The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast

By Benjamin A. Steere

Explores the evolution of houses and households in the southeastern United States from the Woodland to the Historic Indian period (ca. 200 BC to 1800 AD)
 
The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast contributes enormously to the study of household archaeology and domestic architecture in the region. This significant volume combines both previously published and unpublished data on communities from the Southeast and is the first systematic attempt to understand the development of houses and households as interpreted through a theoretical framework developed from broad-ranging studies in cultural anthropology and archaeology.
 
Steere’s major achievement is the compilation of one of the largest and most detailed architectural datasets for the Southeast, including data for 1,258 domestic and public structures from 65 archaeological sites in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and the southern parts of Missouri, Indiana, and Illinois. Rare data from hard-to-find cultural resource management reports is also incorporated, creating a broad temporal and geographic scope and serving as one of many remarkable features of the book, which is sure to be of considerable value to archaeologists and anthropologists interested in comparative studies of architecture.
 
Similar to other analyses, Steere’s research uses multiple theoretical angles and lines of evidence to answer archaeological questions about houses and the people who built them. However, unlike other examinations of household archaeology, this project spans multiple time periods (Woodland, Mississippian, and Historic); is focused squarely on the Southeast; features a more unified approach, using data from a single, uniform database; and privileges domestic architecture as a line of evidence for reconstructing daily life at major archaeological sites on a much broader scale than other investigations.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9780817391195

Book preview

The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast

Archaeology of the American South: New Directions and Perspectives

SERIES EDITOR

Christopher B. Rodning

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Robin A. Beck

John H. Blitz

I. Randolph Daniel Jr.

Kandace R. Hollenbach

Patrick C. Livingood

Tanya M. Peres

Thomas J. Pluckhahn

Mark A. Rees

Amanda L. Regnier

Sissel Schroeder

Lynne P. Sullivan

Ian Thompson

Richard A. Weinstein

Gregory D. Wilson

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast

Benjamin A. Steere

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Caslon and Gill Sans

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover image: Stylized post pattern of a Mississippian period house; courtesy of the author

Cover design: Todd Lape / Lape Designs

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1949-6

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9119-5

For Elizabeth, Alexander, and Zachary

This work is dedicated to the descendants of the people who built the houses I have written about in this book. I have donated my royalties for this book to the Society for American Archaeology Native American Scholarship Fund. This program is designed to help Native American students pursue advanced studies in archaeology.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Patterns of Architectural Variability in the Native Southeast

2. Environmental Factors in Architectural Variation

3. Household Composition and Economics

4. Houses and Architectural Symbolism

5. Houses, Status, and Settlement

6. Conclusion: A Macroregional Perspective on Architectural Variation in the Native Southeast

Appendix: Description of the Architectural Variables

References Cited

Index

Illustrations

Figures

I.1. Map of Middle and Late Woodland Period Sites Recorded in the Database

I.2. Map of Early Mississippian Period Sites Recorded in the Database

I.3. Map of Middle and Late Mississippian Period Sites Recorded in the Database

I.4. Map of Historic Indian Period Sites Recorded in the Database

1.1. Histogram of Middle Woodland Period Domestic Structure Area

1.2. Histogram of Late Woodland Period Domestic Structure Area

1.3. Histogram of Early Mississippian Period Domestic Structure Area

1.4. Histogram of Early Mississippian Period Nondomestic Structure Area

1.5. Histogram of Middle Mississippian Period Domestic Structure Area

1.6. Histogram of Middle Mississippian Period Nondomestic Structure Area

1.7. Histogram of Late Mississippian Period Domestic Structure Area

1.8. Histogram of Late Mississippian Period Nondomestic Structure Area

1.9. Histogram of Late Mississippian Storage Structure Area

1.10. Histogram of Historic Indian Period Domestic Structure Area

1.11. Bar Chart of Mean and Median Floor Area for Domestic Structures

1.12. Bar Chart of Mean and Median Number of Wall Posts for Domestic Structures

1.13. Bar Chart of Mean and Median Wall Post Spacing for All Time Periods

1.14. Bar Chart of Mean and Median Wall Post Diameter for All Time Periods

1.15. Bar Chart of Mean and Median Number of Partitions in Domestic Structures

1.16. Bar Chart of Mean Number of Interior Burials for All Time Periods

2.1. Major Physiographic Regions of Eastern North America

2.2. Location of Sites with Structure Basins

3.1. Model of Household Clusters for Each Chronological Period

3.2. Examples of Middle Woodland Period Domestic Structures

3.3. Examples of Late Woodland Period Domestic Structures

3.4. Examples of Early Mississippian Period Domestic Structures

3.5. Examples of Middle Mississippian Period Domestic Structures

3.6. Examples of Late Mississippian Period Domestic Structures

3.7. Examples of Historic Indian Period Domestic Structures

4.1. Middle Woodland Circular Structures from the McFarland Site

4.2. Rectangular Late Woodland Structure from 1PI61 Site

4.3. Late Mississippian Winter House Layout

4.4. Historic Indian Winter House Layout from the Townsend Sites

5.1. Box Plots of Area for Mound and Village Structures

5.2. Bar Chart of Mean and Median Area for Mound and Village Structures

5.3. Scatterplot of House Area and Component Area

5.4. Scatterplot of House Area and Number of Mounds

5.5. Scatterplot of House Area and Number of Structures

Tables

I.1. List of Archaeological Sites Recorded in the Database

1.1. Structure Shape by Time Period and Functional Class

1.2. Hearth Types

1.3. Average Post Density for Structures by Period

1.4. Results of Multivariate Regression with Chronological Dummy Variables for Domestic Structures

1.5. Results of Multivariate Regression with Chronological Dummy Variables for Nondomestic Structures

2.1. Environmental Data for Sites

2.2. Historic Accounts of Building Materials

2.3. Archaeological Evidence for Building Materials

2.4. Summary of Environmental Variables for Sites with and without Structures with Basins

2.5. Results of Multivariate Regression for Post Density and Environmental Variables

3.1. Results of Regression with Dummy Variables for Interior Partitioning

5.1. Summary Statistics for Mississippian Mound and Village Structures

5.2. Results of Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Tests for Differences between Mound and Village Structure Variables

5.3. Results of Multivariate Regression for Domestic Structure Area

5.4. Summary of Architectural Diversity by Component

5.5. Results of Multivariate Regression for Architectural Diversity

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many people for their contributions to this book. Steve Kowalewski not only challenged me to think big and tackle this bold project but also provided the direction and support to make it possible. His insightful feedback, challenging questions, frank critiques, and ongoing encouragement kept me moving forward. I could not have asked for a better mentor.

David Hally helped me develop the methods and refine the analyses for this project, and like Steve, his feedback and suggestions greatly improved the finished product. Mark Williams and I had the chance to work together at the Copeland site, and our discussions there and in the archaeology lab kept me tuned in to the practical problems associated with structure excavation and analysis. Mark also provided support in the form of hardware, software, and technical training at the Laboratory of Archaeology. Bram Tucker encouraged me to think about the project in broad anthropological terms, and he introduced me to new ways of thinking about houses and households. I would also like to thank Betsy Reitz. As graduate coordinator, she was a supportive mentor, and she helped me and my peers progress through the graduate program in a timely manner.

Likewise, the staff of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia enabled me to meet deadlines and secure funding and awards to support this work. Margie Floyd offered guidance, practical help, and kind encouragement all along the way. LaBau Bryan, Lisa Norris, Deb Chasteen, Jill Morris, and Curtis Combs provided administrative, technical, and moral support.

Good friends and colleagues at the University of Georgia provided camaraderie and inspiration and prevented me from developing tunnel vision. I would especially like to thank Emily Beahm, Sarah Bergh, Dan Bigman, Steffan Brannan, Carol Colaninno-Meeks, Viki Dekle, Amber and Pat Huff, Ellen and John Turck, Yanxi Wang, Jared Wood, and Jen Birch for making my time in Athens more productive and fun. John Chamblee provided invaluable instruction and insight for the construction of the database.

I was introduced to household archaeology as a field technician with TRC while working on the Ravensford project in Cherokee, North Carolina. Tasha Benyshek, our field director, encouraged me to pursue this research. So did our manager, Paul Webb. Paul and Tasha both provided unpublished data and feedback that helped this research a great deal. They have also been wonderful mentors and friends. I would also like to acknowledge my good friends and colleagues from TRC. John Kesler, Mandy Terkhorn, Hannah Guidry, Mike Hayden, Bruce Idol, Heather Olson, Michael Chief Griffin, Phoebe Gilbert, Chris Ciancibelli, Jacob Turner, Nicole Coomer, Bill Duckworth, Mike Fisher, Bryan Jackson, Sterling Howard, and Heather McAllister taught me so much about archaeology and were a second family to me when I was in the field.

Many of these data were hard to come by. I especially thank Aaron Deter-Wolf at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology and Susan Myers at the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology for providing access to excavation records from Tennessee and North Carolina. The interlibrary loan staff at the University of Georgia helped me track down several sources. In Athens, Joel Jones, Jerald Ledbetter, and Scott Jones of Southeastern Archeological Services provided insight and ideas on houses during informal talks at the archaeology lab and on Michael Chief Griffin’s front porch. Thanks especially to Jerald for supplying unpublished data.

Many thanks to Andrew White for hosting the data for this project on his website, The Eastern Woodlands Archaeology Household Data Project (www.householdarchaeology.org). Andrew and I have tackled similar projects with household data from different times and places, and his work gave me fresh ideas for this book.

This work also benefitted from the ideas and suggestions from so many of my colleagues, mentors, and friends across the Southeast. Many thanks to Chris Rodning, Tom Pluckhahn, Ramie Gougeon, Jon Marcoux, Alice Wright, Ned Woodall, Brett Riggs, Steve Davis, Jane Eastman, Anne Rogers, Rodney Snedeker, Scott Ashcraft, Andrew Triplett, Lorie Hansen, David Moore, Linda Hall, John Mintz, Ashely Smallwood, Tom Jennings, Lisa Gezon, Marjorie Snipes, Karl Steinen, Lara McCormick, Sara Phillips, Jane McCandless, T. J. Holland, Ted Gragson, Kathleen Brennan, Marylin Chamberlin, Ted Coyle, Hartwell Francis, Tony Hickey, Cheryl Johnston, Munene Mwaniki, Peter Nieckarz, Nicholas V. Passalacqua, Jim Veteto, John Williams, Katie Zejdlik, Richard Starnes, Russ Townsend, Brian Burgess, Tyler Howe, Beau Carroll, Johi Griffin, Miranda Panther, and Yolanda Saunooke for specific advice and general support along the way.

Many thanks go to my editor at the University of Alabama Press, Wendi Schnaufer, and to two anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments greatly improved this book. Thanks also to Jennifer Manley Rogers for her speedy and excellent copyediting and to Jon Berry, project editor, for his help in seeing the book through to production.

My family has always provided loving support and encouragement. They are my favorite extended family household. I thank Jonathan, Sarah, Matt, Allen, Richard, Joanna, and Kate Steere, and Anne, Whit, Justin, Jonathan, and Kathryn Lee for everything.

Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Elizabeth Lee Steere, and our two sons, Alexander and Zachary, for their loving kindness, support, and humor all these years. Elizabeth is the best partner, friend, and copy-editor a guy could ever want, and our two boys helped me keep this project (and many others) in proper perspective. I could not have done this without them.

Introduction

On a windy morning in December 2004, I stood around the excavated post pattern of an early eighteenth-century Cherokee winter house with a dozen students from the Cherokee High School’s advanced placement history class. At the time, I was working as a field technician for TRC Environmental Corp (TRC) at the Ravensford site on the Qualla Boundary in Cherokee, North Carolina. Our field director had asked me to give a site tour to visiting students. The excavated historic period Cherokee houses were by far the best place to start a tour. Many of the social phenomena we examine as archaeologists—subsistence strategies, settlement patterns, social organization, or political complexity—can be abstract and remote to the average site visitor but everyone can relate to houses. The map of an excavated post pattern can be read like an architect’s floor plan. Walking across the surface of an excavated structure is not unlike crossing the threshold of a small cabin. It is an intimate experience.

The students were quiet, so I tried to encourage discussion by asking leading questions, such as, What materials do you think people used to build this house? How could you tell? What sort of activities went on inside the house? After a while, the students began to ask questions of their own. They wondered how many people could comfortably sleep, eat, and work in the house. One student suggested that the quarters would have been cramped but also warm in the winter. With minimal prompting, these students were making good connections between archaeological data and human behavior.

As a field technician, I helped excavate several of the over one hundred well-preserved Woodland, Mississippian, and Cherokee structures at Ravensford. My colleagues and I spent days trying to identify, delineate, map, and excavate complex post patterns. We spent hours removing roof fall from the surface of burned beams. This immersion in structure excavations made me want to learn more about the connections between the fragile remains of these houses and the people who built them.

My experience with house excavation and the realization that anthropological studies of houses and households were accessible to people outside of archaeological circles led me to study prehistoric domestic architecture. Of all the classes of material culture archaeologists study, architecture is one of the most useful for understanding how the broad social world affects domestic life (Blanton 1994; Moore 2012; Rapoport 1969; White 2013). Houses are both utilitarian and symbolically charged objects. People use houses as domiciles and workshops, yet they often build them according to cosmological principles. Individuals and small social groups make conscious and creative decisions about house design, but their choices are constrained by top-down societal forces.

Understanding architectural variability requires theory that takes into account different social reasons for variation in house form and considers spatial and temporal scale. Research in household anthropology and archaeology has improved our understanding of the social processes that explain architectural variability in households and communities but has done less to describe and explain broader patterns of variation in domestic architecture. Large-scale changes in domestic architecture must be explained by large-scale social processes. As Kowalewski has argued, archaeologists often tend to favor bottom-up, locality-to-macroregion method and theory, but top-down, macroregion-to-locality method and theory provide their own insights (1995:149).

The call for attention to scale is not new, with proponents in various disciplines, including history (Braudel 1979), sociology (Giddens 1979), geography (Meentemeyer and Box 1987), ecology (Wu and Loucks 1995), and anthropology (Blanton et al. 1993; Smith 1984; Kowalewski 1995). We can think of households, communities, polities, and regional systems operating on a continuum of increasingly large socioeconomic and political and temporal scales. We should anticipate different explanations for the behaviors and processes we see at each level (Kowalewski 1995:155).

Explanations of architectural variability must also account for the interplay of structure and agency (Giddens 1979; Wiessner 2002). Many studies of houses and households use practice theory (Wilson 2008) or refer to Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus to understand this relationship (Blanton 1994; Emerson 1997). People consciously use houses to communicate their social standing, and subtle differences in the size and exterior decoration of houses are meaningful. Yet in communities and regions, houses generally conform to a similar architectural style, and historical and archaeological studies of architecture demonstrate that coherent building styles change over time. This sort of conformity is hard to explain with strictly bottom-up, agent-based explanations.

As a student searching for a way to make a contribution to household archaeology, I found there were plenty of data for answering questions about people and houses in the Southeast. Houses have long been a focus of major excavations, and researchers here have made significant contributions to household archaeology for decades. What I found wanting were comparative studies of prehistoric houses at a broad spatial and temporal scale. Beyond the scale of a single site or small, well-studied region, it was hard to tell if houses at a particular site were relatively large or small, simple or complex, and whether or not diachronic changes in house form were typical or extraordinary.

This research is the first systematic attempt to understand how prehistoric houses and households have changed across the Southern Appalachian region of the southeastern United States during the Woodland, Mississippian, and Historic periods (ca. 200 B.C. to A.D. 1800). Most studies of prehistoric houses in the region have been conducted at the single-site scale. Archaeologists in the Southeast have an in-depth understanding of domestic architecture at many individual sites, but wider patterns of variation are not well understood. How did prehistoric houses in the Southeast change in shape, size, layout, and permanency? How did houses at small, dispersed sites differ from houses at large, regional centers? What are the relationships between changes in domestic architecture and the social groups—the households—that made and lived in houses? What social causes underlie differences in house form across space and time? Large-scale changes in domestic architecture, such as the shift from round to rectangular houses during the Woodland to Mississippian transition, need to be explained by social processes operating at a macroregional scale. This book addresses these questions by comparing the architectural features of prehistoric houses in the Southeast from the Woodland, Mississippian, and Historic Indian periods.

This work is guided by a theoretical framework drawn from research in household anthropology and archaeology (Wilk and Rathje 1982; Wilk and Netting 1984). Household archaeology is not a unified theory. It is a subfield defined by its focus on the household as the primary unit of analysis. Research in household anthropology and archaeology has mostly been carried out at small spatial and temporal scales and has not been related to a coherent theory that delineates and weighs the different social factors that explain architectural variation.

However, these studies have identified the most important causes of architectural variability. Decades of research in household anthropology and archaeology suggest that five major factors are the most important for understanding variation in house form. Variation in houses is best explained by (1) environmental variation; (2) variation in household economics and household composition; (3) ritual and symbolic behavior; (4) status differentiation; and (5) settlement patterning. Household studies tell us which questions to ask about people and houses and give us methods for linking the material remains of houses to human behavior.

We can use methods and insight from household archaeology to build a framework for a broadscale comparative study of domestic architecture. The first step is to compile a large sample of houses, one big enough to identify meaningful patterns of synchronic and diachronic variation over a large geographic area. The next step is to consider the effect of the environment on house form. What are the major environmental and ecological constraints on house building? Finally, we can ask to what extent the patterns can be explained by each of the most important social factors—economic behavior, symbolism, status differentiation, and settlement patterning. In each case, some architectural variation may be explained by local, small-scale causes, but some patterns will require explanation in terms of broader processes.

This approach could be used anywhere, but the southeastern United States is an especially good place to start. Long before household archaeology emerged as a formal research framework, southeastern archaeologists looked to houses to identify social groups and reconstruct social, economic, political, and ritual activities. Beginning with the federal relief programs of the 1930s, excavations of mounds and villages uncovered hundreds of houses, mostly from the Mississippian period. At sites such as Hiwassee Island (Lewis and Kneberg 1946), Mouse Creek, Ledford Island, Hixon, Dallas, Rymer (Lewis and Lewis 1995), Jonathan Creek (Webb 1952; Schroeder 2005), and Town Creek (Boudreaux 2007) prehistoric structures were uncovered, recorded, and sometimes excavated. While record keeping was highly variable on these projects, houses were recognized as important data sources, and many of these early excavations produced carefully drawn plan-view maps of houses and their associated features.

For the most part, the houses from these early excavations were used to develop culture histories and map prehistoric culture areas. As Pluckhahn (2010:334) notes, house patterns appear prominently in the descriptions of various cultural-historical foci, aspects, phases, and complexes [e.g., contributors to Griffin 1952]. However, there was little consideration of the social groups that might have lived within these structures. Without the benefit of radiocarbon dates, chronological associations in these early reports were understandably problematic. Architectural variation was often attributed to the norms held by different cultural groups.

The Hiwassee Island (Lewis and Kneberg 1946) and the Chickamauga Basin (Lewis and Lewis 1995) reports on Mississippian and historic period town sites from eastern Tennessee may be the best examples of studies from this early era of southeastern archaeology. They continue to influence architectural studies today (see Brennan 2007; Lacquement 2007b). Lewis and Kneberg operated in a culture-history framework strongly influenced by McKern’s Midwest Taxonomic Method. They carefully described individual architectural traits of buildings (e.g., walls, hearths, clay benches) and used these traits to assign houses to either the Hiwassee Island or Dallas component (Lewis and Kneberg 1946:48–79). The same strategy was used to classify Hiwassee Island, Dallas, and Mouse Creek phase houses in the Chickamauga Basin (Lewis and Lewis 1995:54–78).

With the processualist turn in the 1960s, the house became an important line of evidence for developing and testing ecological, adaptationist, and evolutionary models. As regional chronologies were developed, cultural determinist explanations for variation in house form became less common. Activity areas, seasonality of occupation, and occupational duration became staples of archaeological investigations about houses and households (see for example Hally 1970, 1978; Smith 1978; Kline et al. 1982).

In the 1970s and 1980s southeastern archaeologists used the household as unit of analysis for understanding settlement patterns (Smith 1978) and for reconstructing ceramic assemblages (Hally 1983, 1984, 1986; Shapiro 1984). By the late 1980s there was a more formal attempt to understand Mississippian households (Polhemus 1987; Sullivan 1987), and by the time of the publication of Mississippian Communities and Households (Rogers and Smith 1995), the household approach was a fairly coherent research framework centered on five themes: spatial analysis, social dynamics, population dynamics, subsistence, and economic activities (Rogers 1995).

Coincident to the emergence of household archaeology as a coherent subfield of southeastern research, cultural resource management projects, including some with broad horizontal excavations, produced data sets that provided new opportunities for household studies. A small sample of