The Shawnee language belongs to the Central Algonquian language family and is, therefore, related to Miami, Illinois, Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, Menominee, Potawatomi, Ojibwa, Cree, Montegnais, and Naskapi. Regarding the archaeological evidence concerning the Shawnee homelands prior to the European invasion, some people see the Fort Ancient people in Ohio as ancestral to the Shawnee. Archaeologists Pennelope Drooker and C. Wesley Cowan, in their chapter in Societies in Eclipse: Archaeology of the Eastern Woodland Indians, A.D. 1400-1700, write:
“Archaeologists and ethnohistorians have reached no consensus about which historically named group or groups might have been descended from Fort Ancient populations, although Shawnee and related Central Algonquian groups are most often suggested.”
In his book Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native American Tribe and its Cultural Background, archaeologist James Howard writes:
“It would certainly appear that the most economical explanation in terms of available archeological, linguistics, and ethnohistorical data is to equate the prehistoric Shawnees with at least part of the Fort Ancient archaeological culture, though other groups were probably involved as well.”
Since the Shawnee often migrated, it is difficult to pinpoint their aboriginal homeland at the beginning of the European invasion. In his Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes, Carl Waldman writes:
“Perhaps the best way to think of their territory is generally to the west of the Cumberland Mountains of the Appalachian chain, with the Cumberland River at the center. At one time or another, the Shawnees had villages along many of the rivers of the region: the Cumberland, the Ohio, the Tennessee. This area now comprises parts of the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia.”
Subsistence
The Shawnee, like many other Algonqian-speaking people, engaged in a combination of farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. Farming was of secondary economic importance and contributed less…