The Armstrong people took their name from a creek that flows into the Kanawha River at Mount Carbon, where excavations first identified theirs as a distinct culture. Their villages consisted of scattered circular-shaped houses constructed of poles and woven materials. Cultivation of plants, limited to sunflowers and a few others, had not advanced beyond that of the Adena period. The Armstrong people continued to build small earthen mounds, but they also practiced cremation on a considerable scale. Their pottery, one of the most distinctive features of their culture, was thin, tempered with particles of clay, and fired so that surfaces were oxidized, leaving an orange-yellow color.
The Wilhelm culture, prominent in the Northern Panhandle and adjacent parts of Pennsylvania, coincided with the Armstrong culture on the Kanawha. An excavation in Brooke County first drew attention to the distinctive practice of the Wilhelm people of building small mounds over individual stone-lined graves and then fusing several graves together into a single large mound.
Later Hopewellian variants included the Buck Garden and Watson Farm stone mound builders, who succeeded the Armstrong and Wilhelm cultures, respectively. The change from Armstrong to Buck Garden, first identified at a rock shelter at Buck Garden Creek, Nicholas County, was gradual and under way about A.C.500. Buck Garden folk probably built many of the stone mounds of central West Virginia, but they also buried their dead under overhanging rock formations. Greater attention to agriculture, into which they introduced the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash, combined with defense needs to foster a more compact village life. Excavations at Mount Carbon have shown that the Buck Garden people were driven from the Kanawha Valley, but they probably continued to live in the hills on both sides of the river for some time. By about A.C.1200 their culture had all but disappeared.
Watson Farm people dominated the Northern Panhandle and adjacent regions from about A.C. 500 to about 1000. Like their Buck Garden contemporaries, they lived in compact villages and cultivated corn, squash, and beans. They evidently abandoned the use of individual cists and included many burials in one mound. The Watson Farm Mound in Hancock County and the Fairchance Mound near Moundsville have yielded much information regarding their modes of life.
Hopewellian influence among mound builders of mountainous areas of West Virginia is somewhat obscure. Artifacts from mounds at Romney and in the Tygart Valley, in Randolph County, show characteristics indicating that a distinct Hopewellian culture prevailed contemporaneously with the Buck Garden and Watson Farm variants. Nevertheless, the frequent and widespread contacts among earlier Hopewellian peoples began to diminish about A.C. 500. All of the related cultures began to place less emphasis upon moundbuilding and to give greater attention to the living. Warfare became common and gave rise to special concern for defense.
Late Prehistoric Village Farmers. Mississippian culture, which developed around Saint Louis between A.C. 800 and 900, spread eastward and dominated the eastern United States at the time of the arrival of Europeans. In West Virginia, Mississippian influences were strongest in the Ohio and Kanawha valleys. Middle Woodland traits persisted in mountainous areas. The new culture was marked by city-state political organizations, priest-temple cults, compact towns serving as centers for outlying villages, large flat-topped pyramidal mounds for temples or homes, and wattle and daubed houses with thatched roofs. Where it prevailed, permanent villages sprang up, particularly in river valleys, and population increased in density. To sustain the growth, residents turned to a much more intensive cultivation of corn, beans, squash, and other plants.
During the Late Prehistoric period, Fort Ancient people replaced the Buck Garden with a blend of Mississippian and Middle Woodland cultures. They usually lived in oval-shaped stockaded villages of several hundred inhabitants and consisting of a single row of houses built around an open plaza. The houses, about thirty feet long and from eighteen to twenty feet wide, had sidewalls of saplings, probably covered with bark or hides, and roofs of thatch supported by two interior center posts. Some houses had small basin-shaped fire pits inside. Early Fort Ancient burials were inside the village, with the dead usually placed in a flexed position. Sometimes there were grave offerings, such as strings of bone beads with alternating cannel coal pendants.
Villages and houses both became larger in the later Fort Ancient period. As many as three concentric rows of houses appeared inside the stockades, and populations numbered from 1,000 to 1,500. Advances in horticulture and the protection afforded by larger political units in an era of mounting warfare probably account for the greater size of villages. Rectangular houses measured up to fifty or sixty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. Roof supports invariably consisted of three large center posts and six or seven secondary center supports midway between the sidewalls and the main posts.
Later Fort Ancient burials were inside the houses, under the floors. Prolonged use of some houses necessitated the stacking of burials along the inside walls. Grave offerings were rare, except for some pottery vessels, presumably with food for the departed. Other artifacts include shell-tempered pottery, often with strap handles; small crudely worked figurines of human beings and animals; elbow pipes; and a large assortment of flint and bone objects and tools. Toward the end of the period, southern influences led to rather extensive use of lizards and fish in designs.
The Monongahela culture, found in the northern part of the state and in western Pennsylvania, closely resembled the Fort Ancient. Villages, usually smaller than Fort Ancient, seldom covered more than two acres and were enclosed by circular stockades. The dome-shaped houses were of pole and bark construction. Many had pear-shaped pits, probably for storage. Both Monongahela and Fort Ancient people moved their villages often, evidently to find fresh soil for crops and areas where game had not been depleted. The Monongahelans continued to build small stone mounds well into late prehistoric times.3
Petroglyphs. All parts of West Virginia have yielded petroglyphs, or rock carvings, made by Indians. One type, often a maze of grooves and commonly called “turkey tracks,” is usually found under rock overhangs. Sometimes regarded as a form of picture writing, it now seems more likely that they were made in sharpening stone or bone tools.
Perhaps more interesting are pictographs with representations of human figures, birds, deer, snakes, puma or dog-like animals, fish, turtles, and abstract designs. Numerous pictographs have been found in the vicinity of Morgantown, in the Northern Panhandle, near Salt Rock in Cabell County, at Beards Fork in Fayette County, and along the Kanawha River. Most of them were probably the work of Fort Ancient or Monogahela people.
The Protohistoric Period. The discovery of glass beads, brass kettles, and iron objects in excavations of some Fort Ancient and Monongahela sites indicates that they were inhabited in historic times, or after the arrival of Europeans in America. Indians of West Virginia who had indirect trading contacts with Europeans are better described as protohistorie rather than prehistoric.
Identification of Fort Ancient and Monongahela cultures with specific historic tribes is at present educated guesswork. The Moneton town on the Kanawha River visited by Gabriel Arthur in 1674 may have been one of the Fort Ancient sites that have yielded European trading goods. The Monetons may have been Shawnee, possibly remnants of the Western Shawnee who appear to have introduced Fort Ancient culture into West Virginia but were living along the Cumberland River in Kentucky and Tennessee when Europeans first found them.
Association of any tribal group with the Monongahela culture is more difficult. One early reference mentions the Honniasonkeronons, or Black Mingua, in the area, but it is possible that the Monongahela culture was that of the Eastern Shawnee whom Europeans first encountered in the Carolinas. The Monongahela people appear to have left the upper Ohio Valley during the protohistorie era for the Potomac Valley, and from there they evidently moved southward.
Artifacts from several sites along the South Branch of the Potomac, including trading goods and pottery, are unmistakably Susquehannock. The Susquehannocks pushed