Last week I reported on my interest in local archaeology, especially as it related to the Monongahela People and mentioned that I was doing further research on this subject. That turned out to be a gross understatement, as I have been introduced to a wonderland of information far too complex for me to master. Nonetheless this week I will try to summarize what I have learned.
The term “Monongahela Woodland Culture” was coined by anthropologist Mary Butler in 1939 to describe a prehistoric Indian way of life centered in southwestern Pennsylvania between 1000 and 1600 AD, based primarily on archaeological investigations sponsored by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. These investigations identified villages, fortifications, and burial mounds unique to a culture that eventually disappeared.
The archaeological literature is full of highly detailed papers describing this culture and its characteristics, many of them published in the Pennsylvania Archaeologist and currently available electronically from the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology. Of special interest to me is a paper by Richard L. George in Volume 74, published in 2004, introducing the concept of the “Drew Tradition”.
According to Mr. George, in 1970 William Buker and Donald Tanner reported finding artifacts at an excavation “situated on a terrace of Chartiers Creek near the town of Bridgeville” that were so distinctive that they should be considered diagnostic of a phase of Monongahela. Mr. George then explained that these distinct characteristics had been found on artifacts at eighty additional sites since then and suggested that the concept warranted the broader appellation of “Tradition”.
His paper then displayed a map of the area encompassed by this tradition. It extends east-west from the West Virginia Panhandle to Allegheny Ridge and north-south from Freeport to the Mason-Dixon Land. Right in the middle of the region is the original Drew Site (36AL62). It is believed this is the homeland for a distinctive group of Pre-historic Era native Americans.
An equally valuable resource for me is “First Pennsylvanians”, the book I mentioned last week. According to it, around 1000 AD these people began to coalesce into village-size units to take advantage of communal life. A typical village would consist of twenty or thirty huts each holding five or six persons, frequently enclosed by a stockade. By now Meso-American agriculture based on maize (corn), beans, and squash had reached the Ohio Valley, so the village would be surrounded by gardens.
The other newly acquired technology in those days was the bow-and-arrow, which revolutionized the art of hunting. The Monongahela People depended heavily on corn for their diet, but were happy to supplement it with deer, turkey, turtles, and fish. Consequently each village had five or six satellite settlements located half-a-day’s journey (ten miles) from the core community where the able-bodied men spent most of their time while the women, children, and old men took care of the farm and domestic chores.
The limiting resources for this culture were nutrients in the soil and the availability of firewood. Consequently it was necessary for the village and its satellites to move every twenty years or so. The experts believe this occurred regularly and that it took at least a century for a site to have recovered sufficiently to be re-used.
In addition to the aforementioned Drew Site, there are several other well-documented village locations from this era in the Chartiers Valley. Site 36AL39, known as the Godwin-Portman site, was located at Boyce Station, between Mayview Road and the railroad. Site 36WH48, Morganza, was located on a hilltop close to the confluence of Little Chartiers Creek and Chartiers Creek. The Wylie site (36WH283) and the Kelso site (36WH23), 2.5 miles apart, are in the general Meadowlands area.
With so much information available it is impossible to be confident about any interpretation. An unscrupulous scientist can make the data fit almost any hypothesis; no reason why I shouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity. A possible model for the Drew Site people in the Chartiers Valley would locate them initially in one of its fertile bottom land meanders in, say, 1050 AD, with a core village, adjacent gardens, and satellite settlements. Just for kicks, let’s start north of Bridgeville in the Presto area. When this site’s resources are depleted, they will move south, say to the Meadowlands area.
Then north to Carnegie, then south to Boyce Station, then Crafton, then Morganza, etc. Eventually it is possible for them to recycle the original sites, or perhaps the occasional summer flood has encouraged them to leave the floodplain and move up to the first terrace. Somehow this model seems more likely to me than one assuming different communities occupying this general area concurrently.
These appear to have been peaceful, communal people, with more in common with the advanced societies at Cahokia in Illinois and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico than with the semi-barbarian tribes that the settlers encountered when they came west in the eighteenth century. What caused their nearly simultaneous disappearance? We will leave that question to the anthropologists.