There is a strong tendency on our past as contemporary archaeologists to unhesitatingly view mounds and earthworks as central places to which a social group was drawn by respect for its dead and the need to maintain funeral monuments as symbols of corporate group identity, much in the manner of our Own rural historic family cemeteries (Charles and Buikstra 1983, Goldstein 1980). Even beyond the question of cemeteries, there is a parallel tendency to view prehistoric architecture in general, certainly where it occurs with appropriate scale as in the case of large earthworks and mounds, as the spatial locus of social groups. This view, which might familiarly be called the "bullseye" model, is at the core of the somewhat different interpretations of Adena settlement that NVebb developed.
The "C and O pattem" projected each social group with its own burial mound. In this view human groups were dispersed in space, interacting with each other, yet segregating mortuary ritual to strictly corporate structures--mounds, mortuary camps and ceremonial earthworks. Burial inclusion in a mound was a matter of kin group membership tempered, in Webb's thinking, by local status differences.
Webb's "Elkhom pattern" grouped all ritual elements together with domestic settlements to fomm a cohesive whole that was segregated by architecture into specialized activity areas. From the dispersed sites of the Mt. Horeb vicinity Webb interpreted a sense of a larger social group perfomming several stages of ritual behavior, still within a bullseye modd. The nucleated activity cluster was presumably the ritual center of gravity of the local Adena group, simply stated, it was at the center of its corporate hunting and gathering territory. Currently there is no basis for this particular reconstruction.
Given what we know of Adena archaeology, a more appealing schema shifts the ritual centers to the edges of corporate group territories. Thus, altematively, I suggest that the ritual sites represent cooperative activity loci and not corporate expressions of ritual activity. As such, they shifted from being the central places of group territories to loci between different groups that served as hinges between them. Expressive of Brose's emphasis upon cooperation between groups, they represent the architectural expressions of negotiations between groups.
When the possibility of multiple intergroup cooperation is considered, the ritual settlement becomes an increasingly complicated pattern of overlapping territories and interacting corporate groups. At ritual sites, because of that interaction, mounds and circles occurred seemingly in isolation. At the same time, they also clustered, reflecting the complexity of intergroup rdations in specific and scattered contexts.
There has been a lack of studies of Adena ritual sites, specifically as groups of architectural elements. Recent work suggests that this sort of research, getting at the dynamics of site composition, can prove fruitful.
Tuming to paired-post circles, the multiple and non-overlapping circles at the Niebert Site in West Virginia (Clay and Niquette 1989) seem to reflect potentially contemporaneous ritual activities perhaps performed by different social groups. On the other hand, overlapping post alignments, as under the Wright and C and O mounds, suggest sequences of ritual activities through time. Summarizing, grouping of circles reflects both the complex partitioning of ritual space due to social complexity and the continuity in its use through time.
Mounds also clustered for several different reasons. In part, and most obviously, mound clustering represented continuity in the use of a area for burial ritual, from one mound to another, as accretional structures grew to unmanageable size, were completed, and a new mound begun. This sequential development may have been the case at the Wright mound group. The structure of the smaller 15Mm7 may reflect an earlier phase of mortuary activity than the large and complex lSMm6.
Niquette's analysis of the Kirk and Newman mounds in West Virginia suggests that mounds may also have been contemporaneous but distinct in function (Niquette et al 1988). For that mound cluster, he has suggested staged mortuary ritual moving between mound loci. In the first area, represented by the low Kirk mound, appropriate mortuary ritual may have been perfommed in a prepared "staging" area. At the second--the larger Newman mound--the deceased were consigned to sealed graves in an accretional mound.
Because of social stability in certain areas through time, there was continuity in ritual site usage. This could lead to clusters of mounds, perhaps ceremonial circles, and overlapping paired post circles. At other places, because of multiple, overlapping and intertwined social relations between several groups, there was also structural complexity, expressed in clusters of mounds perhaps with differing functions.
One final aspect of the Adena ritual landscape was the ability of its ritual parts to concatenate one another. This is a not very satisfactory way of saying that they had the ability to "link" space together from one type to another by the superimposition of one site type on another. I fund this aspect especially important because it seems to be limited to the Woodland Period.
As a simple and obvious example, at Mt. Horeb Webb excavated a circle of paired posts around the inside of the ditched enclosure. If it is true that paired post circles and circular earthworks enclosed and formatted ritual activity, then those activities were either the same between the two site types, or could be merged, or in some sense were compatible with one another.
In this type of linking it is clear that paired post circles and ceremonial earthen circles were probably alternate definitions of similar ritual space, that of Seeman's mortuary camps. Stills it was perhaps not this simple, for if the two enclosure forms represented different cultural styles, then why combine them in a single structure?
In more complex yet widespread examples, burial mounds were built over both the circular enclosure and the post circle: e.g., at the Biggs site in Greenup County (Hardesty 1967), Morgan Stone in Bath County (Webb 1941a), and the Dominion Land Co. site near Columbus, Ohio (Cramer 1989) to name just a few. In time, the burial mound on the ceremonial circle could grow to considerable size entirely filling the enclosed space. Such was the case at the Adena site (Mills 1902, Seeman, personal communication), at the Gay Mound in Clark County, perhaps at Grave Creek in West Virginia (Hemmings 1984), and at many other mound sites.
In these examples the interpretation of continuity is complicated. Ceremonial circles and burial mounds involved different activities and served quite different functions and to cover the first with the second was to obviate further use of the open ceremonial circle or paired post circle in favor of a redirected use for human burial alone. In this case continuity reflects an apparently radical transformation of one type of ritual space into another.
Concatenation is perhaps another way to express what Olaf Preufer (1964) once caned the vertical organization of Adena, a feature which he contrasted, perhaps in overstatement, with horizontal Hopewellian organization. More correctly, I expect concatenation can be considered more generally as a feature of Ohio Valley Middle Woodland mortuary organization.
I find it difficult to offer an explanation of the significance of concatenation.
At one level it suggests to me that the whole structure of inter-group cooperation
in Adena, and other Woodland groups where it took place, may have gone through
cycles during which ritual cooperation in mortuary was differentially expressed.
If they existed, I assume that such cycles were linked to the life cycles of
cooperating groups. However, I am not prepared at this point to detail this
fascinating relationship between site type and social group evolution.