Crossroads, p. 20
Woodland people also discovered that instead of laboriously cracking hickory nuts and black walnuts and picking out the nut meat they could pulverize them, shells and all, in stone or wooden mortars and then boil them slowly in a pot full of water. The valuable nut oil would rise to the top to be skimmed off, the shells would sink to the bottom, and the nut meats would float slightly above them where they could be scooped out and dried in cakes to be eaten right away, or stored.
With the forests now providing a food supply far more generous and dependable than before, thanks to these discoveries, populations grew very rapidly during the Woodland era. By A.D. 500 there were small villages of two to four acres almost everywhere in Arkansas. Today the soil at the sites of these villages is stained a rich velvety black from the shells of the hundreds, if not thousands, of bushels of nuts that were brought to them. These village middens are also filled with the sherds of thousands of simple, undecorated, flat-bottomed or conical based clay cooking pots--the trademark of the Indians of the Woodland era.
The bow and arrow finally appeared in the Southeast during the Woodland era. By A.D. 500 it had mostly replaced the spear thrower, although some tribes along the Louisiana Coast were still using spear throwers, with which they attacked the soldiers of the retreating De Soto expedition, in 1543. The intervillage and intertribal warfare that would remain the scourge and the obsession of the Indians of the Eastern Woodlands for the next 1,000 years seems to have begun about the time the bow and arrow appeared.
(A man of the early Woodland
era ready for the hunt with his atl- atl and a handful of atl-atl
darts. Sometime during the latter half of this era, by A.D. 500, if
not earlier, the bow and arrow finally appeared. The introduction of the
bow and arrow must have altered hunting techniques significantly. Hunting
continued to be important throughout the Woodland era, but there is reason
to believe that women, with their gardens and their gathering, were producing
more food than men.)
(Gary points, the characteristic projectile point of the early stages of Fourche Maline culture throughout southwest Arkansas. Gary points were made from about 2000 B.C. to about A.D. 500. They became progressively lighter and smaller through time and it is probable that the lighter, smaller specimens were used as arrow points rathert than atl-atl points)
(Tools like this chipped stone hoe and perforated mussell shell tool are abundant at Woodland sites in the Arkansas River Valley and Ozark Highlands. Some of these shells were probably used as hoes, others as spoons or scrapers. Both stone hoes and mussel shell tools were used by Woodland era gardeners to clear small plots of ground and to till soil.)
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