Despite almost a century of fieldwork and often excellent reporting, the archaeologist still faces at least two persistent problems in interpreting the Adena cultural landscape. The first of these problems is that Adena has not been defined, at least thus far, in terms of its domestic contexts (camps, hamlets, villages, etc.). Because of this problem we still lack archaeological data on some very basic aspects of this impressive Woodland culture. Perhaps as a result, both professional archaeologists and interested laymen have had free rein to speculate about large areas of Adena society unchecked by archaeological facts. This is hardly to say that Adena did not have a domestic side but to admit to a flaw in the Adena concept as it has been developed and used--it has given us few indications of what every day Adena life might look like. Few would dispute this observation.
Although it is also a product of how archaeologists have "misdefined" Adena, the second problem is of a very different character. Adena (the same can also be said for Hopewell), despite its conceptual limitations, has presented us with impressive variation in what I would call "ritual elements": mounds, earthworks, and associated structures. Concentrating narrowly on the Ohio Valley, I know of no more elaborate a built cultural environment in United States prehistory, even if we have not identified villages. These ritual elements clearly relate to one another, and to a largely hypothetical domestic world, in interesting and possibly unique ways. But this same complexity has invited unchecked speculation. Although a Mound Builder culture may be dead and buried (Thomas 1894), the spirit of the unique and exceptional has persisted.
Adena begs interpretations which embody novel suggestions and which hew a fine line between the effects of these two problems. Without dwelling on the lack of domestic data or overhauling the domestic side of Adena to include the data which are emerging from recent fieldwork, what I would like to do is focus on the second problem the wealth of mounds and earthworks, where there is clearly no dearth of data. A review of the essential site types can, I believe, counter the second problem--their innate and fascinating (and misleading) complexity-and contribute to a resolution of the first.
In this endeavor I owe much to William S. Webb, colleague and peer of Eli Lilly. Webb's monographs of the 1930s and 40s reflect a developing awareness of Adena variability and a commendable ability to question his own interpretations with new explanations. Clearly his development as an archaeologist did not follow a consistent tangent, and he played constantly with the interpretation of the sites he excavated. Despite his interpretive flexibility, a decisive final synthesis escaped him, even though he published two summary volumes with co-workers, The Adena People (Webb and Snow 1945) and The Adena People #2 (Webb and Baby 1957).
It is regretable that Webb did not adequately document his changing interpretations,
for in them lie the germ of a synthesis that eluded him. Instead, we are left
with his decision to let variation speak for itself through an ever-expanding
trait list. The decade of Adena research which followed The Adena People
#2 was to demonstrate that the Adena trait list was remarkably uncommunicative
(Swartz 1971). Webb ignored a built-in interpretive "tension" which existed
in his own Adena site monographs. I would like to play with that tension here,
hopefully pulling forth some new ideas for Adena settlement interpretation which
stem from it.