dealt with domestic contexts and the evidence from what were ritual sites cannot be simply massaged into an approximation of the domestic world. That world is being revealed by ongoing fieldwork and, even in the absence of an abundance of data, we can begin to suggest a model of domestic Adena which does not derive simply by implication from the mortuary sites.

Fieldwork over the past twenty years has consistently provided information from non mortuary contexts (Fischer 1974, Shane 1975, Black 1967, Bush 1975, Carskadden and Gregg 1974, Grantz 1986, Niquette et al. 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, Niquette, Boedy and Fritz 1987). These data fit neither of Webb's settlement reconstructions nor the developmental schemes (Dragoo 1963, 1964) derived from them (infra Clay 1991). When they are added to the reinterpretation of submound habitation levels (including their circular structures) as ritual areas associated with mortuary events (Seeman 1986, Clay 1986, Clay and Niquette 1989), it becomes evident that there was a spatial dislocation in Adena between domestic sites and burial mounds. In most cases the ritual sites were located well apart from domestic sites, although they were often clustered with other mounds and mortuary areas (Niquette et al.1988).

In contrast to the mounds, the poorly-known non-mortuary archaeology of Adena suggests an egalitarian, non-nucleated, relatively low-energy hunting-gathering and horticultural society that made only a minimal investment in domestic site facilities and pemmanent shelter. Collectively, the present data suggest small, relatively autonomous and dispersed social groups. There is little evidence to support elaborate status differentiation within or among groups.

What we know about settlement pattern for the Ohio Valley suggests a continuation of an economic adaptation with roots in the Archaic Period into the Early and Middle Woodland periods. Human settlement progressively adapted through the Archaic to a rich eastern United States deciduous forest in which natural resources were dispersed. Horticulture possibly became an dement of this adaptation by 2000 B.C. with the domestication of squash, then native weeds, but did not become the dominant source of food until the end of the Woodland Period with the appearance of corn (Wymer 1986). Pre-agricultural societies made use of resources through mapping-on to them in space and moving between theme supplementing this semi-sedentary strategy with logistic forays as needed (Binford 1980). The legacy of the Archaic Period, which was passed on to the Woodland Period, was human dispersion and settlement diversity despite developing horticulture.

David Brose has suggested that, under conditions of increasing population density in the Late Archaic and the Early Woodland, and in the absence of dramatic change in subsistence, "cultural ecological stability without population reduction...was possible..."only where there [was] a potential to utilize resource procurement zones beyond those of the immediate corporate group territory" (Brose 1979: 7; emphasis added). Following Brose, it is suggested that cooperative mortuary ritual in Adena, expressed in a ritual landscape (through mounds, post circles, and ceremonial circles), reflects the tendency for dispersed social groups in the time period circa 400 B.C.- A.D. 1 to buffer themselves against local shortages in goods within a larger social environment that is becoming more densely populated and socially intensified. Through alliances, patterns of either potential economic reciprocity or simply resource sharing were established and maintained, cemented and expressed in the exchange of marriage partners between exogamous groups.

In this view, Adena ritual sites were used by allied groups, not an isolated local group. The complex mortuaty process, preparation of the dead, grave-side feasting (Clay 1983), and the construction of graves in accretional mounds, represented allied groups "working out" through mortuary ritual the economic consequences of the death of kin. The end results (i.e. the burials) represented most directly the products of negotiations between groups with potentially conflicting interests in control of the dead. The ritual sites themselves represented compromise locations which split the spatial-social distance between allied local groups. The burials, with their variable outcomes, reflected compromise ritual events expressive of the divided control of the dead between competing claims. The grave goods represented items of exchange, perhaps balancing the exchange of goods or services and preserving symmetry in reciprocity between exchanging groups. Importantly, task groups (most directly funeral parties) moved back and forth between mounds and domestic sites linking the two, but the activities in the two "arenas" remained largely distinct.

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2. The records subsequendy were changed in the Office of State Archaeology.