No abstract

During the Middle Woodland period in eastern North America, modified human skulls are interjected into a broader pattern of "trophy"-artifact manufacture. Interpretations of these human trophies have resulted in a polarity of opinion-that they are the remains of (1) revered ancestors, or (2) defeated enemies. Both previous investigations of the problem support exclusively the "revered-ancestor" interpretation. Results of the present study, which makes use of a six-site Ohio Hopewell sample and stylistic and biological analyses, do not support this position, and are seen as reflecting a competitive component in Hopewell society.

This study examines the relation between raw-material procurement and subsistence behavior among foraging societies. “Embedded procurement” of raw materials may characterize many or most modern foraging societies (Binford 1979). Past societies, however, present economic configurations different than those of any contemporary society. The Early Paleoindian societies of North America present extreme examples in this regard, and were characterized by high mobility, low population density, and high weapon reliability. A lithic-debitage analysis of a portion of the Nobles Pond site (33ST357) supports the argument that the acquisition of lithic raw materials was not embedded in subsistence behavior, but rather, was a specialized activity required by the particular demands of band aggregation in a location far removed from sources of acceptable lithic materials.

How much stone tools are reduced and their form changed from first use to discard bears upon issues such as typological integrity, curation rate, and effects of occupation span. But degree of reduction depends partly upon the measures used to gauge it. Most studies involve single indices that gauge reduction in different ways or at different scales, so results are difficult to compare between studies. In this pilot study, we compare four allometric reduction measures—one each based on length, length:thickness ratio, volume, and mass, estimated by comparing observed values in discarded tools to estimated original values—for consistency when applied to an endscraper sample from the Nobles Pond Paleoindian site in Ohio, USA. Fitted to the Weibull distribution, all measures suggest attrition compared to experimental controls, but variation among them demands reconciliation. A multifactorial method that weights individual measures by their principal-component loadings suggests attritional discard at increasing rate as reduction advances. More importantly, it addresses the growing problem of reconciling the many reduction measures in use, a major concern in this expanding research area.

In a recent synthesis of style theory, Carr (1995) proposed a model based on attribute hierarchies, which reveal social patterns. The present study applies Carr's model of style to a large sample of bicymbal copper ear spools, a diagnostic “Hopewell” artifact class of the Middle Woodland period (ca. 150 B.C.—A.D. 400) in eastern North America. After ear spool attributes are defined and ranked for their visibility, a seriation of the ear spools is developed and tested for time and space correlations. Results are consistent with the interpretation that the size of social groups participating in ritual events increased over time, while the technical requirements for ear spool durability decreased. The “visibility” of ear spool attributes relates to patterns of group interaction at the level of the site, sub-region and region, thus supporting Carr's model. The model has limitations when bridging from archaeological data to ethnographic interpretations, although our results indicate that exchange of finished goods and technology was less important within the context of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere than the construction of Hopewell ideologies.