QuidNunc

Women with obsidian sphere points [Ohio History Connection 2025]

Middle Woodlands Research

Two years ago, I got in touch with Christopher Carr, who had just retired from ASU, when, to my surprise, he responded to my sending him an article I had written about mounds and earthworks I had rediscovered during a trip to Ohio. He offered me a research project, specifically a Neutron Activation Analysis of Ohio household pottery from the Scioto or Hopewell series. This was to start two years from then, this August. The NAA had been done, but the statistical work had come out weird, and he wanted to redo it. Unfortunately, Carr got involved in a project with the Shawnee tribe and decided not to continue. I also tried to volunteer at the Arizona State Museum to get my hands on some sherds, but they are going through a three-year renovation project and their labs are shut down. What I have done is write about the Middle Woodlands, eight articles: An Exercise in Middle Woodland Geometry, which I have just completed. I also wrote three other related articles: What are Categories? Human Categorization, What is Data?, and What is Choice? My purpose for the last two years has been to learn as much as I can about archaeology, anthropology, and the Middle Woodland period. I have learned, but I know that I've barely scratched the surface.

So what's next? I want to think in two-year chunks. I want to do research using the tools of computational archaeology. I have a good skill set in programming, GIS, and statistics. I think the most difficult issue will be access to data sets. Much software is free, and I have access to some commercial systems. Slow run-time may require a faster computer than I currently have, so renting a cloud instance is a possibility. Also, any travel needs to be taken into account.

There are three loose computational domains that I want to work in:

• GIS

• Categorization

• Agent-Based Models

For any of these, one could take a lifetime, so I'd at least want to set a foundation. All data found and created, including all code and geospatial results, would be published and open source.

GIS

When I visited Newark in 2022, the immense size of the Great Circle for some reason didn't register with me. I think perhaps the large trees now growing inside might be making it perceptually smaller. It also might mean that I was not 'seeing' it properly. I mean seeing in the sense of the Buddhist concept of mindfulness. One can look or one can see, there is a big difference. I look at a tree. I see blossoms beginning to bud, I see a caterpillar eating a leaf, I see a nest. I want to be able to encode landscape in the sense of "thick description," a term used by Clifford Geertz to describe the practice of doing anthropology. Whether a thick description can be done within the confines of a GIS is still an open and controversial question; a phenomenological experience, an actual being there, might be necessary. To get an idea of the size of the Great Circle, I paced out the diameter on a street by my house. It fit nicely within the length of this street, and now I have a notion of size based on the distances I walk every day.

The Great Hopewell Road

Possible segments of the Great Hopewell Road have been found near where Squire & Davis say they lost the road in swampland. A couple of questions:

• Are there any other built portions of the road further south?
  

• Did the road lead to Circleville or Chillicothe? Which route would be optimal?

This would involve a workflow for finding portions of the road, optimal routing using modern optimization techniques, including circuit theory, and a continuous viewshed. I would like to establish a horizon and explore wayfinding.

The builders of the earthworks had an intimate knowledge of the landscape. Through GIS, can sufficient knowledge of a landscape be encoded to test out theories on how this landscape impacted the decisions these builders made?

Newark 3D

A 3D model of the Newark Earthworks is needed to experiment with the perceptual and acoustic properties of the structures.

Categorization

Florida

I am starting to believe that Florida holds the key to understanding the cultural fluorescence of the Middle Woodland period. First, I must better understand categorization in archaeology and how to use current computational tools correctly. A statistical analysis is both exploratory and data-centric in that understanding the data is the only way to answer questions about it. A bit of programming in R is in order.

For example, examining the geochemistry of an artifact results in a set of values for different elements; these values are usually measured in percents or parts per million and need to sum to unity. This requirement has implications for the statistics. When percentages are used for measuring the diversity of artifacts at a site, the problem becomes much harder, especially if the dig happened over 40 years ago, when much was tossed or ignored in favor of ‘better’ items.

Earthwork structures

Earthwork form and standard of measure as a classification problem

Agent-Based Models

Cultural Transmission

Along with models of simple economies and decision theory, I want to understand cultural transmission models and perhaps expand them.

In addition to Dr. Carr, I'd like to thank Brad Lepper, John Hancock, and Isaac Ullah for their comments and answers to my questions. Timothy Price for sharing his GIS data with me, and John Volker for his support and for his extraordinary paper, which got this all started. I would also like to thank Chris Lukenbeal, director of the GIST program at the University of Arizona, who got me access to the UA library.

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• Ohio History Connection. Women with Hopewell Obsidian Spear Points - American Indian History Collection -. 2025. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p267401coll7/id/1520/rec/1883.