Early, Middle and Late Woodland Periods

The Early Woodland tool kit was similar to the Late Archaic, and included knives, projectile points (spear points), celts, axes, and atlatls. Early Woodland people lived in increasingly more permanent family hamlets or farmsteads, generated increasing proportions of their calories by farming, made pottery, and built mounds for ceremonial, social, and funerary purposes.

The collection of crops known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC) includes goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), sumpweed (Iva annua), maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana), sunflower (Helianthus annuus), erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum), little barley (Hordeum pusillum), and a locally domesticated variety of squash (Cucurbita pepo ovifera) (see  the Lost Crops of eastern North America ). These plants were managed starting as early as the Middle Archaic (ca. 7,000 years ago) and eventually domesticated in the area now known as the Midwest by the Early Woodland period. The process of domestication took experimentation, patience, and in-depth knowledge of the plants and environment. Domesticated plants depend upon humans for their continued proliferation, creating a mutual dependence between plants and people. Importantly, eastern North America is one of only a few regions on earth where Indigenous inhabitants independently developed farming in the early Holocene. Despite the growing reliance on agriculture, Early Woodland people still hunted and foraged a significant part of their diets. Archaeologists find evidence that people were eating various hickory nuts (Carya sp.), walnut (Juglans sp.), beechnut (Fagus grandifolia), whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus), black bear (Ursus americanus), beaver (Castor canadensis), wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), fish, turtles, shellfish, and waterfowl.

The archaeological material from the Early Woodland period is generally classified as Adena culture. Related Adena sites are found throughout southern Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Adena mounds are usually round and range in size from 20 ft to 300 ft in diameter and were often used for human burials. Some earthen enclosures (earthworks) are also built during this period, generally consisting of circular ditch and embankment forms, with and without mounds inside the enclosure. Beneath the surface of the mounds individuals were buried in log tombs or adorned with intricate grave goods like shell beads, copper, tubular stone pipes, ceramic pipes, spear points, and cache blades. Exotic, non-local materials were a conspicuous feature of Adena ritual deposits.

The archaeological material from the Middle Woodland period is generally classified as Hopewell culture. Hopewell sites in Ohio date as early as the first century BC, and is related to Hopewellian cultures in Illinois (as early as 250 BC), and most of the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Southeastern regions of the US. While there are regional variations among Hopewell groups, there are shared material, symbolic, and behavioral characteristics. Hopewellian groups were master architects that constructed enormous geometric earthwork mounds and effigy mounds shaped like animals, birds, or serpents. Some mounds included human burials. Hopewellian architects inscribed not just shapes and symbols on the ground, but employed sophisticated understanding of geometry and the movements of celestial bodies.

Archaeoastronomers have documented detailed knowledge of the moon, sun, stars, astronomical events and the natural world built into these extensive architectural complexes. The Newark earthworks, for example, includes a circular earthwork paired with an octagonal earthwork; together the main axis of the pair aligns to the northern-most rise position of the moon, which cycles every 18.6 years. There are numerous other alignments at Newark and other Hopewellian sites. In addition to the architecture, the earthwork sites served as gathering places for social events or for special ceremonies attended by many communities from great distances.

Hopewellian society appears to be mostly egalitarian with occasional or situational hierarchy developing in order to organize the building of large communal structures and landscapes. Hopewell settlements were fairly small, consisting of nuclear or extended families dispersed around local earthwork sites in largely self-sufficient farmsteads. Domestic sites tend to exhibit similar material patterns (architecture, artifacts, etc.), suggesting no direct evidence of political leaders in Hopewell communities.

Hopewell groups traded raw materials and finished products extensively. Exotic materials from all over North America were used to make goods found at Hopewell archaeological sites. Copper from the Lakes Superior region and the southern Appalachians was used to make celts, earspools, and other ornaments and tools. Other exotic materials used to make various objects include mica from the southern Appalachian mountains, marine shells from the Gulf coast, and obsidian from the Rocky Mountains. The exchange of these materials seems to have been structured largely at the family level, with no central control or distribution nodes. Between AD 200 and AD 500 many features associated with classic Hopewell began to fade with changing settlement, subsistence, and social patterns. Most noticeably, ceremonial mound construction and exchange in exotic materials comes to a conspicuous end.

At first glance, the Late Woodland period seems subdued relative to the previous opulent Adena and Hopewell cultures. During the Late Woodland people aggregated into large, permanent villages, often with defensive embankment walls and palisades enclosing the settlement. Late Woodland settlements also targeted different environments, reflecting, in part, some changes in subsistence patterns. The widely shared materials and symbols of the Hopewell interaction network are replaced by local styles or unembellished functional artifacts. This reflects a change in the nature of inter-community interaction at local and regional scales. Communities may have faced threats of violence from other villages or groups looking to expand their territory and gain resources.

In addition to the village sites, Late Woodland people also camped or lived in caves and rock shelters, a practice largely absent during the Middle Woodland period. In addition to stone artifacts, archaeologists have recovered well-preserved organic artifacts, including textiles, basketry and gourd containers from these sites. Caves and rockshelters may have been used seasonally during the winter months as a temporary shelter or during hunting/foraging trips.

Other changes include technological and subsistence adaptations. Around AD 700, the first arrowheads were developed and the bow and arrow began to replaced the spear and atlatl as the preferred technology for hunting and warfare. The first true arrowheads were smaller and thinner points similar to the notched and stemmed points of the Middle Woodland period (e.g., Jack’s Reef and Raccoon type points). However, fairly quickly these notched and stemmed points were replaced by small, thin triangular forms (e.g., Levanna, Madison type points), similar in size to modern arrow tips made of metal.

Late Woodland people continued to hunt, especially whitetail deer, and farm locally domesticated crops. During this period, maize (Zea mays, a.k.a., corn) started to become a staple crop, partially replacing EAC crops. Squash, and various members of the EAC were still cultivated along with other minor crops. However, maize rapidly became dominant in most of Ohio during the Late Woodland. Late Woodland potters made cooking and storage vessels with wide mouths and thin walls. In general, pottery was more plain than earlier Hopewell pottery, adapted to function with little emphasis on style. Thinner vessel walls allowed heat to pass to the food in a cook pot more easily.