The Middle Woodland period (ca. 200 BC–AD 600) in eastern North America has long been recognized as an era of extensive interregional connectivity, most famously in association with the Hopewell Interaction Sphere that was centered on present-day southern Ohio but that spanned much of the continent. Understanding how widespread interactions and practices influenced diverse “local” cultures and, in turn, how various far-flung communities contributed to the greater Hopewell phenomenon, has proved challenging. With Garden Creek, Alice Wright brings to this problem a fresh perspective, new data, and a masterful synthesis of existing data, making for a landmark study in the southern Appalachian region and an exemplary case to emulate in investigations of similar phenomena in other areas of the world.
The book counters the commonly perceived marginality of southern Appalachian peoples as compared to population centers outside the region, drawing parallels between the recent and ancient past. In both cases, Wright argues, people pursued connections with distant communities and made significant—and sometimes unintended—contributions to greater North American history.
The tension inherent in intersections of local, regional, and interregional scales; core and periphery; and homogenization and heterogeneity is confronted head on, with world systems models and postcolonial theories of hybridity thoughtfully critiqued in favor of notions of globalization and “glocalization.” Justin Jennings's (Globalizations and the Ancient World, 2011) appraisal of Hopewell as failing to constitute a premodern “global culture” based on an extensive list of criteria provides inspiration for considering sustained culture contact on “peripheries.” Even more so than globalization, Wright argues, glocalization is the key to understanding network peripheries. Coined by sociologist Roland Robertson (“Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, edited by Michael Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, 1995), “glocalization” emphasizes locally distinct adaptations of widespread practices and values. In the case of Middle Woodland Appalachia, these local manifestations played a reciprocal role in creating the larger Hopewell world.
Wright tackles glocalization and globalization from the vantage point of distinctive monumental traditions and accompanying archaeological features. With the premise that monuments are inscriptions of interactions on the landscape, her approach to the built environment of the Garden Creek site is biographical and traces the contextualized details of construction, use, and reuse of various site locales. The biographical approach is carried out through interrogation of specific domains and datasets that include social stratigraphy (emphasizing the practices and techniques by which strata are formed), monument energetics (estimating the energy required to build monuments), and radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modeling (by which life histories of deposits are positioned in time).
Following an introduction to archaeologies of interaction (Chapter 1) and an overview of the Middle Woodland in Appalachia (Chapter 2), the biographies of the platform mound (Chapter 3), the geometric enclosure (Chapter 4), and the occupation area (Chapter 5) are each considered in turn.
Records of excavations in Mound 2 by Bennie Keel during the 1960s are probed to reveal the outlines of 11 structures of various sizes and orientation—all but one constructed before the mound was extant. Although the presence of a platform mound surely points to interactions with populations in the Southeast, Wright presents a compendium of data showing local variations across the region in mound size, shape, and apparent function, and she recognizes that burned structure floors on mound summits—perhaps a kind of ritual closing event—are a southern Appalachian phenomenon and a sign of glocalization.
Using a combination of geophysical methods, Wright's team discovered two small “squircle”-shaped geometric enclosures, with partial excavation of one revealing a ditch deliberately filled with various sediments, crafting debris of crystal quartz and sheet mica, and postholes filled with river cobbles. The architectural grammar, artifact assemblages, and timing (predating the platform mound) are suggestive of connections to contemporaneous Hopewell sites in the Ohio Valley, presumably through travel of Appalachian residents identified by exclusively local ceramics at Garden Creek.
Geophysical survey of off-mound occupation areas also indicated relatively sparse habitation throughout the site history, more consistent with Midwestern Hopewell “vacant ceremonial centers” than Deep South “civic-ceremonial centers.”
The final chapter presents a narrative history of Garden Creek in which local site features are hallmarks of globalization and glocalization, demonstrating aspects of homogenization, heterogeneity, standardization, deterritorialization, and time-space compression in the Eastern Woodlands. Wright not only shows how midwestern and southeastern culture contacts converged through distinctive inscriptions on the Garden Creek landscape but also suggests how tensions with local practices and sensibilities may have shaped the contours of interregional connectivity itself.
Production quality is overall quite high, and the book is richly illustrated with many maps and photographs. However, this careful reader observed missing text in the break between pages 20 and 21. Otherwise flawless, this book is an important benchmark in the study of past globalizations and cross-cultural connections more generally.
