America Before the European Invasions Alice Beck Kehoe
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America Before the European Invasions Alice Beck Kehoe Longman History of America AMERICA BEFORE THE EUROPEAN INVASIONS Longman History of United States The New Republic, 1st edition Reginald Horsman America before the European Invasions, 1st edition Alice Beck Kehoe AMERICA BEFORE THE EUROPEAN INVASIONS Alice Beck Kehoe First published 2002 by Pe,uson Education Limitcd Publishcd 2013 by Routlcdgc 2 Park Square, ;\lilton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4R:-J 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Roullcdge is an impri11l o/'ll1c Ii1ylor 6 franäs Gmup. an infimna lwsincss © Alice Beck Kehoe, 2002 The righ1 of Alicc Beck Kchoc to be identified as Author of this \Vork has been asserted by her in accordance with thc Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 19R8. All rights rcserved. No part of this book may Iw reprinted or reprodw:ed or utilised in any form or by any clcctronic, mcchanical. or othcr mcans. now known or hcrcaftcr in vcntcd, induding photocopying and rccording. or in any information storagc or rc trieval system, without pennissinn in writing from the publishcrs. Noticcs Knowlcdgc ;md bcst practicc in this ridd arc constantly changing. As ncw rcscarch and experience bmaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary. Practitioncrs and rcscarchcrs must always rdy on thcir own cxperknce and knowkdgc in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments dc scrilwd herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful oftheir own safcty and thc safcty of others. including parlies for whom thcy have a profcs sional responsibility. To the fullest exknt of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, .:ontributors, or cditors, assmnc any liability for any injury ;md/or damagc to pcrsons or property as a matter of products liability, ncgligcncc or othcrwisc, or from any usc or opcration of any methods, products, instru.:tions, or ideas contained in the material herein. ISB!'\ 13: 978-0-582-41486-0 (pbk) Brilish Ubrmy Cataloguing in l'ubliralion Data A CIP catalogue record for this book can bc obtained from th<~ British Libral)' Li/mn)' of Congre.~.> CaltJÜJf.,'Uing in Pubtimtion Dala A CIP catalogue rccord for this book can be obtaincd from thc Librar)' of Congress Typt·sd in 10.5/ l2.5pt Baskel'illc by Graphieraft I.imited, Houg Kong CONTENTS List of Illustrations Vl Acknowledgments Vll Introduction: History without Documents 1 I. First Americans 8 2. The Archaic Period: 7000-1000 BeE 23 3. Nuclear America 42 4. Early Woodland, 1000-100 Be 56 5. Middle Woodland, 100 Be-AD 400 66 6. The West Coast 80 7. Alaska 101 8. The Interior West 118 9. The American Southwest 138 10. The Mississippian Period, AD 950-1600 163 II. Late Woodland, to AD 1600 192 12. Overview: the United States, 1600 212 13. Issues and Puzzles 232 Index 255 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Illustrations Figure 1 Poverty Point 36 Figure 2 Hopewell Earthworks, Marietta, Ohio 65 Figure 3 Hopewell Earthwork, Newark, Ohio 69 Figure 4 Chaco Canyon: Chetro Ked pueblo 137 Figure 5 Chetro Ked pueblo, AD 1100 145 Figure 6 Cahokia, AD 1100 163 Figure 7 Etowah Mississippian Site, Georgia 179 Maps Map 1 North America, showing Paleoindian sites and sites in Alaska (Chapter 7) 8 Map 2 Eastern United States 23 Map 3 West Coast 79 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Reginald Horsman, my neighbor and colleague, persuaded Series Editor Mark White that American history did not begin in 1492, and suggested he commission me to write the volume on America before the European invasions. It is a privilege and pleasure to merge archaeology and history in this manner, adding another dimension to the "New History" Professor White brings to this series. Anglo-American connections in the writing of pre-Columbian American history go back a century and a half, to Scottish immigrant Daniel Wilson whose 1862 Prehistoric Man drew substantially on American archaeology to layout, for the first time in a general work, a science of prehistory. Wilson quoted from Thomas Carlyle's comment on the novelist Walter Scott, that he would teach all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught - that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men (quoted in Kehoe 1998: 4*). This book endeavors to follow in the path Daniel Wilson blazed. The assistance of Longman editor Heather McCallum and her staff, the helpful review of the manuscript by Guy Gibbon, and the illustrations by Anne Chojnacki are gratefully acknowledged. Alice Kehoe Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2002 *Kehoe, Alice Beck (1998), The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology. New York: Routledge. viii AMERICA BEFORE THE EUROPEAN INVASIONS The publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Extract from Bahr, Donald, Juan Smith, William Smith Allison, Julian Hayden (1994) The Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth: The Hohokam Chronicles. Berkeley: University of California Press; extract from Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders by Julie Cruikshank in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 1990 by the University of Nebraska Press; extract from Sandstrom, Alan R. (1991) Corn Is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Used by permission; extract from 'In vain I tried to tell you' Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics by Dell Hymes. Copyright © 1981 by Dell Hymes. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press; extract from Cultures in Contact edited by William W. Fitzhugh; copyright © 1985 by the Smithsonian Institution. Used by permis sion of the publisher. INTRODUCTION: HISTORY WITHOUT DOCUMENTS It has been conventional to treat American history as if it were identical with United States history. Such a myopic view cuts students off from the context in which the United States developed, a larger history that will not go away. America's history begins some fourteen thousand years ago with evidence of human activities discovered through archaeology. Even the early humans affected the American scene. Invading Europeans met no wilderness, but landscapes and resources rendered through millennia of human actions. Conventional histories of Europeans and their overseas descend ants depend upon written documents, some the primary texts of eyewitness accounts and business instruments, some descriptions and reflections written later. Participants' names, statuses, calendar or dynastic dates, and place names frequently anchor the documents in time, space, and event. Archaeological evidence, in contrast, seldom provides participants' names, may only hint at social statuses, indicates only general time periods rather than calendar dates, and locates its human actions only to the site itself, without clear signs to their makers' political and economic affiliations. On the face of it, documentary evidence would seem to tell much more than archae ological data; on the other hand, mute archaeological data don't deliberately mislead readers. Ideally, documentary historians and archaeologists work together, written texts fleshing out the archae ological ruins and remnants and the archaeology providing checks upon the text claims, for example on whether a household was wealthy or poor. For America before the European invasions of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries, only the Maya kingdoms of eastern Mexico and Central America provide written texts to com plement archaeological data. This book, limited to United States territory, must draw upon archaeological data alone. 2 AMERICA BEFORE THE EUROPEAN INVASIONS Evidence from archaeology is the material residue from human actions. Human behavior that leaves no permanent physical effect, such as speech and gestures, vanishes out of history. The archae ological record therefore is biased toward material culture, the struc tures and objects made by people. Material culture is winnowed by decay, soft organic materials generally disappearing soon after discard with only hard inorganic materials remaining. For this reason, archae ologists spend inordinate amounts of time studying stone and fired clay objects, simply because not much else of material culture will be left in the ground. Kitchens, with their hard inorganic knives and choppers, pots, and hearths, are over-represented in archaeolo gical records, while places of song, dance, laughter and love under indicated. This history of America before the European invasions has almost no politics, but then the other volumes in this series don't tell you much about kitchens, or even what most people were usually eating. An archaeological history may seem unconventional, yet the human actions it records were quite literally absolutely vital. The Data of Archaeology American archaeologists do not, as a rule, work with standing ruins. (The dry Southwest is an exception.) A project begins with a survey of the locale, walking over it looking at the ground for bits of artifacts (any human-made object) and signs that the landscape had been disturbed by human activity. The archaeologist will be at the locale because a local resident or construction workers reported artifacts, or because examination is mandated by laws requiring cultural her itage to be searched for and preserved before construction destroys a locale, or - least often - because the locale promises to yield data that may solve a question of history. "Problem-orientated," "pure science" projects are what archaeologists wish for but have difficulty raising funds for, while cultural-resource-management projects mandated by heritage protection laws have funds built in the budgets of commercial and public-sector construction. These projects thus greatly outnumber "pure science" problem-orientated archaeology, and also another type of project, the public-participation projects run by Department of Interior agencies and non-profit research groups. Before the 1960s, the picture was reversed, as up until then, heritage-protection laws were weak and limited.