Mound Centers and Seed Security: A Comparative Analysis of Botanical Assemblages from Middle Woodland Sites in the Lower Illinois Valley

Abstract

The earthen mounds built by the Middle Woodland inhabitants of the Eastern Woodlands have been the focus of archaeological research for more than a century. Within these mounds, excavations have revealed naturalistic art worked on exotic materials from points as distant Wyoming, Ontario, and the Gulf Coast (Carr 2006a, b). At the turn of the twentieth century, the makers of this 2,000-year-old art and architecture were named the Hopewell culture and envisioned as a cohesive and highly sophisticated society inhabiting southern Ohio (Moorehead 1892). In the century since, Hopewell has been transformed into a descriptor of a complex network of exchange and interaction spanning the river valleys of the Eastern Woodlands.