Monongahela culture

[5] Monongahela villages originated on flood plains, but by 1250, the people had migrated to the watershed highlands and often lived on gaps between ridges.

Archaeologists speculate that the move to these areas, and construction of larger, fortified villages at this time was a symptom of intergroup warfare.

It is located within the Blacksville USGS Quadrangle, as is the recently found Wana village site, which was revealed by infrared photography.

(Mayer-Oakes’ 1955) To quote the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Lab, "Monongahela ceramics are a complex series that begin with an early grit or limestone tempered group and end with a very anomalous collection of types found in southwestern Pennsylvania during the post-Contact period.

"[8] According to the collaborative research of 2009 of William C. Johnson (Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology) and D. Scott Speedy (Grave Creek Mound Archaeology Complex Research Facility in West Virginia), Monongahela tradition women favored the production of final Z-twist cordage production.

On the upper Ohio River drainage basin subareas, some pottery apparently represents the incorporation of local Late Woodland groups with their own distinctive cordage-manufacturing traditions.

As Johnson and Speedy say in their abstract, "In the absence of elaborately decorated ceramics, variations in the relative frequency of the predominant cordage twist direction peculiar to some subareas also suggest that twist direction may function as a group signature, thus permitting identification of individual or related village removals that may be synonymous with tribes."

Like its sister culture the Fort Ancient, the Monongahela made a leap in agriculture by adopting seed crops from Mesoamerica, which had been obtained through their ancestral trade network.

The women cultivated varieties of crops such as maize, beans, squash, and sunflower, collecting their seeds to use in subsequent years.

In 1599 - 1600 the English geographer and propagandist Richard Hakluyt reported on Native American foods of the mid-Atlantic coastal people with whom they also traded.

In addition, some scholars believe that two severe droughts, one from 1587 to 1589 and another from 1607 to 1612, drove the bearer of the Monongahela culture from the region in search of a more habitable area.

Because of trade with other groups, the Monongahela could have contracted infectious diseases from coastal peoples, who were directly exposed by their contact with Europeans.

The Monongahela culture was progressively disappearing before the time the Iroquois League invaded the Allegheny Plateau through to the Lake Erie region in an effort to control new hunting grounds for the lucrative fur trade.

About the year of 1635, it appears that a group of refugees from the Monongahela culture resettled in south-central Virginia at Halifax County.

The Monongahela cultural region with some of its major sites and neighbors as of 1050~1635 AD
Clip of 1656 (3) LE CANADA OU NOUVELLE FRANCE &C. by Nicolas Sanson. In the Huron Iroquoian dialect, Akounake means "people of a strange language", and Attiouandron means "people of a similar language" (see lower part of map). Various "Smith Maps" by Captain John Smith , note the Virginia Indians refer to those to the west of the Allegheny Mountains as Messawomeck . Riviere de la Ronceverte ( Greenbrier River ) scholars assert the early French Jesuits did not see the main Ohio River during these decades. [ 3 ]
Clip from John Senex map ca 1710, showing the peoples Captain Vielle passed by in 1692 to reach Chaouenon country, as the French Jesuit called the Shawnee.