LATE HOLOCENE PALEOENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE, MIGRATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE FORT ANCIENT CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE OHIO RIVER VALLEY

Climate variability and change over multiple time scales are known to affect human behavior and cultural change. Using paleoclimate proxies, archaeology and geoenvironmental data, this study explores mid-continental drought episodes that occurred from ~1000-1500 CE which have been linked to the demise of Mississippian settlements in the middle Mississippi River Valley and lower Ohio River Valley. These drought intervals, in-turn, appear to have triggered migration and settlement to river valleys elsewhere. A growing amount of archaeological and biological data support an early wave of migrating Mississippian agriculturalists into the middle Ohio River Valley and the emergence of the Fort Ancient culture around 1050-1100 CE. A meta-analysis of datasets from the mid-continent suggests that drought, coupled with sociopolitical instability (pushes), within the middle Mississippi River Valley and the lower Ohio River Valley, especially between ~ 1100-1250 CE, versus growing season moisture availability, late winter and spring (cool season) annual floods, and fertile alluvial soils (pulls) in the middle Ohio River Valley provide a viable rationale for migration and settlement of Mississippian people eastward into the middle Ohio River Basin. These early agriculturalists seem to have often targeted floodplain and terrace environments at river confluences for settlement, especially ones with oxbow lakes, paleomeander wetlands and fertile soils, often the Huntington silt loam, such as in the lower Great Miami, Little Miami, and Scioto river valleys.