THE LANGUAGE OF THE MOTIF: AN ANALYSIS OF THE WALKER VILLAGE LATE WOODLAND CERAMICS

The Walker Indian Village (18MO20) is a prehistoric Late Woodland archeological site on a 700-acre island in the Potomac River Piedmont. When placed upon the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, it became the first prehistoric culture site in Maryland. It is currently marked by a scatter of cultural debris in a modern corn field. The owner granted limited access for survey activities, but will not allow excavations. Concentrations of surface debris have made the site a favored target of avocationalists and relic collectors since the late 1920s. Recently, deep plowing has exposed even more material, including a significant amount of freshly broken human bone and pottery. The pottery sherds vary widely in surface finish and pattern design as well as in tempering material. This variety is unknown on other Piedmont sites and cannot be classified using the traditional classification schemes used in the Virginia and Maryland areas. There are no published accounts of the many visits and investigations of this site. This dissertation relates a study of the Village ceramics under the dictates of an hypothesis stating that designs on rim sherd collars and lips are coded messages of social membership. As such, these designs will covary in time and space as iconic symbols that continue in application over significant periods. A corollary statement claims that tools used to create the iconic messages display even longer traditions. Studied as motifs that fall into a limited number of sets based upon tool markings and basic schemata of arrangements, the Walker Village ceramic motifs are compared with those seen in more thoroughly documented sites in other areas. It is demonstrated in terms of motif congruence that this Potomac Piedmont site was occupied on four different occasions by people with ceramic traditions closely akin first, to the Shenks Ferry/Owasco ceramic cultures of Pennsylvania-New York, then the Eastern Ohio-West Virginia-Pennsylvania Fort Ancient traditions (with minimal Mississippian influence), later the Monongahela ceramic traditions of Western Maryland and Pennsylvania, and finally with an Appalachian cotradition from the south.