Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project
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A Weeden Island House Structure at the Sycamore Site, Gadsen County, Florida

7/18/2014

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Florida is about as far my "home" research area as it possible to get and still be within the Eastern Woodlands.  As a consequence, the EWHADP database contains only two entries for the state:  the Horr's Island site in Collier County and the Aspalaga site in Gadsen County. I'm sure there is a lot more information out there, I'm just not aware of it yet.  As I was reviewing my Florida data this morning for a presentation at the upcoming DINAA (Digital Index of North American Archaeology) workshop in South Bend in August, I came across a 1974 report by Jerald Milanich about excavations at the Sycamore site (8-Gd-13) near Aspalaga. 

The structure at Sycamore was an oval defined by postmolds (illustration to right taken from Milanich 1974:Figure 7).  It measured approximately 8.9 m x 6.2 m
and was associated with a variety of features. It will be Structure 2260 when I update the database.

See how easy it is?  In just a few moments I increased the size of my Florida sample by 50 percent.

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Middle Woodland Structure from the Hardin Bridge Site, Bartow County, Georgia

3/28/2014

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A 2008 report prepared by New South Associates (edited by R. Jeannine Windham, Christopher Espenshade, and Julie Coco) details excavations and analysis of materials associated with the remains of Middle Woodland household at the Hardin Bridge site (9-Br-34) in northwest Georgia.  The report is available on Chris Espenshade's Academia.edu page.

The preserved architectural features at the site did not allow the unambiguous definition of the outlines of a single structure.  Based on artifact analysis, the authors interpret the Middle Woodland remains at the site to be the product of single household that would have occupied a single residential structure.  That structure was likely an oval or rounded rectangular structure measuring about 9m in width and 11m or 20m in length (Windham et al. 2008). The illustration above (Figure 11.1 from Windham et al. 2008:423) shows the outline of a structure with larger dimensions in blue and the most likely candidate for a smaller structure outlined in pink.  The Hardin Bridge structure will be added to the database as Structure 2234.


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Woodland Structures from the Ballynacree Site, Kenora District, Ontario

3/22/2014

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I stumbled upon a paper by Reid and Rajnovich (1991) that describes three Woodland structures from the Ballynacree site in the Kenora District of western Ontario.  The structures are about 8m x 4m, defined by both postmolds and contrasts between interior and exterior sediments.  At the time the paper was written, the three structures from the site constituted the majority of known, excavated Laurel houses.  I do not know if that is still the case.

Three radiocarbon determinations suggest that House 1 dates to about AD 1250. This is, of course, a relatively late age for something that is called "Middle Woodland."  These houses, like others that strain the Midwest/Southeast-centered cultural-historical framework that I'm currently using, are encouraging me to rethink the organization of the database.  Since the relationships between our temporal and cultural chronologies are not consistent across the eastern woodlands, it may be a good move to separate them in the organization of the database. I'm considering simply dividing "time" into discrete blocks (say 200, 500, or 1000 years in duration) and then several columns to categorize the cultural-historical placement of the site (e.g., Archaic - Late Archaic - Brewerton).  This would allow one to plot groups of contemporaneous structures within thicker or thinner slices of time.  Something to think about.
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Above:  Figure 3 from Reid and Rajnovich 1991:196.  The caption is "The Ballynacree site excavations revealed three houses with their associated features--a complete Laurel village.
The Reid and Rajnovich (1991) paper contains pointers to publications with data on several Woodland and Archaic structures in the region.  I've never been there, but based on its entry in Large Canadian Roadside Attractions it looks like a nice place to visit.
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Middle-Late Woodland Structures from Zencor Village, Franklin County, Ohio

3/18/2014

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Daniel Zulandt's M.A. thesis (Zulandt 2010 - available online here) contains plan maps of the 1957 and 1958 excavations at the Zencor Village site (33-Fr-8) in Franklin County, Ohio.  Those excavations exposed the remains of at least three post structures dating to somewhere in the period A.D. 500-1000.  Raymond Baby and colleagues mentioned the existence of these structures in several short papers (e.g., Baby 1971; Baby and Shaffer 1957; Mays and Baby 1958), but with scant details:

"The remains of at least three houses . . . The structures represented by the postmolds were 25 to 36 feet in diameter, with an overlapping wall serving as an entrance.  The postmolds averaged 0.6 feet in diameter and were set in the ground 1.5 feet deep and 2.5 feet apart"
(Baby 1971:196).

The plan maps reproduced by Zulandt (2010:Figures 5, 6, and 7) show the post structures and their relationships to features at the site.  I don't know that these maps were not available elsewhere prior to Zulandt's thesis, but this is the first place I have seen them and I think it is useful to point out their existence. 

I already had an entry for the Zencor Village site in the database.  In the next issues of the database, however, there will be one entry for each structure.  The dimensions of each structure will be estimated from these drawings.
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Figure 7 from Daniel Zulandt's thesis (Zulandt 2010:25), showing remains of structure in Area A' (this will be Structure 2227 in the database).
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Figure 6 from Daniel Zulandt's thesis (Zulandt 2010:24) showing remains of structures in Area B (Structure 670 in the database) and Trench 1 (Structure 2212 in the database).
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Middle-Late Woodland Household Remains at the Strait Site, Fairfield County, Ohio

3/4/2014

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Jarrod Burks' dissertation, entitled Identifying Household Cluster and Refuse Disposal Patterns at the Strait Site: A Third Century A.D. Nucleated Settlement in the Middle Ohio River Valley (Burks 2004), considers how patterns of trash disposal can be used to assess the contemporaneity of residential structures.  Jarrod examines artifact density data from shovel probes in  light of a model of household-level trash disposal developed from ethnoarchaeological data, then compares the results to geophysical and excavation results.  Portions of two structures were exposed.  I have added a listing for the Strait site to the inventory for Ohio, and will include the site in the next version of the Database. 

The Strait site (33-Fa-156-158) is one of only a handful of "Middle Woodland - Late Woodland Transitional" sites in the Database.  Sites of this age (i.e., arguably post-Hopewell, generally associated with projectile points belonging to the Lowe Cluster) are sometimes referred to in the literature as "late Middle Woodland" and other times as "early Late Woodland."  Hence my decision to give them their own category.  These sites represent a time of important change in the organizational structure of settlement during the Woodland period in the Ohio Valley.  Read Jarrod's dissertation to find out more.
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Above:  Artifact cluster interpretations and proposed household clusters at the Strait site (Burks 2004: Figure B.64).
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    Author

    Andrew A. White
    aawhite@mailbox.sc.edu

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