The Armstrong culture were a Hopewell group in the Big Sandy River Valley of Northeastern

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and Western

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from 1 to 500 CE.

Origins

The Armstrong people are thought to have been a regional variant of the Hopewell tradition or a Hopewell influenced

Middle Woodland In the classification of archaeological cultures of North America, the Woodland period of North American pre-Columbian cultures spanned a period from roughly 1000 BCE to European contact in the eastern part of North America, with some archaeolog ...

group who had peacefully mingled with the local

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peoples. Archaeologist Dr. Edward McMichael characterized them as an intrusive Hopewell-like trade culture or a vanguard of Hopewellian tradition that had probably peacefully absorbed the local Adena in the

Kanawha River The Kanawha River ( ) is a tributary of the Ohio River, approximately 97 mi (156 km) long, in the U.S. state of West Virginia. The largest inland waterway in West Virginia, its valley has been a significant industrial region of the st ...

Valley. It is currently thought that their culture slowly evolved into the later Buck Garden people.

Material culture

Ceramics

The Armstrong people made clay pottery with a glazed yellow-orange color. Armstrong

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finish was similar in color to the Peters cord-marked pottery, Cordmarked and Peters Plain ceramics of late western Ohio Hopewell, an oxidized color. ''Peters Cordmarked'' is related to ''McGraw Cordmarked'' of that phase of classic Ohio Hopewell (c. 50 CE) and is considered to be a lineal descendant from that type.

Architecture

Armstrong peoples primarily focused their human resources on long distance trade rather than mass building. Their villages were scattered over a large area and consisted of small round houses. Another feature of their culture was the practice of cremation and the building of small burial mounds in the Big Sandy Valley. They made small flaked knives and corner notched points from Vanport chert from the greater Muskingum River valley area. This period does see the enlarging of the large conical mounds by accretion cremating their dead, depositing their remains in the mounds and then adding new layers of earth over them.

Agriculture

Their limited Eastern Agricultural Complex, agricultural staples were comparable to the previous Adena peoples, with most of its emphasis on vining crops like the climbing string bean, pumpkins (a winter squash) along with some of the earlier summer Squash (plant), squashes. They also grew native cereal Poaceae, grasses, tubers, bulbs and gourds. Maize, although a staple to many later groups of Native Americans in the area, would not reach this area for many centuries after the Armstrong peoples.

References

External links

SOME NOTES ON INDIANS OF THE ALLEGHENY REGION

{{Pre-Columbian North America Hopewellian peoples Pre-Columbian cultures Pre-statehood history of West Virginia Native American history of West Virginia 1st-century establishments 6th-century disestablishments in North America