How Worlds Collide: Drought and Culture Change in a Late Woodland Frontier

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The interwoven pathways of culture and environment are key to the interpretation of the past. Ancient peoples navigated the complexities of environmental changes through strategic decisions and the management of local landscapes. This dynamic holds true for the Chesapeake region where historically climate was varied and localized while also bucking the macro-regional trends of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. Circa AD 1400, migrants arrived along the Potomac River and into this dynamic climate from the North and West. Their arrival contributed to the development of significant material and cultural changes such as the proliferation of palisades, the emergence of new forms of relationality, and intensified economic activity. In this paper, I discuss the environmental conditions which affected the population movements of the Potomac drainage and the role of climate change in the formation of interactions central to the closing centuries of the Late Woodland period. By treating drought and climate as influential actors, I explore how people strategized social practices to navigate their lived experiences of the environment in a newly formed frontier.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Culture, Climate, and Connections: Eventful Histories of Human-Environment Relations

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52213