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Incorporates experimental archaeology to understand the food-caching strategies led by Indigenous women in Late Woodland Michigan.

This experimental archaeology book centers on the decision of Indigenous women in Michigan’s Late Woodland to store food in cache pits for later use, to ensure a stable food supply. These food storage techniques were efforts to increase communal chances of survival in direct responses to sociopolitical changes. Kathryn M. Frederick highlights the importance of food storage in these communities and the decision-making and behaviors behind it.

To discover why food storage became a popular practice at that period, Frederick considered the efficacy of subterranean food storage and constructed experiments to understand the timing and use of cache pits and to test their reliability and efficiency. She also compiled ethnographic data on location, environmental conditions, movement strategies, and types of foodstuffs stored for dozens of hunter-gatherer groups. Two distinct patterns of food storage emerged: “reliant” and “redundant.” Frederick argues that the Indigenous women utilized a system of reliant storage during times of abundance but could switch to a redundant system as the socioeconomic climate shifted. This book will interest a wide swath of archaeologists and others interested in Indigenous foodways and women’s key roles.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

Presents archaeological data to explore the concept of glocalization as applied in the Hopewell world

Originally coined in the context of twentieth-century business affairs, the term glocalization describes how the global circulation of products, services, or ideas requires accommodations to local conditions, and, in turn, how local conditions can significantly impact global markets and relationships. Garden Creek: The Archaeology of Interaction in Middle Woodland Appalachia presents glocalization as a concept that can help explain the dynamics of cross-cultural interaction not only in the present but also in the deep past.

Alice P. Wright uses the concept of glocalization as a framework for understanding the mutual contributions of large-scale and small-scale processes to prehistoric transformations. Using geophysical surveys, excavations, and artifact analysis, Wright shows how Middle Woodland cultural contact wrought changes in religious practices, such as mound building and the crafting of ritual objects for exchange or pilgrimage.

Wright presents and interprets original archaeological data from the Garden Creek site in western North Carolina as part of a larger study of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere, a well-known but poorly understood episode of cross-cultural interaction that linked communities across eastern North America during the Middle Woodland period. Although Hopewellian culture contact did not encompass the entire planet, it may have been “global” to those who experienced and created it, as it subsumed much of the world as Middle Woodland people knew it. Reimagining Hopewell as an episode of glocalization more fully accounts for the diverse communities, interests, and processes involved in this “global” network.

 

This monograph offers the first major synthesis of the Meadowood phenomenon, one of the earliest and largest interaction spheres in northeastern North America. This volume breathes new life into our understanding of the Early Woodland phenomenon (3000–2400 BP).

This book assesses Woodland Period interactions using technofunctional, mineralogical, and chemical data derived from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped sherds whose provenience is fully documented from both mortuary mounds and village middens along the Atlantic coast. Together, these data demonstrate formal and functional differences between mortuary and village assemblages along with the nearly exclusive occurrence of foreign-made cooking pots in mortuary contexts. The Swift Creek Gift provides insight into the unique workings of gift exchanges to transform seemingly mundane materials like cooking pots into powerful tools of commemoration, affiliation, and ownership.

Revealing how the dead continued to shape the spiritual and social worlds of prehistoric North America.

Transforming the Dead is a collection of essays that examines culturally modified human bones and their roles as “cultural and ritual objects” among prehistoric Eastern Woodland cultures. Previous scholarship has explored the role of human body parts in Native American cultures as trophies of war and revered ancestors. This collection discusses new evidence that human elements were also important components of daily and ritual activities across the Eastern Woodlands. The contributors to this volume discuss each case study within the unique regional and temporal contexts of the material, rather than seeking universal answers to how these objects were used.
 
Most research addressing modified human bone has focused on cut marks and trauma associated with warfare, trophy taking, and burial practices. The editors and contributors of Transforming the Dead document the varied and often overlooked ways that human bone was intentionally modified through drilling, incising, cutting, and polishing for utilitarian, ornamental, spiritual, or ritual use. Examples include bracelets and gorgets to be worn, as well as musical rasps, pipe stems, masks, and protective talismans. The form and function of these objects are not unusual; their construction from the remains of “another” sets them apart.
 
Through a flexible but systematic analysis of the archaeological record, the contributors bring into focus how the careful selection, modification, and retention of particular bones or body parts of an individual after death offer insights into concepts of personhood, the body, life, and death among the prehistoric Native Americans in the Midwest.

 

This volume contains the analysis of two prehistoric sites in Gratiot County, Michigan. The author presents a description of the features and artifacts from both sites and discusses the possible cultural affiliation of the sites, which he dates to the Terminal Archaic/Early Woodland.