یک مدل تکاملی تغییر اجتماعی در دره اوهایو میانه: پیچیدگی اجتماعی در اواخر جنگل غیر ممکن است اما در اواخر ماقبل تاریخ اجباری بود

We present an evolutionary model of social change in the Middle Ohio Valley during the Fort Ancient period (AD 1000–1650), primarily relying on an application of Winterhalder’s (1986) and Kelly’s (1995) evolutionary ecology model of cultural responses to environmental variability. We predict changes in social organization, political complexity, and patterns of stylistic similarity. As the environmental background for our model we employ recently published moisture data. By iteratively applying the synchronic Winterhalder–Kelly model we are able to predict a sequence of general trends that agree with much current interpretation of Fort Ancient development. Specifically, the model leads us to expect increasing village size, the development of regional traditions, and the development of leadership roles and a region-wide style Horizon around AD 1400. However, our model provides the ability to make testable predictions that deviate from the accepted cultural history and predicts that the Middle Ohio Valley and the groups referred to as Fort Ancient were far from homogenous.

We present an evolutionary1 model for the development of the Middle Ohio Valley village agricultural societies collectively referred to as Fort Ancient (ca. AD 1000–1650) (Carskadden and Morton, 1977, Essenpreis, 1982, Graybill, 1981, Griffin, 1966, Henderson, 1992, Mills, 1906 and Prufer and Shane, 1970). Our focus is on explaining increases in social complexity, variability in inter-community interaction, and changing patterns of material culture similarity leading up to the Madisonville Horizon (ca. AD 1400/1450), a region-wide increase in trade and interaction represented by homogenization of style and increasing Mississippian influence (Henderson, 1992).

We have presented a model of cultural response to changes in precipitation for a series of 50-year periods covering 600 years of prehistory. We argue that the model developed by Winterhalder (1986) and modified by Kelly (1995: Chapter 5) is a useful heuristic device for predicting cultural responses to changing environmental conditions. This allows us to predict and investigate deviation from the norms implied by the phases so prevalent in current interpretation in the region. There has been a recent shift in this direction for Ohio Valley Late Prehistoric studies (Cook, 2008, Hart et al., 2005 and Means, 2007), but variation-obscuring phases still dominate most current interpretations in the literature. The database does not currently exist to fully test our model, but the major patterns of the most popular cultural–historic sequence (Pollack and Henderson, 1992) are largely duplicated (see Table 1). For example, settlement patterning constituted of smaller sites from the late Late Woodland (AD 800–1000) into the Early Fort Ancient period (AD 1000–1200) fit with sufficient moisture availability and a history of low spatial and moderate temporal variability