Mystery of the Monongahela Culture: Archaeology at Foley Farm
Written by James Herbstritt in the Features category and the Summer 1984 issue Topics in this article: archaeology, architecture and architects, artifacts, burial accoutrements, Chesapeake Bay, Chickasaw, Creek Cherokee, Dr. Paul R. Stewart Chapter, Dutch, English, Foley Farm, Fort Ancient, Fort Pitt Museum, French, Greene County, housing, Jack's Mountain, Mary Butler, Monongahela Valley, Monongahela Woodland Culture, museums, Native Americans, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Potomac Valley, pottery, Powhatan Chiefdom, Protohistoric Monongahela Period, Richard T. Foley Sr., Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology, Spain, Susquehannock Indians, Swedes, Upper Ohio Valley, village design, Works Progress Administration (WPA)In 1939, anthropologist Mary Butler identified and formally named the Monongahela Woodland Culture, a prehistoric Indian way of life centered in the Monongahela Valley of southwestern Pennsylvania, western Maryland and parts of northern West Virginia. Dr. Butler’s reasons for naming this prehistoric Indian culture were, in part, based on archaeological investigations sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), three of which were undertaken in Somerset County, that uncovered traces of villages, fortifications and burials characteristic of the unique culture. Today, archaeologists, prehistorians and enthnohistorians are endeavoring to unravel the culture’s anthropological-sociological dimension, still a mystery, which developed in the Upper Ohio Valley region during a period of some six hundred years – and then vanished without a trace!
For reasons still unclear, during the beginning of the Protohistoric Period, A.D. 1575-1630, the time span antedating physical contact between native Upper Ohioans and Europeans, most of the few surviving groups of the Monongahela Culture relocated their settlements from the main river valleys to extremely isolated regions nearby. One of these sites in western Greene County, known now as the Foley Farm, was extensively examined by both amateur and professional archaeologists to provide answers to numerous puzzling questions about the inhabitants who lived in the small village at the turn of the seventeenth century.
The questions posed were, indeed, manifold. For one, the composition of a Protohistoric Monongahela settlement was, simply, unknown. This was, in itself intriguing and relevant to any serious archaeological study. Other questions baffled archaeologists: Did the people of the village live in the same type of communities as did their predecessors of Somerset County? Were their households markedly similar or different? Did the villagers erect a palisade wall around the settlement for protection? What kinds of animals were hunted and trapped as sources of food, as well as for raw materials for implements and clothing? Did their edible plants grow wild, or were they cultivated in garden plots and nearby fields?
Previous research did disclose that articles of European origin and manufacture – glass beads, brass kettle scraps, iron knives – found their way, curiously enough, into the hands of the Monongahela people who once inhabited places such as Foley Farm. But how did these foreign items arrive there and, more important, who brought them? Documentation suggests that small-scale trading between the early French and native populations was carried out in the Chesapeake Bay area as early as 1546, but would it be possible to trace and untangle the complex networks through which European objects filtered to their inland settlements some fifty years later?
Only archaeological excavations and subsequent intensive analysis of the findings might provide possible answers to the inexplicable ponderings. And the Foley Farm site just might offer some conclusive evidence ….
Archaeology at Foley Farm began accidentally in 1971 when owner Richard T. Foley, Sr., discovered unusual pottery sherds (fragments of broken day containers) and great quantities of animal bone and other debris during spring planting. Recognizing the significance of his discovery, Foley immediately contacted members of the Paul R. Stewart Chapter of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology, who confirmed his findings. For three years the archaeologists coordinated excavations which eventually revealed that the area was used by the people of the Monongahela Culture for the disposal of trash. Butchered and smashed animal bones, stone implements and thousands of pottery sherds similar to those originally uncovered by Foley were retrieved. Several items clearly of European origin and dating to the turn of the seventeenth century were also found, demonstrating, beyond doubt, that the Foley Farm site was inhabited by people of Monongahela Culture at the beginning of the Protohistoric Period. These initial discoveries also revealed that the location of the village lay elsewhere and not where the trash deposit was found.
It was not until the autumn of 1982 that Foley Farm was seriously considered as a possible source for addressing and interpreting crucial questions about the Upper Ohio Valley’s distinctive Protohistoric Monongahela Culture, which continued to defy description and definition. Approached for permission to conduct further investigations on this property, an enthusiastic Foley encouraged archaeologists to continue their search to locate the settlement site and, if found, to discern through systematic excavation, the types and sizes of community structures that the inhabitants constructed, including dwellings, wall fortifications, courtyards or plazas.
The intensive seven week archaeological excavation was undertaken in 1983 by the Division of Archaeology, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, with funding provided by the agency’s grant program for professional and program incentives. The project was administered by the Fort Pitt Museum Associates, and the actual fieldwork was carried out by a trained crew of professional archaeologists and university students. The archaeologists’ first phase involved the orderly mapping of the suspected village location on a structured grid system and establishing necessary reference (datum) point determinants using cardinal points of the compass and existing landmarks. Through this technique, the entire area was carefully mapped and the grid correlated to the excavations undertaken eleven years earlier.
More than 32,000 square feet of plow-turned soil were removed from the suspected settlement location with the aid of power equipment, and the surface was cleaned with handtools to remove any of the remaining plowzone. Dark discolorations in the soil uncovered by hand cleaning were duly recorded and mapped. Pits, depressions filled with refuse, were logged and photographed. Following excavation, soils from these features were waterscreened through one-eighth-inch hardware cloth to recover fragile objects discarded by the villagers, including fish bones and scales or bones of tiny mammals. Frequently, these “ecofacts,” or non-artifactual objects found at archaeological sites which offer clues about the environment, are overlooked by excavators, but they are exceedingly crucial in reconstructing various facets of prehistoric nutrition.
Constant volume samples of soil from the pits were also taken for laboratory processing to identify the presence of other ecofacts such as seeds and plant pollens which might have survived in the acidic soils. If found, the seeds and pollens would greatly enhance the possibilities of determining environmental change and thereby isolate the range of plants and animals available to the villagers for food and raw materials, for building shelters and tools.
Remnants of decomposed house-wall posts called postmolds were discovered at the site. These discolorations in the subsoil, traced by careful and painstaking excavation, aided in determining the original structure dimensions. By connecting the postmolds – which can be likened to connecting dots in a child’s workbook – archaeologists during the seven week venture reconstructed the village plan, which was made up of two concentric arrangements of houses. The smaller of the two configurations was designed to lie within a larger outer ring of structures, forming the center ring of houses and constituting the main portion of the excavation area. The outside circle forms the boundaries of the actual village settlement. The constellation of the structures’ remains exhibits remarkable neatness and order, implying a well-structured community organization and settlement pattern.
Postmold evidence also indicates that the typical residential building averaged about 18 to 20 feet in diameter. Unfortunately, methodology for determining the heights of such structures has not been adequately developed and can only be conjectured. Some archaeologists have implied that the Monongahela Culture’s houses were fashioned in wigwam style, or, when viewed at eye level, in a “beehive” configuration. Although this general arbor style may have been true at several sites, the postmold evidence at Foley Farm suggests that an alternative style of house building was in vogue. Dwellings at Foley Farm had heavy pole frames interlaced with supports to provide greater strength over which bark or marsh grass was placed. Unlike wigwam roofs, the village’s structures appear to have been capped by conical roofing. Some of the dwellings had an attached unit in which families stored household goods and personal possessions. At the same time, these small units may have been used in much the same way as a modern sauna – archaeologists uncovered heat-shattered rock piles neatly placed within their boundaries. At sites similar to Foley Farm, these household compartments usually had shed-shaped roofs, dictated in style by the distinctive conical roofs of the structures to which they were attached.
Each household was equipped with a firebasin, a shallow depression in the dirt floor lined with hand-plastered day. Through the careful techniques of archaeology several were discovered, some of which still bear their maker’s faint palm prints. Repeated use rendered the firebasin brick hard, making cleaning of ashes and charcoal somewhat easier. As the focal point of each household, the firebasin provided not only warmth and a place for cooking, but it undoubtedly provided light for crafting, games-playing and other evening activities. Usually two, sometimes three, circular pits were located near the central firebasin, often carefully lined with stones to prevent their walls from collapsing. Occasionally the excavated pits contained broken pottery vessels, although they most often yielded parched corn, wild plant seeds and other foodstuffs – mute testimony to their purpose as food storage pits.
Although the firebasin and accompanying small rocklined food storage pits occupied the central section of the structures, the area was also used as a burial place by the Protohistoric Monongahela villagers. When a child died, the corpse was bundled in fringed buckskin and placed beneath the floor of its former residence near the firebasin. Personal possessions usually placed with the deceased commonly comprised a necklace or bracelet of glass beads or metal tinklers serving as noisemakers. Occasionally a small pottery container held a meal and, rarely, a few skillfully crafted stone balls which may have been used by the child as toys. The placement of offerings with the deceased implies that the inhabitants had a complex cosmology which included belief in the supernatural and life after death.
Analysis substantiates that a fair number of the village’s children were victims of acquired iron deficiency anemia which may have been induced by the consumption of great quantities of corn. Telltale signs of Ute disease show up as reactive bone lesions (arrested bone abnormalities) inside the eye orbits of the skull and as unusual distorted enamel flaws in the teeth. Interestingly enough, adult remains at the site were not found, indicating that the corpses of the older villagers were disposed of in an entirely different manner, one which still eludes today’s researchers.
Areas surrounding the firebasin, food storage pits and burial chambers were outfitted with bedracks, constructed by lashing a pole frame onto the wall and a square configuration of inner roof supports that breached the center of each dwelling. The beds also served as platforms for sitting and lounging.
Archaeology has indicated that the Protohistoric Monongahela households were maintained in less than sanitary conditions; archaeologists uncovered garbage or midden deposits containing both inorganic and organic remains: wood ash, potsherds, freshwater mussel shells from the creek (used as a food source), and an abundance of charred plants and butchered animal bones. On one of the excavated living floors, the refuse was easily traced along the walls and even beyond the household confines where it had been casually, almost carelessly, swept aside. The diversity of the butchered bones excavated from these garbage middens proves, unequivocally, that the villagers were accomplished gatherers, hunters, trappers and fishermen.
The butchered bones also yielded clues as to the types of animals the villagers hunted for food. Of the total identifiable bone remains, 48 percent were attributed to the whitetail deer, more than Likely slaughtered by scheduled mass drives and opportunistic harvestings. Elk, bear and most of the 33 mammal, bird, fish, reptile and amphibian species identified during excavation of the middens were also valued by the villagers as sources of protein, particularly because most – with the exception of reptiles, migratory fowl and amphibians – were available year-round. The middens also contained other butchered bones – those of dogs, whose presence not only signifies that they were raised but, on occasion, also eaten. Punctures and gnaw fractures noted on many of the other animal bones indicate that the dogs scavenged the village for carrion. In all probability, dogs were primarily kept by the villagers to sound the alarm at the approach of intruders.
Without question, the most unusual and fascinating discovery made among the postmold patterns at Foley Farm was the remains of a large, centrally located structure. This curious pattern of postmolds had many appendages that, in many respects, were not unlike the singularly attached compartments affixed to the individual households. The central structure incorporated the compartments in a sort of petal pattern – much like that of a flower – when viewed from above. Gutters were dug around the base of each appendage in which run-off water during rainy periods drained as a means to keep them dry.
Unlike the surrounding households, the central structure contained neither food storage pits nor burial chambers, but it did feature a large centrally located firebasin lined with plastered clay. The absence of ancillary pits for storage and burial leads one to believe that it was not a dwelling, but several hypotheses regarding the structure’s utility have been offered. One possibility is that it may have served as a men’s house where priests and shamans congregated to perform such rituals as the rites of passage. Another possibility is that the structure may have functioned as a communal or council house during special times of the year as is ethnohistorically documented for the Creek, Cherokee and Chickasaw settlements of the southeast woodlands. Archaeologists will continue testing these and other hypotheses through future excavations and studies of Protohistoric Monongahela settlements.
Archaeological investigations undertaken at Foley Farm have uncovered samplings of the Monongahela’s material culture which have, among other things, proven a long tradition of native technology. There seems to have been very little change in the culture’s ceramic, stone, bone and shell industries. The traditions span at least six centuries, from the Monongahela’s formative stages as a major prehistoric Indian culture of the Upper Ohio Valley to its final phase at the turn of the seventeenth century, when these long-lived technologies were eventually eroded by indirect European trade. In this case, the resulting acculturation (interaction between two or more markedly different cultures) was caused by the dominant European culture which caused the subordinated native culture to alter or relinquish most of its traditions.
From the very beginning, the acculturating trade ventures favored the Europeans, who exchanged worthless trinkets of glass, low grade metals, even foreign diseases, for the natives’ valuable furs. Among the first to actively participate in the New World trading negotiations were the French and the Spanish, who were shortly followed by the Dutch, Swedes and English in grasping for the new frontier’s untapped resources. European trade objects filtered into the Upper Ohio Valley through native middlemen at the opening of the seventeenth century. The middlemen were entrepreneurs, as shrewd, perhaps, as their European counterparts. Susquehannocks of the Lower Susquehanna Valley may have been foremost in these inter-tribal ventures, but others who probably participated may have been the Powhatan Chiefdom and the Siouan cultures of Tidewater Virginia.
Forty-five years ago, Dr. Mary Butler noted relationships between the Monongahela and an Indian culture located along the Ohio River known as Fort Ancient, whose settlements were large and populous. According to archaeological analysis, some of the native shell objects and European glass beads found at the Fort Ancient settlements may have been carried by native middlemen, whose relations with the Europeans were firmly established, into the region through trade routes along the James and New rivers. Similar objects have been discovered at the sites of Protohistoric Monongahela villages. Occasionally, the Monongahela villages also contain late Fort Ancient pottery types and brass baubles fashioned from kettle scraps and cut into unusual zoomorphic shapes. Consequently, these artifact associations indicated that there was, indeed, contact between the two cultures.
Sometime during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, or shortly thereafter, the Monongahela Culture faded into oblivion. The point in time was a crucial one-it was hallmarked by dissension, pestilence and, ultimately, the extinction of the Monongahela and many other North American native cultures.
The final path trod by the Monongahela people will doubtless never be known. Some archaeologists and ethnohistorians favor theories that they moved south to the Potomac Valley and beyond to become the eastern Shawnee of historic times. Others theorize, based on similarities discerned in material things, that the Monongahela were absorbed by the populous and powerful Fort Ancient culture. Nevertheless, the careful and systematic archaeology at Foley Farm provides a glimpse of one of the last Monongahela settlements. But, above all, what was learned during the tedious and painstaking process?
Most important, a major Protohistoric Period occupation of the Upper Ohio Valley was identified and described. It has been proven that the composition of a late period (Protohistoric) Monongahela village is comparatively different from its earlier counterparts of the Upper Ohio Valley where a courtyard and plaza were important considerations in settlement design and layout. Household function is also distinctly different; not only were the structures residential, but they also served for the burial of children. The appendages of the structures contained the carefully arranged burned rock piles which were used, in conjunction with water, to induce sweating.
Although a fortification or palisaded wall could neither be confirmed nor refuted due to unavoidable time constraints on the archaeological project, the unique central structure situated within two rings of encircling households was an unanticipated and exciting discovery. The village layout demonstrates, to the very end, that Foley Farm’s villagers had a well-structured social organization. The village design, together with the household architecture and burial accoutrements, demonstrates that their cosmological beliefs and world views were important aspects of life. Despite several centuries of progress, the maladies plaguing the juvenile population of Foley Farm still affect modern Third World societies.
For certain, all facts regarding the Monongahela Culture are not – nor ever will be – known. New information, perhaps, will be gleaned by subsequent archaeology at Foley Farm and sites similar to it, but much will remain forever lost, vanished much like Mary Butler’s Monongahela people.
For Further Reading
Kent, Barry C. Discovering Pennsylvania’s Archaeological Heritage. Harrisburg, Pa.: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1980.
Kent, Barry C., Ira F. Smith III and Catherine McCann, eds. Foundations of Pennsylvania Prehistory. Anthropological Series of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, no. 1. Harrisburg, Pa.: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1971.
Mayer-Oakes, William J. Prehistory of the Upper Ohio Valley: An Introductory Archaeological Study. Annals of the Carnegie Museum, vol. 34; Anthropological Series, no. 2. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute Museum, 1955.
Wallace, Paul A. W. Indians in Pennsylvania (rev. ed). Anthropological Series of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, no. 5. Harrisburg, Pa.: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1981.
James T. Herbstritt, director of field operations at Foley Farm, has been associated with the PHMC’s archaeology program since 1975. His research interests include Monongahela Culture systemics and paleonutrition; he has authored articles on the archaeology of Pennsylvania and its native Indian cultures. Presently, he is engaged in computerizing the Commonwealth’s archaeological site survey files at the Commission’s Division of Archaeology.