Part Four
The Initial Woodland Period in Southern Minnesota
500/200 B.C. – A.D. 200/700
For many years the commencement of a new cultural tradition in the Eastern Woodlands, the Woodland, was defined by the first appearance of pottery containers, earthen burial mounds, and agriculture (Willey 1966:267; Griffin 1967:180). Information gathered within the last twenty years has clearly demonstrated, as we read in Part 3, that these once diagnostic traits had already made their first appearance in areas of the Eastern Woodlands in the earlier Late and even Middle Archaic. Both indigenous and tropical plants appear in a variety of contexts throughout the mid-continent at least by the Late Archaic, and small earthen burial mounds have been reported from a number of Middle Archaic sites. Fiber-tempered pottery makes its first appearance in otherwise Archaic contexts by at least 2500 B.C. in Georgia, Florida, and other southern states.
The result of these discoveries has been a redefinition of the Woodland tradition, a redefinition that now depends more on new socioeconomic adaptations than on shared diagnostic material traits. Still, the first associations of these three traits in about 700 B.C. in some areas of the Midwest does seem to mark the inception of these new adaptations. Misleading reconstructions of the culture history of other areas of the Midwest have resulted, however, from the assumption that the presence of pottery, burial mounds, or cultigens, or some combination of the three, necessarily means that similar socioeconomic adaptations were present in those areas, too.
In the American Midwest, the Woodland tradition is generally divided into Early, Middle, and Late periods. These divisions are based for the most part on developments that occurred in Illinois, Ohio, and other lower tier Midwestern states. In the northern Midwest, however, the same developments were delayed in their appearance, often by hundreds of years, occurred only in attenuated forms, or did not appear at all. Furthermore, unique adaptations and artifacts appear in the prairies, Northwoods, and boreal forest of Minnesota that have no specific counterparts in the traditional lower tier zone to the south. As a result, we prefer the use of the terms Initial and Terminal Woodland rather than Early, Middle, and Late Woodland as organizing concepts to describe Woodland developments in all but the southeastern corner of the state. Although awkward at times, these concepts stress the unique accomplishments of Native Americans in our region rather than their marginality to events and processes that occurred in different environments to the south.
Part 4 reviews the archaeological cultures, trends, and formative processes that characterize the Initial Woodland period in southeastern (Chapter 9) and southwestern (Chapter 10) Minnesota. Initial Woodland cultures, trends, and formative processes in the central and far northern sections of the state are reviewed in Part 5.
Contributors to this section: Guy Gibbon
Date of last contribution: December 2008