Outline of a Monongahela petal house

Beginning around AD 1000 in the Ohio Valley, agricultural villages appear in what archaeologists call the Monongahela culture.  Initially sites are situated on floodplains, but by AD 1250 they are more often found on upland saddles between hilltops.  Houses were usually small, suggesting they were occupied by nuclear families.  The houses were arranged in a semicircle or circle around a central plaza.  The upland sites were frequently surrounded by a wooden stockade, suggesting that there may have been feuding among villages.  By AD 1450, the villages consisted of concentric rings of houses with a large building in the center.  Some of the houses had petal-shaped attachments that may have functioned as storage or processing structures (i.e. a smokehouse).  By the time of European contact, at around AD 1600, the central house contained numerous attachments leading to the term “petal houses”.  Child burials are found inside the houses and frequently under the hearths.  However, we do not know where the adults were buried.  Contrary to other Late Woodland villages, most Monongahela villages do not contain adult burials or cemeteries and we do not know how they disposed of their dead. 

The people of the Monongahela culture grew corn, beans, and squash, but also relied on hunting and gathering wild foods. Shellfish was also an important resource.  Because they had no chemical fertilizers, they needed to move their villages every few years as the soil became depleted. Charred remains of corn are found in refuse pits, along with bone and shell debris.  The bow and arrow replaced the spear as the standard hunting tool.  In addition to stone tools and pottery, a wide variety of ornamental artifacts are found at Monongahela village sites, including bone beads, ornaments of carved bone and teeth, and marine shell pendants.  Stone and earthenware pipes are also common.

The Monongahela were dispersed by AD 1635, when the first Europeans arrived in the region, and much of the region was unoccupied at the time of European Contact.  The demise of the Monongahela is somewhat of a mystery. Glass beads are found at some villages, so the Monongahela culture was in contact with Europeans, but probably only through Native American middle men.  We have no written accounts of Europeans ever meeting these people and there is no direct evidence of catastrophic warfare among Monongahela villages.  As elsewhere in the New World, European diseases likely decimated these people prior to their ever meeting the Europeans.

Read more about the Monongahela people in The Mystery of the Monongahela Indians (PDF, 3.2 MB)