Archaeologist Robert Cook and physical anthropologist Scott Aubry, both of the Ohio State University, studied the teeth of ancient American Indians from four sites in southwestern Ohio that together encompass nearly the entire span of the Fort Ancient culture.
Cook and Aubry focused on teeth for the Cuvierian insights they could reveal into who these people were. Specifically, they hoped to learn where these ancient men and women chose to live once they got married. Cook and Aubry acknowledged that there wasn’t necessarily a “rigid rule” that dictated postmarital residence patterns, but in many societies there is a strong preference for either patrilocal residence, meaning the married couple would live in the husband’s home community, or matrilocal residence, which means the couple would settle in the wife’s home community.
From precise measurements of the teeth, Cook and Aubry were able to determine that in early Fort Ancient societies, people tended to be partrilocal. By the middle Fort Ancient, people had shifted to being matrilocal. And in the late Fort Ancient, the societies appear to have been multilocal, meaning that people opportunistically connected “with kin on either side of the family.”
Cook and Aubry link these changes in social norms and customs to changes in technology and diet. Early Fort Ancient folk principally were hunters and gatherers who supplemented their diet with maize. By the middle Fort Ancient, there had been a shift to a full commitment to maize agriculture supplemented by hunting and gathering. Hunting and gathering societies tended to be patrilocal, whereas indigenous agricultural societies tended to be matrilocal.
http://apps.ohiohistory.org/ohioarchaeo ... ent-teeth/
Ft Ancient Society
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