The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Recently, yet another theory has been proposed, which seeks to explain both the Pleistocene extinctions and the fact that at the same time, the Clovis culture also vanishes from the archaeological record. This coincides with the twelve-hundred-year cold snap known as the Younger Dryas, thought to have been triggered by the breaching of a massive ice dam, sending cold water rushing into the Atlantic from Glacial Lake Iroquois.

  But what if the cause of both the freezing climate and the disappearing Clovis culture came from above? Lately, scientists have been arguing fiercely over the suggestion that a cosmic collision occurred about 12,900 years ago, just as the Younger Dryas began. Perhaps a comet or immense meteor slammed into the earth, setting off global fires, filling the atmosphere with soot and dust, and plunging the world into cold. There is some evidence—controversial though it may be—of such an impact.

  For hundreds of years thereafter, signs of human occupancy are hard to find in much of North America, especially the Northeast. Those who remained, especially in the Southeast, responded to the warming climate and changing environment with new cultures. At the end of the Pleistocene, humans were living in small, highly nomadic bands that subsisted on hunting and gathering. As the temperature warmed—to averages that were, for a time, higher than today’s—those family-based, mobile bands were replaced by more sedentary villages, especially along the coasts and major rivers.

  Archaeologists have tracked not only the shifting material culture—for example, smaller projectiles and ax heads made by patient grinding instead of chipping—but also signs of increasing social sophistication. People were living in larger and larger communities, and with so many willing hands, as early as six thousand years ago they began to build immense earthen mounds, some of which eventually grew into enormous complexes. The oldest, as well as one of the largest, is known as Poverty Point, in Louisiana. It features half a dozen concentric ring mounds bracketing a peninsula—in all, more than seven miles of mounds, on which stood homes for up to a thousand people. The unknown culture that built it had to move almost a million square yards of earth, basketful by basketful.

  Along with local social growth, a continental trade network blossomed. At Poverty Point, archaeologists have found points made of flint from Alabama, the Ozarks, and the Midwest; stone bowls from the southern Appalachians; and decorative copper from the Great Lakes. But the ancient sites also reveal signs of increasing social stress—embedded spear points, healed injuries, crushing skull fractures resulting from blunt objects—probably caused by rising human populations and greater competition for resources. War had come to the First Frontier.

  Around the end of what archaeologists call the Archaic period and the beginning of the Woodland period, about a thousand years ago, three major cultural developments swept Native communities across eastern North America: agriculture, ceramics, and bow-and-arrow technology. All three are usually referred to as “revolutions,” because they reshaped Indian culture in profound ways, but as archaeologists trace their progression through time and across the landscape, their real impact seems to have been more evolutionary than revolutionary.

  Human beings are conservative creatures; we tend to stick with what we know. For thousands of years, boiling water entailed dropping a series of heated rocks into a bowl chipped out of stone or a bag made from closely stitched skins. As the first rocks cooled, they were fished out and replaced with hot ones until the liquid boiled—a tedious and time-consuming process. Pottery that could be heated directly on a fire would have been a radical improvement.

  About 4,500 years ago, a culture known as the Stallings Island people, who lived along the Savannah River in South Carolina and Georgia, made that inventive leap, creating the first ceramic pots found in North America. But revolutionary as it may have been, the innovation didn’t exactly set the world on fire. It took fifteen hundred years for pottery to spread just to the surrounding areas of the coastal plain. By about 1500 b.c., pottery was ubiquitous throughout the Southeast, but it took another two millennia to spread into the Northeast.

  Around the same time that early potters were experimenting with clay, pioneering farmers were learning to grow gourds, squash, sunflowers, maygrass, and goosefoot (an amaranth-like grain related to quinoa). Although agriculture didn’t replace hunting and gathering, it took on an increasingly important role by the beginning of the Woodland period, about 700 b.c., especially in the Southeast.

  One plant whose seeds do not appear in archaeological digs from that time is corn, or maize, which was domesticated in Mexico and did not make its way into the Southeast until about a.d. 175. Given the eventual preeminence of corn in Native life and religion—it was revered as a divinity by everyone from the Cherokee to the Iroquois—you might expect its introduction to have had an immediate and tectonic impact. Instead, like pottery, it took almost a thousand years for corn to become the dominant food crop of eastern Indians living south of New England, where the climate made farming an iffy proposition.

  Weaponry also underwent a dramatic change. Most of the “arrowheads” picked up by generations of rural kids from freshly plowed fields were, in fact, made for spears—not as impressive and elegant as the Clovis points, but made to tip slender throwing-spears, or darts. Such darts were often six or eight feet long, fletched with feathers for stability, and hurled with tremendous force and accuracy using a throwing stick, or atlatl, which greatly magnified the force of the throw.

  Sometime between two thousand and fifteen hundred years ago, however, atlatls and darts were replaced by bows and arrows, which were smaller, lighter, and more portable. An arrow fired from a powerful bow had more velocity and range than a throwing-spear, and it provided far greater versatility. One could shoot from a crouch, from a tree, or while standing motionless, and a trained archer could fire off several arrows in the time it took to fit and throw a dart.

  Here again, the new technology was not universally embraced. Archaeologists have found evidence that in some areas of North America, bows replaced spears almost in an eyeblink. Elsewhere, however, spear throwers lingered for hundreds of years, often used alongside bows before the new technology won out. (An even older technology, the hand-held thrusting spear, lasted right up to the historic era in war and hunting.)

  As technology and agriculture changed, so did social and political organization. In parts of the Southeast, especially west of the Appalachians and in the lower Mississippi Valley, social structure became increasingly complex, and with it the physical infrastructure that these hierarchical societies required. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of huge mounds and plazas, some with no signs of residences; scientists can only assume these were regional ceremonial centers, supported by surrounding communities.

  These mounds are small beer compared with those of the great mound-building cultures along the central and lower Mississippi. By a.d. 1100, the city of Cahokia, close to modern St. Louis, boasted a four-tier, flat-topped pyramid, which was made of 22 million cubic feet of soil and had a base measuring almost a thousand feet on each side. With a population of fifteen thousand to thirty thousand, Cahokia would have put medieval London to shame. It was the largest city north of Mexico until 1775, when New York finally surpassed it. Yet Cahokia was just one of a number of large urban and ceremonial centers in the same region.

  In other parts of the South, such as the highlands of the southern Appalachians, mound building was a considerably more modest undertaking, and the settlements were far smaller. In the Little Tennessee River valley, around a.d. 500, farmers were tilling rich bottomland to grow corn, sunflowers, bedstraw, and maygrass, but much of their food was still coming from the forests and rivers. And because the woodlands and waterways of the southern Appalachians are among the most biologically diverse areas on the planet, it must have seemed like a feast was laid out for the inhabitants during much of the year.

  In summer, wild cherries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries were ripe for the picking. In autumn, a smooth stick
hurled into the trees brought down a shower of hickories, chestnuts, butternuts, and walnuts. Acorns could be ground and processed into a coarse flour. The rivers held fish and dozens of species of freshwater mussels. Excavations have revealed the bones of elk, deer, bears, turkeys, turtles, and raccoons, among many other species. Closer to the coast, not surprisingly, the ocean’s bounty formed the backbone of subsistence, with villages supplementing shellfish, fish, and waterfowl with farming.

  Here, as elsewhere, clay pipes are a common artifact found at old settlement sites, for among the plants grown most enthusiastically was tobacco, one of several species domesticated throughout the Americas. This plant presumably played as important a ritual and religious role in prehistoric life as it did among contact-era Natives. (Ironically, the tobacco grown in the eastern United States today is a different species, Nicotiana tabacum, which originated in South America and was brought to Europe from the Caribbean by Christopher Columbus. Introduced to Virginia by English colonists, it quickly replaced the so-called Aztec tobacco, N. rustica, also originally from Mesoamerica, which in turn had replaced the native N. quadrivalvis—not surprising, given that Aztec tobacco packs up to ten times as much addictive nicotine as the native species.)

  Just as tobacco, stone, and other materials moved across North America in trade, so did ideas, religions, and customs. One of the most remarkable examples of a cultural convergence across an immense area of the continent was what archaeologists call the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex or Southern Cult—deceptive names, since artifacts connected to this belief system have been found from Florida to Texas in the South to the western Great Lakes and Ohio Valley in the North. Cahokia and the other mound complexes were an expression of this cult, which sparked intricate artwork depicting a layered cosmology that—as far as anthropologists can decipher—featured an upper world and an underworld, each with a pantheon of supernatural beings, with the daylight world of humans poised in between. A sacred tree linked all three realms.

  There are similarities between the imagery in Southeastern Ceremonial Complex art and that in art from Central America—to say nothing of the pyramid-like mounds at Cahokia and elsewhere. That has led some people to speculate that the cult was imported from Mesoamerica, although most archaeologists now dismiss the likelihood of any direct connection, since the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex was thousands of miles from the centers of Aztec and Maya culture, and the similarities may be coincidental.

  Trying to understand something as abstract as religion based only on artifacts is an uncertain business at best, as is reconstructing the movements and development of the people who held those beliefs. For example, it appears that most of the Indian cultures of the middle coastal plain remained more or less in place for long periods of time, evolving over thousands of years into the Algonquian-speaking groups that first met Europeans. However, around 500 b.c., new cultures, bringing with them their distinctive pottery styles, pushed into what is now Virginia and the Carolinas. Two thousand years later, these people’s descendants would include the Siouan-speaking Catawba and Tuscarora and the Iroquoian-speaking Tutelo and Saponi.

  By the fifteenth century, the cultural landscape of what would be the First Frontier was incredibly rich—although much of it remains beyond our understanding, populated by people who vanished in the earliest years of European contact. These people left almost no trace in the historical record—nothing but mute remains stratified in the soil of old village sites and camps. This is particularly true of much of interior Florida, the Southeast, and the Appalachian ridges and plateaus west to the Ohio Valley. It’s a telling comment on our ignorance that one of the most authoritative works on the Indians of Florida includes a map whose legend reads, “Peoples about whom something is known.”

  The coastal inhabitants of Florida—primarily the Calusa on the southwest coast and the Timucua in northern Florida and neighboring Georgia—developed radically different cultures, although in the hot subtropical climate, both wore elaborate breechclouts woven of palm fibers and shawls made either of palm fibers or Spanish moss.

  The Calusa were not farmers—with the rich estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico close at hand, they didn’t need to be—but they were ambitious builders, creating complexes of mounds and earthworks, as well as ditches and canals that prefigured the drainage schemes that make “Florida swampland” a punch line today. In fact, the spiderweb of canals radiating out from ceremonial centers in southwestern Florida were probably water trails, some wide and deep enough for decked barges made by lashing enormous dugouts together. The canals facilitated trade and political control, held by chiefs who owed tribute to a paramount leader. One such certepe, or great lord, welcomed Spanish visitors to a vast thatch-roofed house that could hold two thousand people. The few wooden Calusa objects that survive show that they were superb artists, creating vivid masks, carvings of humanlike animals, and decorated plaques.

  General Tribal Territories of the Southeast

  Mapping Native cultural groups and boundaries, especially during the early historical period, is fraught with difficulty. This map depicts generalized Indian territories from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It includes refugee groups such as the Yamasee, which came into existence from the remnants of shattered prehistoric chiefdoms and moved several times between the territory shown here and Spanish Florida. (Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 14, Smithsonian Institution Press)

  The Timucua to the north did not share the Calusa’s rigid, tribute-based hierarchy; there were about thirty-five separate chiefdoms, some loosely allied, stretching from northern Florida up to the Altamaha River in Georgia. Farming was far more important to the Timucua than to the Calusa, and Timucua villages were smaller, as were their houses—circular structures of wood and thatch big enough for a single extended family. French drawings from the mid-1500s show a Timucua man wearing nothing but a woven breechclout, his body heavily tattooed and his hair pulled into a topknot, from which dangles a furry animal tail. A woman, drawn by the same artist, wears a mantle of Spanish moss and earplugs of dyed, inflated fish bladders. Her body is decorated with equally elaborate tattoos.

  Just to the north, inhabiting the Low Country and Sea Islands of northern Georgia, were the Guale, neighbors and apparently frequent enemies of the Timucua. Like almost all Indians associated with the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, the Guale ritually consumed “the black drink,” a potent draft brewed from the caffeine-rich leaves and twigs of the yaupon holly, Ilex vomitoria. The liquid, drunk from decorated whelk shells and apparently spiked with snakeroot and other ingredients, was a purgative used by high-ranking men in cleansing ceremonies. Taken unadulterated, yaupon tea (also known as cassina) imparts a pleasant buzz and for a time actually gave coffee a run for its money among colonial Europeans.

  Calusa? Timucua? These are hardly names that ring a familiar bell with most Americans today. If you know anything about Florida Indians, you are more apt to think of the Seminole—a group actually descended from members of the Creek confederacy in Georgia and Alabama, who didn’t migrate to Florida until the early eighteenth century, becoming known by the Creek word simanoli, meaning “wild” or “undomesticated.”

  Elsewhere in the sixteenth-century South, there were, of course, the Cherokee, who were restricted to the rugged, impossibly beautiful highlands of the southern Appalachians. From those mountains across the Carolinas to the ocean lay a welter of culturally linked villages that the Spaniards termed “the Province of Cofitachequi,” an amalgam of Catawba-speaking chiefdoms. In 1540, these villages may have been ruled by a paramount chieftainess the Spaniards called “the Lady of Cofitachequi,” who was carried about on a ceremonial litter.

  The Manner of Their Fishing

  The watercolors of John White, based on multiple voyages to the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina in the 1580s, provide a unique glimpse of contact-era life among the Algonquians of the Mid-Atlantic coast. Here White shows the use of weirs, spears, and a fire
built in the clay-covered hull of a canoe to lure fish to the surface at night. Among the fish are hammerhead sharks, while pelicans and other water birds fly overhead. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-576)

  In northeastern North Carolina and adjacent Virginia lived several groups speaking closely related dialects of an Iroquoian language. The largest group called themselves skarò·rə̜ʔ “hemp gatherers,” referring to the many uses to which they put dogbane, or Indian hemp, a source of fiber and medicine. From skarò·rə̜ʔ also came the Anglicized name Tuscarora.

  From the Outer Banks north all the way to the subarctic, the eastern seaboard was almost exclusively the realm of the Algonquians. A diverse mix of cultures with prehistoric roots in the North, these groups were related by language but as often at war as at peace with one another. Algonquian, as a language family, bestrode the continent in the sixteenth century, reflecting millennia of human migration. It included not just the eastern Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Atlantic coast, New England, and the Maritime Provinces, but also the Ojibwa, Sauk, Potawatomi, Illinois, Miami, and Shawnee of the Great Lakes and Midwest; the Cree of the Canadian prairies; the Gros Ventre and Blackfoot of the Rockies; and the Cheyenne and Arapaho of the western Great Plains. Most remarkably, the Yurok and Wiyot of northern California also spoke related tongues.

  The southern fringe of Algonquian territory lay in northeastern North Carolina, among groups such as the Roanoke, Croatan, Chawanoke, and Weapemeoc. Ironically, although relatively little is known about the Carolina Algonquians, we have a beguiling glimpse of their daily lives, thanks to a series of delicate watercolors painted by John White in 1585 on Roanoke Island. For many people, White’s paintings are the iconic images of the eastern Algonquians, showing their palisaded villages and arch-roofed bark houses; their gardens and cornfields, the latter with bark shelters on raised platforms, from which a guard (usually a child) could scare off flocks of birds with well-aimed stones; dancers moving around posts carved with human faces; and Indians fishing from a dugout canoe, a hammerhead shark and horseshoe crab in the water below and other people in the background spearing fish or trapping them in a weir.