Variation in Ohio Hopewell Political Economies

Abstract

I examine mortuary, artifactual, symbolic, and proxemic data from Hopewell sites in southwestern and south-central Ohio to suggest that people associated with south-central Ohio sites such as Hopewell and Seip implemented more exclusionary political strategies, while people at southwestern sites such as Turner and Fort Ancient maintained a more corporate orientation through much of the Middle Woodland period. The recognition of this dimension of variation among Ohio Hopewell peoples has important implications for the study of the evolution of middle-range societies.

Optimizing Engines: Rational Choice in the Neolithic?

“…Investment in monumental structures, in fact, seems to be quite a pervasive feature of the transition to sedentary social environments, though in most places in the world, this transition took place well into the Holocene: there is evidence of it in North America, Central America, South America, and China (Hass and Creamer 2006;Coon 2009;Renfrew 2013;Zhang, Bevan, and Guo 2013). In some places, these monumental sructures seem to be associated with competitive interactions between larger social groups (Coon 2009), but in others, as at Gobeke Tepe, we see large-scale investment in ideological infrastucture but without any signs of group-group conflict (Hass and Creamer 2006). I return to this point and its significance in the final section.…”

Lo andino, duality, and indigenous identities in Prehispanic highland Bolivia

“…Moieties have been documented in many regions as different as New Guinea (Busse, 2005) and North America (Coon, 2009;Lowell, 1996). And many cultures have principles of duality or complementarity between two categories of people or things (e.g., male/female) that do not also have moieties.…”

Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009

“…to C.E. 500 (Coon 2009), during which period important social and political events took place at Hopewell ceremonial centers with earthen enclosures and earthen mounds. Meanwhile, prehistoric native groups of the Pacific Northwest in North America are known to have lived in sedentary settlements, with substantial architecture and pronounced social and political differentiation for a considerable period of time before and after European contact (Martindale 2009), but, strictly speaking, traditional societies of the Pacific Northwest were hunter‐gatherers.…”