1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [147]
The Ouachita mounds as they may have appeared at their creation, 5,400 years ago.
Because modern-day hunter-gatherers in Africa live in egalitarian bands that constantly move from place to place, archaeologists assumed that Native American hunter-gatherers must also have done so. Discovering the Louisiana mounds upset this view: they suggest that at least some early Indians were stay-at-homes. More important, they testify to levels of public authority and civic organization rarely associated with nomads. Building a ring of mounds with baskets or deerskins full of dirt is a long-term enterprise. During construction the workers must eat, which in turn means that other people must provide their food. Such levels of planning are ordinarily thought to kick in with the transition to agriculture. When people till and sow the land, anthropologists say, they set up systems to protect their investment. Eventually somebody ends up in charge of allocating goods and services. But the mound builders in Louisiana built these massive constructions at a time when agriculture was barely under way—it was like the whiff in the air from a faraway ocean. In the central river valleys of North America, people had a way of life without known analogue.
After these first mounds the record is sparse. After the Ouachita mounds, there is a gap in the record of more than a millennium. The curtain parts again in about 1500 B.C., when an archipelago of villages, the largest known as Poverty Point, grew up in the northeast corner of Louisiana. Located fifty-five miles from the Ouachita site, Poverty Point had as a focus a structure resembling an amphitheater: six concentric, C-shaped ridges, each five feet tall, on a bluff facing the river. The jaws of the widest C are 3,950 feet apart, an expanse so big that scientists did not recognize the ridges as constructions until they took aerial photographs of the site in the 1950s.
Now another gap: seven hundred years. The next major sequence occurs mainly in the Ohio Valley, hundreds of miles north. Here was a group known as the Adena—the name is that of a well-known site. Because Adena mounds served as tombs, researchers know more about their deaths than their lives. Accompanying the noble few in the tombs to the world of the deceased were copper beads and bracelets, stone tablets and collars, textiles and awls, and, sometimes, stone pipes in the shape of surreal animals. The head of the creature faced the user, who sucked in tobacco smoke from its mouth. It is widely believed that Adena tobacco was much stronger than today’s tobacco—it was psychoactive.
Tobacco was only one of the crops grown at Adena villages. The Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and much of the U.S. Southeast were home to what is known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex. A full-fledged agricultural revolution with a multifarious suite of crops, the complex is an example of a major cultural innovation that has completely disappeared. Its crops were such unfamiliar plants as marshelder, knotweed, maygrass, and little barley. All of these species still exist; one could stock a specialty restaurant with them. (Sample menu: maygrass patties, steamed knotweed beans, and buffalo tongue.) No one seems to be doing that, though. In fact, farmers today treat several of these crops as weeds—they routinely blast little barley with herbicides. Archaeologists have tentative indications of early domestication in spots from Illinois to Alabama by 1000 B.C. But agriculture did not begin to flower, so to speak, until the Adena.
Adena influence in customs and artifacts can be spotted in archaeological sites from Indiana to Kentucky and all the way north to Vermont and even New Brunswick.