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Community and Aggregation in the Upper Mississippi River Valley: The Red Wing Locality A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Edward Paul Fleming IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Guy E. Gibbon, Advisor June, 2009 © Edward Paul Fleming 2009 Acknowledgements I am indebted to many people who have helped me with this research over the past several years. This has been an intellectual journey and a major period of growth in my life. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Guy Gibbon, who encouraged me to join the PhD program in anthropology at the University of Minnesota and was invaluable in shaping my research and guiding me through the program in a timely manner. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee, Dr. Peter Wells, Dr. Gil Tostevin, and Dr. Rod Squires. I owe much of my thinking about material culture theory to a seminar on the subject to Dr. Tostevin and an excellent seminar he taught on the subject. That was perhaps the most influential course I have taken. I have benefited from the guidance of several mentors over the years. I thank especially my friends and colleagues, Dr. Ron Schirmer and Dr. George Holley. I could not have completed this without their help and encouragement. Much of this research is the product of many, many long conversations, and many, many occasions where I needed to be gently brought back to ground and to the realities of the data and anthropological theory. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been able to learn from Ron’s on-the-ground experience working in the Red Wing area and George’s vast and varied experience working with Late Precontact ceramic assemblages. Dr. Clark Dobbs, truly a giant in Red Wing studies, helped me tremendously in formulating my initial research prospectus. To that end, Dr. Orrin Shane also provided valuable advice as I crafted that document. Orrin is also responsible for introducing me to the archaeology of the Red Wing area and for bringing many of the collections I worked on to the Science Museum of Minnesota. Dr. Rollie Rodell also provided conversational guidance at several points during my research. The enthusiasm of all of these individuals for Midwestern archaeology and the archaeology of the Red Wing area has certainly rubbed off on me. The Science Museum of Minnesota, my employer, has enabled me to complete my research and continues to encourage me to grow as a scholar. I thank especially Jim Fairman, Vice President of the Science Division, for allowing me the time required to complete my research and writing. I would also like to acknowledge some of my other colleagues at the Science Museum, past and present, Ron Lawrenz, Tim Ready, Jackie, Hoff, Tilly Laskey, Gretchen Anderson, Kristi Curry-Rogers, Jim Almendinger, and Dan Engstrom for assistance and encouragement along the way. My friend and colleague, Tim Ready, who tragically passed away before its completion, took several of the artifact images in this volume. This work would not have been possible without the dedication and persistence of many laboratory volunteers and student interns. Notably, Anna Morrow has volunteered for years working on cataloguing collections from the Red Wing Locality. Anna’s precise, and seemingly perpetual, work in the lab underlies much of this research. Verne Anderson drew illustrations found in this volume. Other volunteers and interns who made significant contributions to the lab work are Kay Miller, Tom i Young, Greg Schwab, Maria Montegue, Mike Bergervoet, Stephan Sebatke, and Rod Johnson. Thanks to Pat Emerson, Head of Archaeology at the Minnesota Historical Society, for providing access to the Bryan site collection from Clark Dobbs’s 1983/1984 excavations. Thanks to Bill Green and Nicolette Meister at the Logan Museum of Anthropology for providing access to the Mero site collection from Moreau Maxwell’s 1948 excavation. Thanks to John Richards, Jody Clauter, and Seth Schneider for providing access to the Mero site collection from Robert Alex’s 1974 excavation. This research was supported in part by the Anthropology Department of the University of Minnesota through grants for travel to study collections and to have maps made. Mr. Paul Wickman, Northstar Geographics, created all of the maps in this volume. Most of all, I thank my family – my wife, Jessica, my children, Myles, Clare, and Simon, and my parents. I owe all of my accomplishments to their love, patience, support, and encouragement. ii To my wife Jessica And to my children Myles, Clare, and Simon iii Abstract The Red Wing Locality is a cluster of Late Precontact villages located in the Upper Mississippi valley of the Midwestern United States. It has long been interpreted as a monolithic presence within the broad regional context of Late Precontact times. While these studies place Red Wing into a broader context relative to a presumed dominant, Mississippian culture and other cultural entities, they have been at the expense of addressing cultural relationships within the Red Wing region itself. The research presented in this dissertation is a community-based, inside-out approach to understanding how the Red Wing Locality functioned for the populations it served. The core focus is the nature of the relationship of Red Wing Locality villages to one another and to their hinterlands. For decades, scholars have recognized the Red Wing Locality as a locale of intense social interaction, and the processes of social aggregation at central places provide an explanatory model for this phenomenon. A diverse range of materials are examined that highlight similarities and differences among villages in the Red Wing Locality. These data demonstrate that contemporary villages on opposite sides of the river had different hinterland contacts and access to resources. One conclusion of this research is that interactions and mobility patterns into and out of the Locality were structured by the Mississippi River. Finally, the Red Wing Locality is examined in the light of a three-tiered non- hierarchical community conceptual framework that at once separated individual settlements, combines the settlement cluster, and ties individual settlements to a broader region that included supporting hinterland populations that aggregated at Red Wing villages. A major contribution of this research is that it provides a new, holistic perspective of the archaeology of the Red Wing Locality and the Upper Mississippi River valley. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments i Dedication iii Abstract iv Table of Contents v List of Tables vi List of Figures vii Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: Description of the Red Wing Locality and History 10 of Investigations Chapter Three: Theoretical Foundations of Community, 74 Settlement, and Material Culture Chapter Four: Stratified House Basins at the Mero Village: 103 Implications for Red Wing Chronology Chapter Five: Comparing the East and the West: Presentation of 152 Data Chapter Six: Aggregation at the Red Wing Locality 224 Chapter Seven: Community at the Red Wing Locality 294 Chapter Eight: Future Directions of Research 313 References Cited 321 Appendix A: Rim profiles, IMA feature 9, Mero village 340 Appendix B: Details of bison scapulae and estimations of areas 346 excavated at Red Wing Locality villages Appendix C: Data from visual inspections of inclusion grain 348 sizes in ceramics v List of Tables Table 4.1. OD/NL values, IMA feature 9, Mero village. 121 Table 4.2. Vessel attributes by level, IMA feature 9, Mero village. 123 Table 4.3. OD/NL values, UWM feature 17, Mero village. 136 Table 4.4. Vessel attributes by level, UWM feature 17, Mero 138 village. Table 5.1. Raw material profile – combined. 157 Table 5.2. Summary of raw material counts. 159 Table 5.3. Chipping debris counts by raw material, Mero village. 176 Table 5.4. Chipping debris counts by raw material, Bryan village. 177 Table 5.5. Cores by raw material. 183 Table 5.6. Red Wing Locality bison scapula artifacts. 189 Table 5.7. Bison scapulae per square meter excavated, by side of 192 the Mississippi River. Table 5.8. Grain size comparison for ceramic paste inclusions. 206 Table 5.9. Ceramic paste inclusions, medium and higher. 208 Table 5.10. Ceramic paste inclusions, fine and smaller. 208 Table 5.11. Dimensions of line incising. 211 Table 5.12. Occurance and degree of intaglio effect. 215 Table 6.1. Feature types at the Mero and Bryan villages. 252 Table 6.2. Motif counts from the Mero and Bryan villages. 281 Table 6.3 Generic renderings of ceramic motif categories. 279 vi List of Figures Figure 1.1. The Red Wing Locality and other Late Precontact 4 complexes in the Upper Midwest. Figure 2.1. The Red Wing Locality in the Upper Mississippi 14 River Valley. Figure 2.2. 1948 photo of mounds at the Mero village. 17 Figure 2.3. Sweney/Brower archaeological chart of the Red 20 Wing area. Figure 2.4. Red Wing Locality – West. 23 Figure 2.5. Silvernale village and mounds. 24 Figure 2.6. Bryan village and mounds. 33 Figure 2.7. Energy Park village and mounds. 43 Figure 2.8. Red Wing Locality – East. 55 Figure 2.9. Mero and Mero 2 villages and mounds. 57 Figure 2.10. Pottery vessels from the panther effigy (Mound 26) at 60 the Mero village. Figure 2.11. Adams village and mounds. 65 Figure 4.1. Plan of IMA feature 9 house at Mero. 114 Figure 4.2. Profile drawing of IMA feature 9 at Mero. 115 Figure 4.3. Photograph of trench through IMA feature 9. 116 Figure 4.4. IMA feature 9: vertical distribution of FCR. 119 Figure 4.5.