The Hughes village site: A Late Woodland community in the Potomac Piedmont

This study examines archaeological data from the Hughes site in the context of historical processes evident in the regional archaeological record. The study focuses on the Hughes village as a particular form of Late Woodland residential community that was historically linked to social and economic practices that are first documented in the region nearly four thousand years ago during the Transitional period. The historical context of the Hughes site is established in the first part of this study through the review and interpretation of archaeological data from various sites within the Potomac Piedmont and within the larger Potomac Valley and Middle Atlantic region. These data are examined from multiple perspectives, including the history of resource use and occupation of the Piedmont relative to surrounding areas, the histories of selected social and economic practices involved in long-term processes of culture change, and the history of the cultural group with whom the residents of the Hughes site were most closely related. The remainder of the study focuses explicitly on the Hughes village site, beginning with a review of the archaeological data recovered during previous and more recent excavations and concluding with an examination of the cultural landscape of the region during the site's occupation and the social construction of the Hughes village community. Data related to site structure, village economy, and stylistic expression at the site suggest that the residents of the site were adaptive, economically self-sufficient, egalitarian in terms of access to resources, socially undifferentiated, and that they represented themselves as a unified social entity. The burial data from the site, on the other hand, suggest that the village was composed of multiple subgroups that likely maintained a degree of social distance, had different conceptions of the role of the individual in communal life, and possibly had differential access to external relationships. This internal tension, together with external tension rising from their occupation of a strategic location on the Potomac River ca. 1400 A.D., may have precipitated the abandonment of the site and probable move to a location in the Shenandoah Valley.