Abstract The lands of North America have been inhabited by humans for a very long time. Indeed some of the oldest, commonly accepted evidence shows human activity on the continent for at least 20,000 years (Pigati et al, 2023), and there are some estimates that would go much farther. While much about the earliest days of habitation in the Americas is poorly understood, and indeed the scientific community cannot even fully agree as to how humans first arrived here, the same cannot be said about the more recent history. While there has been plenty of research done on the societies of Central America and the Andes, the same amount of academic rigor has not been applied to the many societies which once inhabited the lands of the current United States. Of course that is not to imply no work has been done in this regard, however to say that the societies of the Mississippians or the Puebloans have received nearly as much attention as societies of the aforementioned regions would be a claim made in error. The goal of this paper is to rectify this issue. This is as this paper seeks to delve into the pre-colonial history of the Mahoning River Valley, an area of research that one would be hard pressed to find scholarly sources on. Though some references may be found such as a very useful work from Kingsley that will be utilized for descriptions of the area during the Archaic Period. As for later periods, this paper will be using new data from the Purdy Site (33-Tr-120), which is a site along the Mahoning river, to help create a better understanding of the peoples who once lived along its banks.
Alex Baumeier (Thu,) studied this question.