Sacred Games, Death, and Renewal in the Ancient Eastern Woodlands: The Ohio Hopewell System of Cult Sodality Heterarchies

Abstract

Sacred Games, Death, and Renewal in the Ancient Eastern Woodlands: The Ohio Hopewell System of Cult Sodality Heterarchies. A. MARTIN BYERS. Alta Mira Press, Lanham, MD, 2011. 558 pp., ill., maps. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-7591-2032-7; $97.99 (e-book), ISBN: 978-0-7591-2034-1.A. Martin Byers's newest book presents another of his attempts at synthesizing Eastern Woodland prehistory. At its base, Sacred Games, Death, and Renewal in the Ancient Eastern Woodlands promotes a new and alternative explanation of Hopewell social organization. The main thesis this book seeks to elucidate is how and why the Middle Woodland (ca. 100 B.C. to A.D. 400) ritual landscape developed in the middle Ohio River valley. On the back cover of this book, Byers's is described as and grounded in empirical data. Some of Byers's ideas are innovative, but radical may be a poor word to describe his current work; sodalities have been proposed as an organizing principle for Hopewellian societies before. In addition, only portions of the book are grounded in empirical data, none of which derives from new or unpublished work. The language used herein is typical of Byers's previous books; the vocabulary is exhausting, and constant rereading of various parts of the text is required to comprehend his thesis. Nonetheless, the amount of work Byers undertook to complete this book should not be dismissed. It is as impressive as it is important because it requires us to consider alternate theories that push the boundaries of current and enduring interpretations of the Hopewell phenomenon.Byers's book is organized into two parts. The first section critically assesses prevailing interpretations of Hopewell social organization and how it developed. His alternative is also presented in this section. The second section outlines how the Ohio Hopewell possibly interacted according to his model. Here Byers discusses specific sites and their significance. Both sections are addressed below.In the introduction Byers outlines his analytical methods and the models he critically tests. He employs what he calls the hermeneutic spiral (p. 15) to create a critical comparison of his models and the existing models of Hopewell social organization. This method consists of delineating situations in which specific social, political, and economic conditions may have developed that led to the creation of landscapes containing burial mounds and geometric earthworks. The two specific models that Byers juxtaposes are described as the monistic modular polity community model (MPC) and the heterarchical polyistic localecentric community model (HPC) (pp. 17-28). The former is identified as the vacant center/dispersed hamlet hypothesis argued for by archaeologists Paul Pacheco and William Dancey. The latter is Byers's model, a version of which he used in 2006 to describe the organization of Mississippian peoples who constructed Cahokia. The primary difference between these two models rests in the nature of sociopolitically decentralized kin-based societies. While the MPC considers Hopewellian societies to be organized along kin-based clans, Byers's HPC regards them as organized in autonomous and decentralized sodalities ordered in relation to seniority and age-sets transcending physical kinship in clans.Moving forward, Byers highlights cultural analogs and cosmological models used to describe nontangible aspects of Hopewell society. He rejects Pacheco's cultural analogs, drawn from the Mapuche of southern Chile, for not fitting the HPC of sodality origins (p. 39). Byers condemns Christopher Carr's arguments for earthen enclosure variation relating to different functions, uses, and community sizes by outlining his perspectives on Hopewell mortuary traditions and material culture in Chapters 3-5. He argues that Carr's of multiple, kin-based communities pooling labor does not properly characterize the variability of the sodality-based Hopewell system (pp. …