Woodland Cultures
The term "Woodland" was introduced in the 1930s as a generic heading for prehistoric sites falling between the Archaic hunting and gathering and the temple-mound-building Mississippian cultures in the eastern United States.
By the early 1960s, Woodland sites were generally characterized as those that regularly produced pottery and constructed burial mounds that contained elaborate grave goods. Although evidence was lacking, it was assumed that these burial mounds implied an agricultural-based economy to support the construction of these earthworks.
Traditional archeological interpretation of the evolution of prehistoric Native American cultures dictated that there was a clear line of division between Archaic peoples and Woodland pottery-making and agricultural peoples. By the mid-1960s, however, it was evident that in some areas of the United States prehistoric cultural groups with a clearly Archaic cultural assemblage were making pottery without any evidence of the cultivation of domesticated crops. In fact, it appears that hunting and gathering continued as the basic subsistence economy and that true agriculture did not occur in much of the Southeast for a couple of thousand years after the introduction of pottery.
In recent years archeologists in the southeastern United States have addressed the issue of agricultural development by investigating Woodland village sites to learn more about the subsistence patterns of the period. This has sometimes led to establishing cultural chronologies that separate Archaic from Woodland cultures with a transitional stage of cultural development, or to postulating alternative subsistence strategies for the cultures of the Early Woodland period in the Southeast.
In the Southeast, the Woodland period is now generally viewed as a cultural developmental stage or temporal unit dating from about 3,200 to 1,000 years ago (3,000 to 1,000 rcbp). Rather than showing a wholesale change in material culture, archeology has shown a continuity in the development of Archaic and Woodland stone and bone tools for the acquisition, processing, storing, and preparation of animal and plant foods, leather working, textile manufacture, tool production, cultivation, and shelter construction. Some Woodland peoples continued to use Archaic-style spears and atlatls until the Late Woodland period (around 1,200 years ago) when these were replaced by bow and arrow technology. The major technological change in the Woodland period, however, was the emergence of a distinct pottery-making tradition with definite vessel forms and decoration, although in the Southeast, pottery technology apparently began in the Late Archaic. There was also a culmination of an increasing sedentism, which first appeared in the Archaic, into permanently occupied villages.
Of importance was a realization that the subsistence economy of the Woodland period was essentially similar to that of the Archaic period, utilizing seasonal exploitation of wild plants and animals but with the introduction of a system of planting and tending of garden crops and the intensive collecting of starchy seeds and autumnal nuts. This set the stage for agriculture economies of the later Mississippian period. Generally, the Woodland period is divided into three subperiods. The beginning and ending dates for these phases, however, are not consistent throughout the Southeast.
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