Associate Professor; Department of Anthropology

Associate Professor; Archaeology Program
 
 

"I'm trying to do anthropology and history when I can't observe the people and they didn't write anything down." -Doug Charles

And how exactly does one accomplish such a feat? By compiling and analyzing mountains of information gleaned from 30 years of research involving thousands of people and a multitude of disciplines.
 
 

Two thousand years ago, during the Middle Woodland period, people participating in what is known as the Hopewell Culture inhabited the major river valleys of the mid-western United States. The Hopewell Culture is a favorite amongst archaeologists because of its strong material manifestation. It is easily identifiable by its artifacts that include obsidian all the way from Yellowstone Park, copper from northern Michigan, mica from the Appalachians, shells and sharks teeth from the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the first really viable ceramic pieces.Hopewellians of the Illinois River Valley were very social, obviously traded a good deal with others, and gathered together at certain points throughout the year at large ritual sites. They had elaborate burial procedures for their dead, creating cemeteries of highly structured mounds on bluff tops. The cemeteries included central crypts, which housed the bodies of the elite families, and peripheral burials, which contained the bodies of those lower in the social organization. They traveled to the cemeteries and ritual sites from their homes, which were tiny hamlets of not more than a few families living in huts, spread out across the landscape.

image courtesy of the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park

They were hunter-gatherers and sophisticated horticulturalists. They cultivated several types of plants, including plants we know as weeds, like goose-foot and lamb's quarter. Unfortunately, none of the plants endemic to North America were productive grasses, like wheat, corn, or rice, and many took more effort to grow than they were worth in their yield of edible food. With the Middle Woodland period came the development of more complex seed storing capabilities. It was also a time when ceramic technology progressed greatly. The advent of more solid ceramic vessels allowed the greater usage of starchy seeds, as opposed to the oil based seeds the Hopewellians had been confined to earlier. Starchy seeds, like wheat and rice, are much more productive than oil based seeds, but they require significant boiling in order to process, which necessitates vessels that can handle that sort of intense, lengthy heating.

The rise of agriculture engendered significant demographic changes, as well. The Hopewellians migrated to the river valleys which flooded annually, leaving extremely rich soil for the budding agriculture. Increasing numbers of groups in these fertile valleys were forced to interact with one another. They needed to maintain amicable ties for protection and for support in the case of a bad crop year. Many of these ties were maintained through the exchange of the characteristic Hopewell goods.

Eventually, things began to settle down and the valleys became full. There was not as much movement, not as many new faces, and the Hopewell exchange was not as vital as before. The elite lineages of Hopewell, those who controlled trade and exchange, were no longer necessary. The valleys contained networks of kin that formed support systems that did not require the continual diplomacy to maintain amicable relations. The elite of the Hopewell Culture became obsolete and generally disappeared.

This was not the only significant social change that occurred as the river valleys filled. The characteristics activities of Hopewell, the earthwork building and trade of intricate goods made of exotic materials, are, ethnographically, male activities. During the Middle Woodland Period, the men held most of the power, and the woman moved into the house of her husband after marriage. This changed somewhat suddenly at the beginning of the Mississippian period, 600 to 700 years after the disappearance of the Hopewell Culture; after the switch, the women stayed and the men moved at marriage. The process of changes leading up to this major social shift took centuries of gradual evolution. The patrilocal system, where women move at marriage, ended in part because agriculture is tied to the land, and the women were tied to the agriculture. While the men were off building mounds and hunting deer, the women became skilled agriculturalists. The women produced not only the food, but the workers to tend to the fields that yielded the food, as well. A household could not well afford to lose a valuable food producer. The economy shifted from the pooled resources of the extended lineage to the nuclear household, where the majority of the food came from the work of the women.
 
 

The end of Hopewell came at different times in different places, but as a generalization, it was around the 300 AD mark, give or take a century. At this point, the economy was becoming more and more agriculture based. When the bow and arrow appeared around 600 or 700 AD, the villages were forced to converge to protect themselves against their neighbors, who might have found it worth their while to try and steal stores of food. The villages became larger, developing into tribal level organizations, involving not a few hundred people, but thousands. The shift to a matrilocal society manifested itself after centuries of gradual change. When maize was introduced around 800 AD, the expansion of the tribes just exploded. They were already extremely advanced agriculturists, but lacked the right crop to really thrive in the Valleys. Maize was that crop and within a few hundred years, true complex chiefdoms arose in the place of tribes. By 1150 or 1200 AD the town of Cahokia emerged, a town of 10,000 people complete with a palisade wall around it, and a platform mound called Monk's Mound, which, at its base, covered fourteen acres and was the largest human made structure in North America until the 1800's.
 
 

So, how do we know all this? That's where Doug Charles comes in. He helps to paint the bigger picture. He draws these social and cultural conclusions from scientific data. His work relies on data from geologists, geomorphologists, paleopathologists, botanists, faunal experts, evolutionary biologists, and geneticists, to name a few. His primary area of interest lies in the politics and social organization of the Hopewell Culture, particularly gender roles and kinship networks, and his goal is to analyze the data as a whole to gain a better understanding of life 2000 years ago. The description above is the product of his work and the work of his colleagues. It is also, shall we say, a rough draft; it is being constantly modified and added to as new information emerges from the area. When you consider the fact that the entire account has been constructed from the analysis of items found in the ground, it is an absolutely astounding accomplishment.

Most recently, he has focused primarily on three sites. One, the Elizabeth site, is a cemetery site. The second, Mound House, is a ritual gathering site. The third, the focus of his sabbatical, is the Smiling Dan site, a two thousand year old hamlet. These three types of sites give Dr. Charles a relatively complete view of life, because they were the three kinds of places where the people he studies spent their time: their primary homes, their cemeteries, and their social gathering and religious spots.

At each site, he learns about different aspects of their lives. Studies of the skeletal morphology done on the skeletons in the cemeteries revealed that the taller, healthier skeletons in the central crypts were related, pointing to an elite that was based on heredity, probably a family lineage. The same kind of scientific comparison showed that males are related within cemeteries while women are relatively homogeneous across cemeteries, evidence that during the Middle Woodland and early Late Woodland, the women moved at marriage. Data from a later period, around 800 or 900 AD, shows that this pattern reversed and the societies became matrilocal. Dr. Charles' next question: why?

The answer isn't obvious and must be coaxed from the rest of the raw data. Botanists have been able to state with some certainty that there is solid evidence of domestication among plant remains from thousands of years ago. Coupled with genetic data and evidence of demographic shifts, Dr. Charles reconstructs possible scenarios for the major social changes that appear to have occurred. He uses his knowledge of contemporary hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies to try and understand the circumstances surrounding the evolution of the societies in the Illinois Valley. Unfortunately, many important changes happened very subtly and, as Dr. Charles says, "subtle isn't good for archaeology."

There are still many other unanswered questions. For instance, there is the appearance of a marked increase in violence after about 700 AD, when the bow and arrow were introduced into the area. The problem is that, while an arrowhead lodged in a bone is a pretty obvious sign of violence, knife or spear wounds to soft tissue may not be evident in skeletal remains. It has been assumed, until recently, that the hunter-gatherers of the Illinois Valley, like most other hunter-gatherers around the world, were comparatively peaceable. This may be true, but evidence is emerging that they may not have been quite as peaceable as previously assumed. Dr. Charles explains that after very careful scrutiny of six skulls that had been found crushed in a trench of a crypt, it turned out that they had been smashed by a violent blow, not by the weight of the earth above. Skulls are often found broken, but the general assumption has been that the immense pressure of several feet or meters of dirt over hundreds or thousands of years was sufficient to crush them. However, it takes intense scrutiny of break patterns to determine whether that was the cause of the break, or whether it was violent trauma. The problem is, that there has not been systematic study of skulls in this way, so it's possible that the archaeological world has been missing some very important evidence for violence in hunter-gatherer societies.

What has attracted Dr. Charles back to the Illinois River Valley year after year, where he has been conducting his research since his undergraduate days, is the possibility to ask and answer these questions. The area where he works is sparsely inhabited today, mostly by farmers, and so is rare in the relatively pristine conditions of the archaeological sites. In addition, the Valley has been excavated during a period of over a century and studied intensely for over 35 years, yielding the huge amount of information that is necessary to gain a deep and detailed understanding of the evolution of the cultures that lived there thousands of years ago. The Illinois Valley may not seem quite like the Indiana Jones vision many have of archaeology, but it would take 30 additional years of work in any other exotic locale to be able to even begin asking the kinds of questions Doug Charles addresses every day. Even in the well-studied Illinois River Valley, there is so much more to learn. Just think; it's like putting together a puzzle when half of the pieces are missing and the other half are faded or broken. Not an easy task.

-Jessica Benko