The Social Implications of Ceramic Style Distributions in Precontact Springwells Communities

Introduction

Here I examine stylistic variation in Springwells phase (ca. AD 1160-1420) (Carroll, 2019; Fitting, 1965; McCullough & Graham, 2010) Native American archaeological ceramics and interpret the geographic distributions of style in the precontact (i.e. before European exploration and colonization) Great Lakes region of North America (Figure 1). Springwells communities located in what is now the Midwestern United States, had dynamic social networks that served a number of purposes. Many archaeologists accept that social networks facilitate moving people, ideas, and materials across the landscape (Hart et al., 2019; Birch & Hart, 2018; Mills, 2017; Mills et al., 2013; Pailes, 2014). If we think about the role of these networks from an emic (insider) perspective, we might consider them as social mechanisms for tracking community and individual identity. For example, these organizational principles might function as a way for people to identify where incoming members are originally from, or people might also use these relationships to define their own group identity while simultaneously creating a sense of outside groups (i.e. socially constructing the “other”) (Bashkow, 2004). Many archaeologists (myself included), often consider etic (outsider) perspectives when constructing interpretations relating to the material correlates of human behavior. For example, we might use artifact attributes to identify how objects move around in a network, using their spatial distributions as a proxy for identifying and elucidating cultural processes in the past.

Figure 1.

Archaeological sites with ceramics included in this study (Carroll, 2019; ESRI, 2011).

I must make a confession here: because of the nature of archaeological data, we often have no choice but to construct narratives from suboptimal datasets. The analysis below is one such account. As a graduate student in search of a dissertation project, I started to notice gaps in the literature regarding what we knew about lifeways in Native American communities in the Great Lakes region post-AD 1000. I combed the literature trying to understand why we know so little about this enigmatic point in prehistory, and I found little satisfaction in realizing that much of the region’s known post-AD 1000 archaeological collections were already analyzed. The majority of these datasets were previously addressed in scholarly theses or dissertations, the so called “Gray Literature” of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) projects reposited in government offices, or in collectors’ basements, and often unreachable to many. Further, performing fieldwork was not practical as many of the known sites in the study area were already excavated, destroyed, or otherwise inaccessible. If I wanted to address a research problem relating to the Springwells phase, I would need to do it by examining already existing collections (see Voss, 2012 for more on the value of revisiting curated collections).

Another archaeological confession I would like to make is that many of us crave big data. Perhaps not the same kind of big data collected on a per-click basis by corporations like Facebook or Google, but we archaeologists have a predisposition for equating confidence with “more stuff.” As I have written before (Carroll, 2019), almost all of us would prefer to have more (rather than less) material culture to interpret, but often we do not control our destiny with respect to sampling the material record. In the absence of ideal datasets, archaeologists have to maximize the interpretive value of the archaeological assemblages at our disposal.

The Role Of Ceramic Style In Reconstructing Social Networks

To paraphrase one of my professors from graduate school, Lynne Goldstein, archaeological data is “messy data.” While it is easy to think of archaeological cultures as cohesive groups interacting within a nice-neat-bounded space, this is simply not the case. People, ideas, and material culture move around, and understanding those distributions and the cultural processes that produced them is central to what anthropological archaeologists do. The goal here is to detect the archaeological signatures of intercommunity social interaction in the distributions of Springwells ceramics scattered throughout the region.