People, Places, and Plants: An Appraisal of Subsistence, Technology and Sedentism in the Eastern Woodlands

The transition from foraging to farming has cross-culturally been associated with major changes in human technology, settlement patterns and social organization. This research project tests these relationships among prehistoric human populations inhabiting the Eastern Woodlands by considering how increasing reliance on cultivated foods during the Holocene led to economic circumstances in which investment in the specialization of plant-food processing tools was beneficial. It further identifies that tool investment benefits were only adaptive when seasonally strategic mobility had decreased to such a degree that tool carrying costs were offset by expanded tool use-life. Using the Model of Technological Investment, grounded in neo-Darwinian theory and Human Behavioral Ecology, this study uses quantitative and qualitative archaeological data to 1. Provide a general survey of the changes in human botanical diet from the Hocking Valley, Ohio, for the Late Archaic through Middle Woodland Periods, 2. Determine the relative correlation between investments in food processing technology and the incorporation of cultivated foods into the prehistoric Woodlands diet, and 3. Establish the seasonal occupation at each of the sampled sites in order to determine different degrees of sedentariness and residential stability throughout the temporal periods surveyed. A variety of archaeological methods were utilized in this study, including macro-archaeobotanical analysis, pottery and ground stone macrocharacteristic analysis, and analyses of settlement and feature data from habitation sites The results of these analyses indicate that 1. Relatively high levels of investment in the construction of food-processing technology only occurred after population mobility decreased to such a degree that allowed for an extended use-life of an individual tool, 2. Middle Woodland populations in the Hocking Valley were essentially residentially stable farmers, and 3. The relationship between plant domestication, technological innovation, and sedentariness was co-evolutionary.