Christopher T. Hays
2010
Adena Mortuary Patters in Central Ohio. Southeastern
Archaeology. 29:106-120
This article's whole purpose is to examine how the Adena
mortuary program was practiced in the Upper Scioto Valley in central Ohio. Why
is this important? Well, in contrast to the Upper Scioto Valley, the rituals in
the Columbus area were highly variable in their treatment and placement of the
bodies and artifacts. The point of the paper is to find out why. Hays defines
Adena broadly as a generalized mortuary program that was centered in the Ohio
Valley during the Early and Middle Woodland period. He considers Adena to be a large number of interacting societies
that drew upon a common repertoire of mortuary practices, symbols, and ideas.
He does not belief that a specific region practiced an ideal set of these
rituals that other regions copied or changed, but that it instead is simply a
general set of beliefs, practices, and symbols. He suggest that Adena has no
artifact types or mortuary patterns that are unique or always present at
burials.
Ritual
is one of the more conservative aspects of culture since its message is usually
very general and adaptable to a great variety of specific events and social
circumstances. Mortuary ritual is designed precisely to transform death, which
is often an irregular capricious even that threatens the stability of the
community, into a controlled and standardized event that affirms the stability
of the community and the social order. Ritual derives much of its power and
efficacy from the stability in its form. The unchanging and repetitive quality
of ritual makes its message seem beyond discussion, beyond question, and
incontrovertible. Yet, rituals are variable. Why? One reason for this is that
in many small scale traditional societies rituals and beliefs are usually
controlled by a few leaders. These leaders will maintain the broad structure of
the rites taught to them, but add variations and innovations to them. A second
reason is that rituals and beliefs inevitably change with the passage of time.
Ritual is inclined toward both stability and variability by the very
constitution of its form.
The
Alum Lake area had five small mounds and two small residential sites. white the
use of the ritual space varied a bit, the contents of the mounds were very
consistent in many regards. Four of the five mounds contained post molds in the
submound floor. Two of the mounds had post molds that outline circular to ovoid
structures, whereas the post molds in other mounds were more scattered and
appear to outline only small windbreaks or scaffolding. The base of all five
mounds were ovoid to rectangular pit features that probably were used in mortuary
processing. The pits were empty or held very few artifacts and fragments of
human bone. The mounds also contained lots of burnt earth and charcoal.
The
mounds held no formal burials. The human remains consisted of cremated bone
that was scattered throughout the mound with the occasional fragment. The flesh
had completely rotted off the corpse before the bones were cremated. Artifacts
found in the mounds, were scattered. They included chipped stone tools,
debitage, ceramics, and a few ceremonial items. The mound sites were used only
a single time for this ritual.
The
mortuary patterns in the four Columbus sites are rather different from those in
the Alum Lake area. These four mounds,
unlike the Alum mounds, are very diverse. However, there are a few common
elements. Three of the mounds were medium to large accretional mounds that were
built in several different stages. These same mounds were used primarily as
final burial grounds and cemeteries rather than as mortuary processing sites.
The rituals were conducted in single cycle. This process was repeated up to six
times at these sides, with each adding a new level to the mound. In all four,
the corpses were extended and most likely fully fleshed when they were placed
there. However, cremations, flexed burials, and bundle burials. All four sites
contained points, ceramics, tubular pipes, and gorgets. Three contained stone
hemisphere. That is the end of their
shared patterns. While one mound had 81 sherds, another only had only five. In
the same mound that had five sherds, the artifacts were complete and either
found in a feature or with a burial. In a differed mound, all the artifacts
were broken and in the mound fill. In one mound there was sixteen burials, with
all but one located in two large and shallow pits below the mound floor. The
last was at the top. At another mound, this pattern was reversed. This mound
had thirty leaf-shape blades, and the previous had none. Another mound had
eight log tombs, but the others did not.
Both
the Alum and Columbus sites had few common factors, such as similar artifacts,
a complete separation of the mortuary and living sites, and every mound had at
least some type of ceremonial item. The only item found at all of these sites
was the gorget. However, the type varied. Why does any of this even matter?
Well, this all suggests that the people living in these two areas of the valley
had some basic set of practices and beliefs that they both shared. Despite
this, the areas developed their own very distinct mortuary ritual patterns.
James A. Tuck
1978
Regional Cultural Development, 3000 to 300 B.C.
Handbook of North American Indians. 15:28-43
While the article discussed a variety of things other than
that which pertains to burials, it does put forth a nice supply of information
on them as well. The main focus of the paper though, is how whole cultural
traditions does not mean considering only one or two aspects of a given
technology, or for that matter even an entire technology. Rather it means
combining the study of technology with what can be inferred about subsistence
and settlement patters, art, aesthetics, religion, and whatever other cultural
data have been recovered by archaeologists. This, in and of itself is important
to keep in one's head. The article also elaborates in detail about all of the
aforementioned parts of cultural traditions. Why is this important? The answer
is, to understand a culture, you must understand more than just their
projectile points.
In the
Mixed Prairie-Hardwood there were
burials from the Illinois-Missouri area that produced bannerstones or atlalt
weights. The culture that this was found in was the Riverton culture, which
held a mixture of Midwestern and Southern tradition with litihic tradition from
the east. In the Great Lakes Forest Archaic there is evidence of the use of red
ocher in ceremonial contexts, or, perhaps even as body paint. In the Maritime Area, the culture was more
oriented toward the sea, as the name would suggest. There were magical or
decorative objects such as concretions and quartz pebbles, red ocher, and the
general pattern of burial ceremonialism present. There was the lavish use of red
ocher in both the utilitarian and esoteric grave offerings, which were often in
great quantities. Possibly, orientation toward the east might be an early
manifestation of the "basic core religiosity" found throughout the
Northeast. However, there is no relationship between the Maritime Archaic
people and the later Algonquians.
In the Susquehanna
tradition sites, there is use of red and yellow ocher in the burial rituals
which would hint at the use of it in daily life. Burials pertaining to one
culture in the Late Archaic-Early Woodland period are red-ocher-covered burials
and have "sand-sole" shell gorget, copper adzes, round and
rectangular shell gorgets, discoidal shell beads, galena nodules, and copper
awls showing up as grave goods. The whole reason that grave goods are an
important thing to note, is the fact that sometimes, that's all there is to go
off of. In one of the location previously mentioned, the only thing that was
available were cemeteries, otherwise there was no other evidence of day-to-day
living in that particular area. Artifact
complexes associated with burials from sites in the Upper Great Lakes have thin
bifacial blades, knives, end scrapers and stemmed points, conoidal-based
ceramic vessels and cigar-shaped smoking pipes; bone awls, at least one bone
harpoon, antler flakers; a fish net and net sinkers, occasional copper
implements, gorgets, "birdstones," and other exotic objects.
It is easy to see that there was a special
treatment of the dead, as the article also states. The Hopewell and Adena
'cultures' both have distinctive traits but have a similar set of underlying
beliefs. These two cultures tie in to
the Northeastern burial cult. Extended burials from Allumette and Morrison's
islands in easter Ontario show use of red ocher, often to sprinkle over the
burials, as well as various grave goods that were mostly utilitarian in nature.
These included side-notched porjectile points, scrapers, gouges, adzes,
whetstones, two ground slate points, copper points, bone harpoons, needles, and
awls. There were also thousands of copper beads and several bracelets that show
evidence for personal adornment. While not all the objects are entirely
mortuary offerings, the objects and the use of red ocher foretell of the
expression of this ceremonialism.
In the
Maritime Archaic tradition, there were flexed or burial bundles which were
often located on high, east-facing hills or bluffs, lavishly covered with red
ocher and containing tools, weapons, ornaments, charms, amulets, and medicine
bundles. The graves of newborn infants were richly accoutered, which suggests
that the items found in burials are no all personal belongings. Burials also
contained ground slate spears and bayonets that were exclusively grave goods.
Most of the objects are often found broken, mostly on purpose. Why? Probably to
release the spirit of the artifact.
The
article concludes all of this the best. Consistently recurring and
ever-elaborating elements of mortuary ritualism-red-ocher-covered burials accompanied
by numerous artifacts, often ritually killed to ensure the well-being of the
deceased in the after-life demonstrate perhaps the only real unifying factor
among the otherwise varied cultural manifestations of the Northeast.
I see connections between your article about regional cultural development and my article about the faunal remains from the Cater Creek site. This site is of interest because it is a "pioneer" site; that is, it was established by a group that moved out of a riverine environment into an upland location. My article examines the evidence from Carter Creek in an effort to put to rest two different hypotheses. The first, proposed by Green, predicts that early Late Woodland groups who moved from riverine areas into uplands would continue to focus on riverine resources. The other hypothesis, proposed by Styles, claims that the geography around the settlement would dictate which fauna were utilized. In other words, there is a debate over whether early "pioneer" groups would rely more on tradition or on their new habitat for subsistence. In the end, the author concluded that both theories are correct; the people from Carter Creek did rely heavily on aquatic resources, but they were local resources that would not have been found in their original riverine location.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that burials and ceremonial complexes follow these two theories as well. Groups such as the Adena and Hopewell have similar beliefs but also have distinctive traits. These differential traits, such as differences in burial goods, could be a product of the environment in which the people are living. For instance, the groups from Allumette and Morrison's islands in eastern Ontario use red ocher in their burials but other groups do not. This is most likely because other groups did not have access to red ocher, not because there was some fundamental religious difference related to the use of red ocher. I suspect that quite a few of the differences we see in religious artifacts/ceremonial items stems from differences in regional location.
Reference Cited:
Holt, Julie Zimmermann.
2005 Animal Remains from the Carter Creek Site: Late Woodland Adaptive Strategies in the Upland Frontier of West Central Illinois. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 30: 37-65.
In my study of non-projectile lithics in the Woodlands, one of the articles I read was about ceremonial picks discovered at burial sites (Halsey 1984). While the exact purpose (i.e., if the picks were actually ceremonial) was unclear, the article did postulate that the picks were tools of a warrior, and were therefore buried with the warrior when he died. It’s interesting to consider the exact implications of such tools found at burial sites, especially considering that, according to your second article, the brunt of the discovered artifacts are tools, which were broken to release the spirit of the artifact. It would be interesting to consider such types of objects found as potentially being related to the deceased’s specialty, such as the pick with the warrior, rather than being considered simply ceremonial, since they seem to carry such significance for being rather straight-forward tools.
ReplyDeleteHalsey, John R.
1984 The Ceremonial Pick: A Consideration of Its Place in Eastern Woodlands Prehistory. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 9(1):43-62.