Inscribing Interaction: Middle Woodland Monumentality in the Appalachian Summit, 100 BC -- AD 400.

Abstract

During the Middle Woodland period (ca. 300 B.C. – A.D. 500), indigenous people across eastern North America participated – to varying degrees – in long distance networks of material and ideological exchange. This study examines the relationship between these interregional interactions and the emergence monumental architecture among groups of seasonally sedentary, egalitarian hunter-gatherer-gardeners in western North Carolina’s Appalachian Summit. Using the results of multi-method geophysical survey, targeted excavation, radiocarbon dating, and analyses of museum collections and newly excavated materials, I argue that the record of geometric enclosure and platform mound construction and use at the Garden Creek site points to a complex and shifting history of interregional interaction and local response. These findings underscore how social relationships and identities at multiple scales structure local historical trajectories among complex hunter-gatherers, and encourage the further development of theories of culture contact in pre-Columbian contexts.