No single concept is more ubiquitous in the literature on the archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands and the Middle Woodland period (100 BC to AD 500) than the Hopewell Interaction Sphere (HIS) and its variants. Joseph Caldwell (“Interaction Spheres in Prehistory,” in Hopewellian Studies, 1964) coined the concept to account for two striking Middle Woodland–period patterns in the archaeological record. The first is that a suite of identical, or nearly identical, mortuary artifacts have been found to occur over great distances across the Eastern Woodlands. The second is a complete lack of concomitant similarities within the secular (i.e., non-mortuary) record at widely separated sites that nevertheless share these mortuary materials. That archaeologists have observed similarities over a vast area at all suggested to Caldwell that some form of interaction took place. The mortuary context in which those similarities were observed, Caldwell reasoned, meant that the interaction was religious in nature, perhaps even along the lines of a religious cult.
In Reclaiming the Hopewellian Ceremonial Sphere, A. Martin Byers ambitiously seeks to reinvent or, as he put it, “reclaim” the HIS model so that it carries more explanatory power. Christopher Carr (“Rethinking Interregional Hopewellian ‘Interaction’” in Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction, 2005), who also sought to “deconstruct” the HIS model, serves as a foil throughout Chapter 1. Byers's two main issues with the HIS model are that it requires (1) Hopewell communities to be polities, and (2) Hopewell mortuary practices to be exclusively funerary in nature. Instead, according Byers, Hopewell communities were heterarchical, with inclusive rather than exclusive territoriality, and their mortuary practices were world renewal rituals aimed at releasing the living soul. Their “mortuary mounds were not corporate markers for kin-based communities” (p. 18) but were a further part of Hopewell world renewal efforts.
Byers argues that community polities, by virtue of their exclusive territoriality and the related “stranger effect” cannot explain the widely dispersed, transregional practices that are observed in Hopewell. Instead, explaining transregional patterning requires a radical rethinking of the way these societies were organized. In Chapter 2, Byers outlines his ideas about Hopewell community organization, introducing concepts such as autonomy and inclusive territoriality, and more fully elaborating on heterarchical communities. He also introduces another component of his new Hopewell ceremonial sphere model, the cult sodality, which he then expands on in Chapter 3. The cult sodality, which Byers suggests is of the ecclesiastic sort, participated in sacred games and performed complex ritual tasks for the purpose of world renewal.
Chapter 4 covers the sacred bundle and ritual performance, whereas chapters 5 and 6 delve more deeply into the mortuary rituals associated with the Ohio Hopewell, in particular. In chapters 7 through 12, Byers addresses different aspects of other autonomous regional ceremonial spheres, including the Illinois-Havana, the Indiana (Mann), and the Swift Creek-Weeden Island spheres. Byers considers only the latter not to be a regional Hopewellian ceremonial sphere, in that it has a distinctive material assemblage. Chapter 13 closes out the volume by examining the collapse of Hopewell at the end of the Middle Woodland period.
My one issue with the book is not with the ideas presented in it but rather with the verbose way in which they are presented. Excessive length of both sentences and concept terminology significantly limits comprehension for the average reader. One sentence in the first paragraph consists of an astonishing 71 words. Some concepts are five or more words long (e.g., “dispersed third-order world renewal cult sodality heterarchy”). Editing to reduce the lengths of sentences and terms would have helped greatly with the readability of the volume.
Readers should also be aware that this is not a book that they can begin in the middle. Each chapter builds on the preceding one, and each newly introduced concept has a place in the overarching argument. For those interested in pre-Columbian social organization, in Hopewell, or in the Middle Woodland period, I recommend this book, but I advise that they be prepared to invest time in digesting its contents.
I leave the book convinced that Byers is right about the need to rethink the way Hopewellian societies were organized. Although all models are imperfect, the most useful ones are those that explain the most aspects of the patterning observed in the archaeological record. There is the risk, however, that models, in trying to account for more and more, become too complex themselves. When this happens, they can lose their explanatory power altogether. Readers should judge for themselves whether Byers's intricate model adequately explains the material complexities observed across the Hopewellian world—or whether it has become too complex to explain anything well. I suspect many readers will find that the model presented in this volume falls somewhere in between.
