LIFE ON THE FRONTIER

LIFE LIFE

ON THE ON THE FRONTIER FRONTIER

A FEW MILES EAST OF THE NARROW GAP in the Cumberland Mountains where Daniel Boone and his companions blazed a trail into Kentucky, Maureen Meyers is puzzling over another group of settlers. Her subjects are the Mississippian people who built the Carter Robinson Mound and Village in western Virginia and occupied it for 150 years.

The Mississippian culture lasted from roughly A.D. 900 to 1500. The name comes from the Mississippi River Valley that was their stronghold, but these ancient people spread into other parts of the Southeastern U.S., too. The Carter Robinson inhabitants came from Mississippian enclaves in Tennessee, “This was their frontier,” said Meyers, an archaeologist at the University of Mississippi. “We know a lot about Mississippian culture, but not a lot about their interaction with others at the frontiers.”

Meyers’ work at Carter Robinson focuses on the nature of life on the fringes of the Mississippian world. She wants to understand how the location influenced people’s activities. “Frontiers are important places to study because they are generally where people with different backgrounds interact, or that bridge other more densely settled areas,” said Barbara Mills, a University of Arizona archaeologist who is familiar

Researchers excavate the middle structure of the three structures that were built on top of each other.

with frontier research. “They may be conduits for information and resources and places with a high degree of innovation. Understanding social processes that occur on the edges helps to bring other areas into sharper focus.”

Meyers’ current project involves excavating part of the village where three structures were built sequentially, one on top of another. It is her fifth season at Carter Robinson mound and village over the course of twelve years. The mound was first identified in 1962 and was included in C.G. Holland’s Archeological Survey of Southwest Virginia. Published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1970, Holland’s work describes Carter Robinson as well as Ely Mound, a well-documented Mississippian site partially excavated by the Peabody Museum in 1877. (Ely Mound is now a preserve owned by The Archaeological Conservancy)

Unlike Ely Mound—which sits on busy U.S. Route 58— Carter Robinson hasn’t drawn generations of curious visitors. The land was a field of clover when Holland saw it, and it had experienced only minor looting in 2006 when Meyers first approached the long-time owners of the secluded pasture. Granted permission to work here, she began her investigation the following year.

In 2007, a remote sensing survey revealed anomalies that suggested the presence of as many as nine structures, including one on top of the mound, which is ten feet high and 120 feet in diameter. A series of shovel tests uncovered abundant artifacts, including ceramics, tool fragments, animal bones, stone flakes, and other lithic debris. Of the 117 test pits dug, 109 contained artifacts. Because the area at the foot of the mound on the east side was virtually artifact-free, she believes it was an open plaza.

Initially there was some question if Carter Robinson might have been settled by the Radford people, a group indigenous to the area. But the evidence indicated it was built and occupied by the Mississippians. At slightly more than a half an acre, the village was far smaller than vast Mississippian settlements like Cahokia in Illinois or Moundville in Alabama. Nonetheless, the remote-sensing survey and the excavations showed that it conformed to the typical Mississippian layout: a mound facing a public plaza, surrounded by

houses. And the houses were also constructed in the typical Mississippian fashion of weight-bearing poles arranged in the shape of a square, with twigs and other fibrous material woven between the poles to create exterior walls, which were then daubed with clay. Unlike some Mississippian settlements, there’s no evidence of a built-up embankment for defense—“No palisade,” Meyers said. “That tells me things were fairly friendly.”

INDICATIONSARETHAT CARTER ROBINSON’Sresidents settled here to take part in the Mississippians’ expanding trade network. They were interacting with people from regions that had resources they used in craft production, such as cannel coal (a soft coal used to make pendants) and freshwater shells for bead making. And they were 100 miles from salt deposits in what is now the town of Saltville, in southwest Virginia, so they could obtain that valuable commodity via trade. Positioned near the spot where a mountain gap creates a natural travel route, the area is “a trade funnel,” said Meyers. “They could go north, south, east, or west.”

She has also found evidence of trade goods production at Carter Robinson. An excavation of a structure close to the mound uncovered cannel coal artifacts in various stages of completion. The construction technique (trench-set poles) indicates this structure was built during the earliest period of occupation, A.D. 1250 to 1300. The researchers uncovered another structure from the middle period of occupation, 1300 to 1350, with large concentrations of shells and shell beads in various stages of completion, plus ceramic beads and tools, including eighty drills. The material was concentrated in two specific spots in the structure.

“I think [the structure] is a production area,” Meyers said, and a well-organized one at that. “The initial work was being done in one part of the structure, then they moved to another part [to finish the beads.]” The types of ceramics found here—primarily bowls and storage vessels—as well as a large quantity of deer bones suggest that whoever was using the structure was cooking large cuts of meat, so it may have been used for feasting.

Both the cannel coal and the shell-production structures were close to the mound. “At other Mississippian sites, we interpret proximity to the mound as reserved for those who have higher status,” she said. (In some Mississippian settlements, the structure on the mound is believed to be where the chief lived.) Because neither cannel coal nor shell beads are found in abundance in other houses, it suggests to Meyers that making and trading these items was restricted to certain people. This points to a system where elites were the ones

A collection of chunky stones recovered from the site. Chunky was a popular Mississippian game in which the stones were rolled along the ground.

allowed to produce goods and interact with trading partners.

She and her crew have found Radford artifacts at the site, which indicates that Carter Robinson’s residents were interacting with the Radford people, while the village’s architecture suggests they also maintained contact with Mississippians in Tennessee. For example, early houses in both places were built with posts set in a trench; then, when Tennessee Mississippian structures transitioned to posts set in individual holes, so did those at Carter Robinson. So, regardless of how much interaction they had with others, Meyers said, they didn’t lose their fundamental identity.

Nonetheless, their lives were different in some ways. One hallmark of Mississippians—the thing that, according to scholars, accounts for their development as a complex, stable, dominant culture—was intensive maize cultivation in the Mississippi River’s fertile floodplains. But these frontier people living in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains didn’t grow maize or other crops, Meyers said. She’s found a limited amount of shelled corn and, she noted wryly, “one bean.” The household detritus indicates their diet consisted of deer, snakes, fish, turtles, and nuts. THIS SUMMER MEYERS EXCAVATED AN AREA at the edge of the plaza, which is another place of importance. Waving off the sweat bees on a muggy Virginia morning, she stepped into the deepest of the excavation units, which she has labeled Block 3. She pointed out a dark circle marking a posthole that, she believes, was set in the east exterior wall of the first house built here in the early period of occupation—sometime around 1250. Then she pointed to another area where a student removed dirt from a large patch of orange clay. It’s burnt clay, and it’s sandwiched between fairly distinct layers of dirt, household debris, and more clay.

Moving through the excavation site, pointing out postholes and more patches of clay, Meyers described what she believes happened on this spot: three structures were built here, one after the other, and each was occupied for forty to fifty years and then destroyed. She believes the first structure was burned and dirt was thrown on top. Then another structure was built on top of the first one, with postholes dug through the remains of the collapsed structure. A thick midden layer of household debris indicates a second occupation, followed by more burned clay and wood, more dirt,

These are some of the drilled objects found at the site, which consist primarily of shell beads. Four drills are seen in the upper left and right corners. More than seventy-five drills have been found.

and a midden layer that dates to the third occupation.

Figuring out the sequence of what happened at Block 3 has taken a while. In 2008, Meyers and her team excavated what they believe to be the uppermost house, radiocarbon dating material to the village’s late period of occupation, 1350 to 1400. She has returned to reopen Block 3 and excavate the middle house, which coincides with the village’s middle occupation.

Meyers has concluded that each structure was deliberately set on fire. She pointed to her evidence: a broad expanse of burned clay, bordered by sections of two partially unburned logs. “What I see here is the straight line of a wall [that collapsed],” she said. “That suggests to me that it was set on fire, it started to burn, then the wall was pushed in and the fire was extinguished by putting dirt on it before it burned completely.” A house destroyed in an accidental blaze, she said, would be “just be one burned mess.” Portions of five other structures excavated at Carter Robinson haven’t shown a similar destruction/reconstruction pattern; the burning and rebuilding at Block 3 “was very different,” Meyers said. “Something important was going on here.”

There are few beads or tools to suggest goods were being made here. Compared to the other houses, there are not many projectile points, either. Her team has found a typical Mississippian assemblage of cooking and serving ceramics, along with animal bones. But so far, she has not been able to locate a hearth, which is, she noted, “very strange.” Pisgah-style sherds point to interaction with the Pisgah group, a contemporaneous Mississippian group located in western North Carolina. The pottery could mean that the residents of Block 3 had a trade relationship with the Pisgah that Carter Robinson’s other residents didn’t have. Or it might mean that the Pisgah ceramics were reserved for some kind of special activity, for which this house was the setting.

If it was the home of elites, burning and rebuilding might represent the beginning of a new mound, because that’s a pattern that was followed at other Mississippian sites. If it was a place created for a special purpose, one possibility Meyers imagines is that it might have been the location of a hut where women were temporarily secluded during menstruation.

To get a better understanding of what might have happened here, she’ll analyze the artifacts as well as other evidence. For example, she plans to examine the animal bones found at Block 3 and compare them to the bones uncovered at other houses, seeing if there are differences in the amount or kind of food that the occupants had access to. Barbara Mills said that frontiers are “rich in land but poor in labor,” noting that “labor recruitment through feasting and monumental building programs would have been important social processes for bringing people together.”

Meyers hopes to be able to return to finish the excavation of Block 3. This is private land, and she is grateful to the family who has cooperated with her work. “It’s an amazing site,” she said, scanning the gentle peaks of the Appalachian Mountains. “It has been great fun, a privilege. And,” she added, “a head-scratcher.”

LINDA VACCARIELLO is the former executive editor of Cincinnati Magazine. Her article “The Mystery Of The Fort Ancient Transformation” appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of American Archaeology.