Taber Well Site (33HO611): A Middle Woodland Habitation and Surplus Lithic Production Site in the Hocking Valley, Southeastern Ohio, The

Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Spring 2008 by Peoples, Nicole, Abrams, Elliot M, Freter, AnnCorinne, Jokisch, Brad, Patton, Paul E

Abstract From ca. 1500 B.C. through A.D. 300, small indigenous communities in southeastern Ohio incrementally increased their population size, adopted a more sedentary lifeway within recognized territories, formalized the burial of select individuals in mounds, and supplemented their hunting and gathering economy with gardening. Data from the Taber Well site (33HO611) are presented, from which we infer that surplus lithic production was taking place at the site. We suggest that surplus production of utilitarian goods was part of the economy of this and other local communities, especially within an environment of uneven resource distribution. This observation is contextualized within models of Middle Woodland exchange and specialization.

Archaeological research in the midwestern United States is heavily focused on gaining a better understanding of the historical process of tribal formation. One dimension of this inquiry is documenting, through the analysis of archaeological data, the emergence of general ethnological tribal institutions such as more formalized community leadership roles, economic specialization, and the demarcation of social corporate territories (Fried 1967; Price and Brown 1985; Price and Feinman 1995; Service 1962). Many of these institutions reached their peak of complexity among pre-maize societies by the Middle Woodland period, exemplified in the Ohio Valley by Hopewellian societies (Carr and Case 2005; Charles and Buikstra 2006). These new patterns of behavior were in no way sudden; they began towards the end of the Late Archaic period (3000 to 1500 B.C.) (Prufer et al. 2001), increasing incrementally through the Early and Middle Woodland periods (1500 B.C. to A.D. 300) (Abrams and Freter 2005a; Dancey and Pacheco 1997; Seeman 1992).

A second dimension to the archaeological inquiry of tribal formation is documenting the chronological and behavioral variability that characterized this general process. Questions focusing more on the emergence rather than diffusion of traits, the influence of contingency, and of course the issue of differential causality relate to this issue of variability. Some diversity within this historical process correlates with the location of sites in heterogeneous ecological settings, affording differential resource access to dispersed communities. This is perhaps most pronounced in the contrast between those communities living along the banks or terraces of larger rivers and those living along upland secondary tributaries, as recent research has confirmed (Jefferies et al. 2005).

One aspect of community variability, and the focus of the present research, is the local economy. We hypothesize that surplus production occurred at distinct communities, with the exchange of commodities serving to ally these spatially dispersed groups. This view lies somewhat in contrast to the current model of Middle Woodland and Hopewellian communities which emphasizes economic redundancy (Dancey and Pacheco 1997). The present research suggests that, especially in environments characterized by unevenly dispersed resources, economic redundancy among Middle Woodland communities may not have been the case.

We test this hypothesis with data from the Taber Well site (33HO611), a community that once occupied an upland tributary within the Hocking Valley of southeastern Ohio. Specifically, this article argues that (1) despite its small size, the site served as a habitation area during the Late Archaic through Middle Woodland periods, (2) the availability of natural resources played a significant role in site selection, (3) while living at the site, community members procured Upper Mercer chert from a relatively local outcrop, (4) the Taber Well site also served as a lithic reduction site, its occupants producing bifacial tools in greater abundance than were necessary for their own use and (5) these surplus lithic commodities were part of an exchange network that contributed to alliance formation among communities. We suggest that local exchange typified the Middle Woodland sociopolitical landscape, serving as one means of expanding alliances between communities.

Background and Site Setting

The Hocking River Valley of southeastern Ohio is a tributary of the Ohio River. The Hocking River Valley has a rich archaeological heritage (Abrams and Freter 2005a; Murphy 1989) and was one of the many river valleys which witnessed the emergence and expansion of tribal communities. Although the earthen mounds of southern Ohio have historically attracted the most attention from archaeologists (e.g., Greenman 1932), a contemporary research approach involves further exploration of all sites within the settlement sphere, including the variety of seasonal habitation sites and their associated satellite sites.

Taber Well (33HO611) was identified in 1985 along the Monday Creek drainage of the Hocking River Valley in the Wayne National Forest (Figure 1). Ann Cramer, an archaeologist at the Wayne National Forest, identified and registered the site in the Ohio Archaeological Inventory (OAI) as a Late Archaic site based on projectile point fragments of Brewerton and Vosburg types. Elliot Abrams and Ann Cramer selected the site for excavation by the 2000 and 2002 Ohio University Archaeological Field Schools. The site was small, accessible, and shielded from the public. Importantly, it was located in an upper tributary of the Hocking River, a setting not yet archaeologically investigated. With two residential sites-the Boudinot 4 and the County Home site (Abrams 1989; Crowell et al. 2005; Heyman et al. 2005)-near or along the floodplain of the Hocking River having already been excavated, Taber Well offered the possibility of yielding comparative data from an upland residential site 12 km (linear distance) away from the main river.