War Paths, Peace Paths Issues in Eastern Woodlands Archaeology Editors: Thomas E. Emerson and Timothy Pauketat SERIES DESCRIPTION: Issues in Eastern Woodlands Archaeology empha- sizes new research results and innovative theoretical approaches to the ar- chaeology of the pre-Columbian native and early colonial inhabitants of North America east of the Mississippi River Valley. The editors are especially seeking contributors who are interested in addressing/questioning such con- cepts as historical process, agency, traditions, political economy, materiality, ethnicity, and landscapes through the medium of Eastern Woodlands ar- chaeology. Such contributions may take as their focus a specific theoretical or regional case study but should cast it in broader comparative or historical terms. Scholars interested in contributing to this series are encouraged to contact Thomas Emerson, ITARP-Anthropology, 23 East Stadium Drive, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL 61820; [email protected]. BOOKS IN THIS SERIES Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions by Timothy R. Pauketat In Contact: Bodies and Spaces in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Eastern Woodlands by Diana DiPaolo Loren War Paths, Peace Paths: An Archaeology of Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America by David H. Dye War Paths, Peace Paths An Archaeology of Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America David H. Dye A Division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK ALTAMIRA PRESS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 www.altamirapress.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by AltaMira Press 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. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Dye, David H. War paths, peace paths : an archaeology of cooperation and conflict in native eastern North America / David H. Dye. p. cm. — (Issues in Eastern Woodlands archaeology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7591-0745-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7591-0745-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7591-0746-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7591-0746-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) eISBN-13: 978-0-7591-1312-1 eISBN-10: 0-7591-1312-2 1. Woodland Indians—Warfare. 2. Woodland Indians—History. 3. Diplomacy—East (U.S.)—History. 4. East (U.S.)—History. I. Title. E78.E2D94 2009 973.04'973—dc22 2008033902 Printed in the United States of America ϱ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. To the memory of the First Nation’s honored diplomats and courageous warriors: Deganawida (Mohawk) The Great Sun (Natchez) Wa-tse-mon-in (Osage) Powhatan (Powhatan) Tecumseh (Shawnee) f Contents List of Figures ix Foreword xi Preface xv Acknowledgments xix Chapter 1: Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America 1 Chapter 2: Archaeology and the Study of Violence and Cooperation 19 Sidebar: The Origin of War: Is War Making Integral to Our Ancestry?31 Chapter 3: Family-Level Foragers and the Resolution of Homicides 35 Sidebar: Paleoindian Foragers and Pleistocene Extinctions 36 Chapter 4: Complex Hunter-Gatherers and the Origin of Feuding 51 Sidebar: The Poverty Point Site and Complex Hunter-Gatherers 60 vii viii f Contents Chapter 5: The Rise of Agriculture and the Elaboration of Feuding 69 Sidebar: Shamans: Warriors and Diplomats 86 Chapter 6: Cooperation and Conflict in Late Woodland Societies 89 Sidebar: Hilltop Enclosures: Ritual or Defense? 91 Chapter 7: Cooperation and Conflict in the Northeast 105 Sidebar: Iroquois Ambassadors 117 Chapter 8: Cooperation and Conflict in the Upper Midwest 125 Sidebar: Matrilocal Warriors 134 Chapter 9: Cooperation and Conflict in the Lower Midwest and Southeast 141 Sidebar: Heroic Warriors 152 Chapter 10: The Paths of War and Peace in Eastern North America 167 References Cited 179 Index 207 About the Author 217 f List of Figures Figure 1.1 Cultural chronology of eastern North America 5 Figure 2.1 Map of eastern North America 23 Figure 2.2 Satellite image of eastern North America 24 Figure 3.1 Paleoindian hunters and gatherers, Tennessee, ca. 10,000 BC 39 Figure 3.2 Dalton symbolic weaponry 45 Figure 4.1 Archaic hunters and gatherers, Tennessee, ca. 5000 BC 52 Figure 4.2 Middle Archaic symbolic weaponry 55 Figure 4.3 Late Archaic symbolic weaponry 63 Figure 4.4 Poverty Point site, West Carroll Parish, Louisiana 66 Figure 5.1 Grave Creek Mound, Marshall Co., West Virginia 72 Figure 5.2 Birdstone, Floyd Co., Georgia 74 Figure 5.3 Middle Woodland village gardeners, Tennessee, ca. AD 300 77 Figure 5.4 Plan of Pinson Mounds, Madison Co., Tennessee 79 Figure 5.5 Saul’s Mound, Pinson Mounds, Madison Co., Tennessee 80 Figure 5.6 Three obsidian bifaces, AD 400, Hopewell site, Ross Co., Ohio 81 Figure 6.1 The Black Warrior at Picture Cave I, Missouri 96 Figure 6.2 Mound A, Toltec Mounds, Lonoke Co., Arkansas 100 Figure 7.1 Map of Iroquoian and Algonquian speakers 106 Figure 7.2 Community plan of Keffer Village, Ontario 109 Figure 7.3 Keffer Village, Ontario 112 ix x f List of Figures Figure 8.1 Map showing major regions with Oneota occupation 127 Figure 8.2 Bison scapula with engraved human image missing feet, hands, and head, Correctionville site, Woodbury Co., Iowa 129 Figure 8.3 Bird Man, New Albin Tablet, Allamakee Co., Iowa 138 Figure 9.1 Mississippian culture in eastern North America 142 Figure 9.2 Cahokia site, Madison and St. Clair Cos., Illinois 143 Figure 9.3 Monks Mound, Cahokia Mounds, Madison and St. Clair Cos., Illinois 144 Figure 9.4 Crownform mace, southeastern Kentucky 147 Figure 9.5 Theodor de Bry, after an original painting of 1564 by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, Outina’s Order of March, 1591 159 Figure 9.6 Theodor de Bry, after an original painting of 1564 by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, A Council of State, 1591 161 f Foreword Today’s globalizing world is rife with armed conflict of all sorts and scales. Warlords and war presidents use it, successful diplomats contain it, and ordi- nary people live in fear of it. We need to understand its causes, consequences, and remedies. Whatever or whoever causes it, violence—says author David H. Dye—is not a “linear process.” Rather, it pervades all aspects of social life and has long-term consequences that can only be understood in historical perspec- tive. The same is true of its antithesis, peace. The job of archaeologists, of course, is to provide that perspective. David H. Dye does this and more for pre-Columbian eastern North Amer- ica in the pages that follow. Eastern North America has one of the best- documented archaeological and ethnohistoric records in the world and, thanks to this book, researchers everywhere can begin to understand its com- plex historical relationship to war and peace. Surprisingly, few others precede him in this effort. Why no one else has written such a book as this might at first seem to strike one as odd. Surely, the ways in which people fought or made peace mattered as much in the past as they do today. One might think that ar- chaeologists long ago would have not only realized this, but would have devoted considerably more attention to understanding the history of violence and its resolution. Certainly, archaeologists often come upon evidence of inferred warfare—based on evidence of palisade walls, burned villages, and traumatic skeletal injuries. These lines of evidence aren’t xi xii f Foreword particularly ambiguous. So why is War Paths, Peace Paths the first book on the archaeology of indigenous conflict and cooperation in eastern North America? Part of the answer must have to do with what Lawrence Keeley, in 1996, said was archaeology’s tendency to “pacify” the past (see also LeBlanc 2003a). Violence and its resolution were rarely central in explanations of the past, save for evolutionary anthropological arguments about the rise of chief- doms and states. However, in North America, war and peace have not taken a front seat in explanations. The reasons for this are not simple, but lie in part in the lingering effects of an antiquated notion that Native Americans were “noble savages” free of the ills of Western civilization, of which organized conflict was one. Thus, finding a several-millennia-old Archaic-period individual who had been scalped—a practice thought by some to have been introduced by Euro- peans—was national news only decades ago. Likewise, the discovery of a several-centuries-old ditch filled with the skeletons of hundreds of massacred men, women, and children at Crow Creek, South Dakota, was met with dis- belief (and threats of violence) in the 1970s (Wiley and Emerson 1993). Perhaps the pacification of the past is also an unintentional by-product of archaeology’s stubborn empiricism. Some insist on finding the smoking gun or signed treaty in the grip of a skeletonized warrior or diplomat before they will entertain any inference concerning the existence of violence or peace making. For that reason, warfare until recently was the exclusive domain of specialists, usually bioarchaeologists, who could reliably identify evidence of traumatic injuries. As a result, violence has not been effectively integrated into big-picture explanations of the past. The study of warfare is not particularly well devel- oped or nuanced in theoretical terms.