Goodall focus

The Goodall focus, also called the Goodall tradition, is the name archaeologists give to the Hopewellian peoples of the Middle Woodland period who lived around the southern end of Lake Michigan, in northern Indiana and western Michigan. It is usually dated from about 200 BCE to 400 or 500 CE. It takes its name from the Goodall site, a mound group in northwestern Indiana, and was one of the first archaeological cultures to be defined in the state.

The Hopewell tradition was not a single society but a loose set of communities across the Eastern Woodlands joined by trade routes and shared ceremonial practices, in many places building on the older burial customs of the Adena culture. Mark Schurr of the University of Notre Dame describes the Goodall tradition as an extension of Havana Hopewell, the branch centred on the Illinois River valley, into north-western Indiana. One long-standing interpretation, summarised by the archaeologist Dancey, holds that Havana Hopewell spread up the Illinois River into south-western Michigan and gave rise to Goodall Hopewell. An early study by George Quimby, published in 1941, analysed ten Hopewellian sites in Michigan and Indiana under the Goodall name.

As usually mapped, Goodall sites extend from the southern tip of Lake Michigan eastwards across northern Indiana to the Ohio border, and north through central Michigan nearly to Saginaw Bay and Grand Traverse Bay. Research in the 1990s concentrated on sites in north-western Indiana and in the basins of the Galien, Kalamazoo and Grand rivers.

Many Goodall sites once had burial mounds, but most have been badly damaged by ploughing, grading and looting. Much of what was known about the Goodall site itself came from amateur digging in the nineteenth century. Even the number of its mounds, twenty-two, was uncertain until Bill Mangold of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources found a lost map made by the amateur collector Ernest W. Young. From the mid-1990s field schools from Notre Dame, led by Schurr, used geophysical survey and small, targeted excavations to find living areas around the mounds without disturbing burials. The work suggested that one mound was probably built between about AD 1 and 150, when Havana Hopewell was at its most elaborate.

Excavations at the Mud Lake site in 2000 to 2002 found decorated Hopewellian pottery and stone tools from about 200 BCE to AD 1. By around AD 200, when Hopewell exchange was most intense, plain pots were made locally while decorated wares were brought in from Illinois. Refuse deposits at Goodall sites contain stemmed spear points and flakes of obsidian, a volcanic glass that Hopewell trade networks carried from as far away as the Yellowstone region. A single bottle gourd seed found at the Goodall site was the first evidence of a domesticated plant from a Middle Woodland context in north-western Indiana.

Archaeologists still know relatively little about how Goodall communities lived day to day, how closely they were tied to Havana groups in Illinois, and why the tradition faded. The Notre Dame project set out to trace links between changes in diet, exchange and social contacts during the tradition's rise and decline, and its dates remain under refinement, with the end of the tradition placed anywhere from about 400 to 500 CE.

Our maps label a territory around southern Lake Michigan as the Goodall Focus on the 100 BCE, 1 BCE, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 maps, within present-day United States. The outline is approximate, and the earlier and later maps show the area as the lands of Eastern North American hunter-gatherers.