Immigrants aided creative boom by ancient Ohioans
Two thousand years ago, Ohio’s Hopewell culture emerged out of what N’omi Greber, former curator of archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, once referred to as an explosion of creativity.
In places such as Chillicothe, Newark and Portsmouth, American Indians from widely scattered small communities came together in large numbers to build enormous earthworks, often in precise geometric shapes, aligned to the sun and moon.
Within large mounds, they buried spectacular offerings of iconic artifacts made from raw materials brought here from the literal ends of their world: seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, copper from the upper Great Lakes, and obsidian, a black volcanic glass, from Yellowstone Park.
What produced the spark that ignited this incredible explosion? A new theory suggests the answer lies in interactions among the local people and immigrants who came to these places to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
Nicole Creanza, a biologist at Vanderbilt University, and biologists Oren Kolodny and Marcus Feldman from Stanford University have developed a mathematical model that shows how inter-population connectivity can result in explosive cultural change. Their paper recently was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Creanza and her colleagues applied their model to the cultural revolution associated with the appearance of fully modern humans around 45,000 years ago.
The model predicts that population growth and travel between populations can trigger bursts of cultural innovation. “When an individual migrates to a new population, the receiving population experiences a cultural burst because many novel combinations of innovations are suddenly possible.”
This deceptively simple model provides an explanation for the rapid technological advancements that followed an increase in the rates of population interaction throughout Eurasia at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. I think it also could be a key to understanding what happened in the Ohio Valley 2,000 years ago.
During Ohio’s Early Woodland period, from about 800 to 100 B.C., the Adena culture lived in small, dispersed communities sustained by hunting and gathering along with some farming of locally domesticated plants.
They built small earthen enclosures and acquired small amounts of exotic raw materials. In the subsequent Hopewell explosion, the earthworks became supersized, and both the quantity and variety of exotic raw materials used to create their religious icons increased exponentially.
Based on the model developed by Creanza, Kolodny and Feldman, population growth fueled by the addition of domesticated plants to the Adena diet, coupled with the extraordinary journeys people increasingly were making to bring the exotic raw materials to Ohio, might have created a positive feedback loop “in which population growth, inter-population contact and cultural complexity” interacted to produce the Hopewellian cultural explosion.
Many in America today regard immigrants as threats to national security. Candidates for political office have demonized them as rapists bringing drugs and crime to our communities.
Some particular immigrants might fit this description, but the work of Creanza and her colleagues suggests that more commonly, immigrants bring new ideas that can lead to bursts of innovation. Far from being a threat, immigrants are and always have been a renewable source of vitality and creativity.