It has been said that “archaeology is anthropology, or it is nothing.” Yet how can archaeologists recover stories from the past as richly detailed as those a cultural anthropologist might hear from a living informant?
It’s easy to see how we might gain insights into some aspects of ancient lives, such as studying stone spear points to understand hunting practices. But how can we hope to discover such things as whether a newly married couple in pre-contact Ohio would go to live in the husband’s or the wife’s village?
Archaeologist Robert Cook and physical anthropologist Scott Aubry, both with Ohio State University, examined the teeth of ancient American Indians from four sites in southwestern Ohio for clues to the changing patterns of where newlyweds chose to live.
Their results were published in the current issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Everyone’s teeth are slightly different, but people who are related to one another tend to have similarly shaped teeth.
If the women in a village have more variability in the shape and size of their teeth than the men, one could argue that this diversity was a result of women marrying into the villages of other communities. Likewise, if the men in a village exhibit more variability in their teeth, then it’s likely that they’re the ones marrying into that community.
Cook and Aubry carefully measured teeth from four villages of the Fort Ancient culture in southwestern Ohio, which dates from between A.D. 1000 to 1650. Turpin is the oldest of the villages, followed by Anderson and SunWatch. Madisonville is the most recent.
Cook and Aubry performed a statistical analysis of the data and concluded that the teeth of the Turpin women varied more than the men’s, whereas the teeth of men varied more than the women’s at Anderson and SunWatch. At Madisonville, there was no clear difference between the sexes, but the teeth of both men and women exhibited a lot of variability.
Based on these results, Cook and Aubry concluded that in the earliest Fort Ancient villages, the women married into the men’s villages. This makes sense if they still relied heavily on hunting for their livelihood. Men tend to hunt in groups and would have wanted to stay together in their home communities where they were familiar with the hunting grounds.
By the time of the Anderson and SunWatch sites, Fort Ancient people had shifted to a diet of mostly maize. Since women traditionally have had the primary responsibility for growing crops, it would have been important for them to stay together where they were familiar with the local soils and weather. In later Fort Ancient societies, men moved to their wives’ villages.
Madisonville represents a time of dislocation and depopulation when the rules governing where you were supposed to live after getting married broke down. Fort Ancient folk came from all over the region to live at Madisonville.
Cook and Aubry have shown us how the histories of ancient peoples can be written in their teeth. Archaeology provides the means for recovering those lost stories.