Multi-Staged Analysis of the Reinhardt Village Community: A Fourteenth Century Central Ohio Community in Context

by Nolan, Kevin C.
Abstract of Doctoral Dissertation
Department of Anthropology
Ohio State University
2010

Many reconstructions and models of the Late Prehistoric period in the Ohio Valley discuss changes in the structure and organization of primary habitations. These changes are often associated with changes in social organization, intra-community relationships, and socio-political complexity. It is also being increasingly recognized that typological Culture Historical narratives often over-simplify or misconstrue actual local trajectories. What is needed to both develop accurate historical narratives and test extant models is a very large sample of communities with a reconstructed organization pattern. Excavation is not an efficient way to increase the size of the known sample of community organization patterns; however, excavation is still the dominant method of archaeological investigation in the region. In this dissertation I illustrate a multi-staged approach to quickly reconstruct the structure of a given archaeological site (irrespective of time period) applied specifically to a Late Prehistoric community in the Middle Scioto Valley: the Reinhardt Village (33PI880). The approach used here begins with a suite of minimally invasive/destructive data-generation techniques (extensive surface survey, intensive surface survey, volumetric shovel testing, gradiometry, magnetic susceptibility, and soil phosphate) supplemented by excavation. The minimally invasive techniques provided most of the salient details regarding settlement structure and if employed iteratively in a regional survey could quickly increase the database to reconstruct local prehistory and test extant models. Specifically, the strategy employed at Reinhardt could be used to reconstruct 2 – 4 community structures in the typical field school, summer season. The results at the Reinhardt site reveal a small, late fourteenth century planned community. The Reinhardt community is organized around an open, oblong plaza oriented northeast-southwest with multiple activity areas roughly concentrically around the plaza. The Reinhardt community varies from a typical plan in that the activity zones are irregularly distributed around the plaza, with an isolated productive area south and outside of the concentric zones. The Reinhardt investigations add to the knowledge of variability of community structure for the Middle Ohio River Valley in general, but specifically for the Middle Late Prehistoric period of the Scioto River Valley. 

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