Anth 3511 Professor Gibbon
Archaic Cultures in the Eastern Woodlands
Early and Middle Archaic Cultures in the Eastern Woodlands: A. It is a hypothesis that a shift from big-game exploitation to a more generalized Archaic hunting and gathering life-way occurred by the early Holocene (8000-6000 BC), because few well-documented sited have been excavated. Nonetheless, existing evidence indicates that Early and Middle Archaic societies in the Eastern Woodlands did exploit an increasing variety of plant and animal forest resources.
(1) Eastern Woodlands Archaic cultures (c. 8000-700 BC) seem to exhibit "Primary Forest Efficiency," increasing efficiency and success in exploiting the resources of the forest.
(2) Human population growth and packing in resource rich areas are thought to have been important factors in culture change in the Archaic. B. Besides scrapers, knives, and other common chipped stone tools, the Archaic is characterized by changing projectile point styles, with a shift from Dalton to side-notched, corner-notched, bifurcate-based, and stemmed forms over time. What do shifts in projectile point mean? What is their social and fUnctional context?
(1) These shifts are documented at deeply stratified sites in floodplain sites in Tennessee (e.g., Icehouse Bottom), Illinois (Koster, Modoc Rockshelter), and elsewhere.
Subsistence shifts in the Early-Middle Archaic involved:
(1) Original small populations concentrated on "first line" foods in the Early Archaic in resource rich areas.
(2) As population size and packing increased, a wider variety of more difficult to procure or process foods (e.g., hickory nuts, aquatic resources) were added to the diet. Packing involved more circumscribed life-ways and the movement of some populations into less food-rich areas. Because of predictable food resource locations, carefUl scheduling of seasonal activities within restricted areas emerges in the Middle Archaic. This process can be seen in some areas by the beginning of the Middle Holocene (c.6000 BC).
This shift is also documented at Koster, Modoc Rockshelter, and the Carrier Mills site complex in Illinois, Rogers Shelter in Missouri, and many sites in the Southeast (e.g., Icehouse Bottom). (b) The Middle Holocene Hypsithermal warm period and rising coastal waters may also have caused some changes in settlement and subsistence. What kinds of changes have been suggested? (c) The Wendover site (6000-5000 BC) in Florida has exceptional preservation of human remains, textiles, and wood and bone artifacts. The earliest known use of bottle gourd as a container come from this site (d) The shift involved a change from a 'free wandering' settlement style with no particular base camp to 'centrally based wandering,' a
seasonally mobile life-way that involved returning to the same base
location year aRer year.
D. What are good indicators of'sedentism,' since many archaeologists believe people became from sedentary in some resource-rich areas during the Early-
Middle Archaic?
(1) Suggestions: greater variety of artifacts; presence of seasonal foods; more tools and food remains; increase in heavy tools; evidence for storage; more substantial dwellings; cemeteries.
(a) Why does Fagan think cemeteries are a good indicator of sedentism? E. These trends are less clearly apparent in more northern parts of the Eastern Woodlands because of fewer good stratified sites, but they do seem to be
present.
(1) L'Anse Amour in Labrador is a rich site dating to c.5600 BC that has evidence for the exploitation of marine resources. The earliest known burial mound is at this site.
Late Archaic Cultures in the Eastern Woodlands:
A. Archaic trends toward greater complexity and sophistication, and greater population sizes, accelerated between 4000-1000 BC. These trends are reflected in much higher site densities and in the diversity of local adaptations. Some of this diversity has been organized into five regional variants. What traits characterize each of these adaptations? (1) Shield Archaic (5000BC to modern times. Subarctic area centered on the Canadian Shield north of the Great Lakes. An adaptation to a country of lakes, rivers, and boreal forest with sparse game and vegetai resources. (2) Maritime Tradition of the Northeast (6000-1000 BC). 'Red Paint people. Port au Choir in Newfoundland. A sophisticated coastal adaptation through the Maritime provinces of Canada. Heavy woodworking tools like adzes, axes, and gouges.
(3) Lake Forest Late Archaic. Pine, hardwood forest areas that extend from the Great lakes into New York State and the St. Lawrence valley. An inland adaptation with generally low populations. Small bands. Great diversity recognized in regional variants like the Laurentian (3200-1400 BC) in the northeast and the Old Copper culture (3000-2500 BC) in the western Great Lakes and westward.
(4) Mast Forest Archaic (2700-1200 BC). Eastern oak forests. Lamoka site.
Great regional diversity.
(5) Central Riverine Archaic (4000-1000 BC). Most elaborate and well developed of all eastern Late Archaic traditions. Centered in Midwestern and Southeastern river valleys in rich deciduous forests. Abundance of wild food resources. Roster. Green River culture (3000-2000 BC). The Riverton culture (1500-1000 BC).
Poverty Point Culture (1700-700 BC). Complex centers with great earthworks in Lower Mississippi Valley area. Probably a ranked society. Hunters and gatherers who harvested wild foods.
Bense, Judith. 1994. Southeastern Archaeology. Academic Press, New York. Fagan, Brian M. 1991. Ancient North America. Thames and Hudson, New York. Griffin, James B. 1967. Eastern North American Archaeology: A Summary. Science 156:175-191. Jennings, Jesse D. 1987. The Prehistory ofNorthdmerica. 3rd ed. Mayfield, Pale Alto. ---- (editor). 1983. Ancient North Americans. W. H. Freeman, San Francisco. Mason, R 1981. Great LakesArchaeology. Academic Press, New York.
Morse, Dan, and Phyllis Morse. 1983. Archaeology of the CentralMississippi Valley. Academic Press, New York.
Muller, Jon. 1986. Archaeology of the Lower Ohio River Valley. Academic Press, New York. Snow, Dean. 1981. TheArchaeology of New England. Academic Press, New York. Smith, B. D. 1986.- The Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: From Daiton to de Soto, 10,500 to 500 B.P. Advances in WorldArchaeology 5:1--92.
Steponaitis, V. 1986. Prehistoric Archaeology in the Southeastern United States 1970--3985. Annual Review ofAnthropology 15:363--404.
Willey, Gordon R. 1966. An Introduction to American Archaeology, Vol. I: North andMiddleAmerica.
Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Eastern Woodlands Archaic
In the Eastern Woodlands, the term Archaic has been used to designate a period, stage, tradition, type of artifact assemblage, taxonomic unit, or some combination of these and other uses. Today, the term is generally defined by constellations of artifact and site types or by trends in subsistence and settlement patterning. According to trait-based definitions, the Archaic is separated from later Woodland assemblages by the absence of Woodland ceramics, and from earlier Paleoindian sites by the presence in the Archaic of certain new traits. Included among these are projectile point forms with notches or stems, reliance on a wider-range of more localized, less flakable lithic raw materials; ground and polishedstone tools like manes, axes, celts, and bannerstones; more varied and numerous bone tools; a proportionately large number of only lightly flaked stone tools; and greater regional variability in types of sites and their content, among other traits (Ellis et al. 1990). Subsistence-settlement definitions have often contrasted a generalized Archaic hunter-gatherer lifeway that gradually became ever more efficient in the exploitation of the varied resources of the eastern forests with that of free-wandering Paleoindian big-game hunters and Woodland horticulturalists. According to initial formulations of this latter perspective, this long, adaptive shift prepared Archaic "broad-spectrum" hunter-gatherers for emerging new lifeways that required ever more complex social organizations and the harvesting of domesticated "tropical" plant foods like maize (corn) and beans.
There are problems with both of these generalapproaches. Trait-based approaches, for example, perpetuate the limited taxonomic and chronological goals of culture history. Although essential goals of the archaeological enterprise, they are by themselves sterile for they cannot explain either the archaeological record or past cultural activities. Subsistence-settlement pattern approaches, while couched in an explanatory format, have often made what have proven to be false assumptions. For instance, nearly all initial reconstructions of Archaic lifeways were based on the idea that Woodland peoples were "tribal" horticulturalists, while their Archaic ancestors were simpler, band-level huntergatherers. Visible features of the new Woodland lifeway were thought to be ceramic vessels to store surplus crops and earthen burial mounds, which the surplus gave them the leisure time to construct. Among the discoveries in recent years that have undermined this picture are Late Archaic ceramics in the Southeast that date from 2500 B.C. onward, Middle and Late Archaic earthen mounds, and the remains of cultivated weedy plants, gourds, and squash in late Archaic contexts south of the Great Lakes.
A problem with some more recent lifeway approaches in retrospect is the simplistic assumption that trends throughout the Archaic can be explained by a single process, an ever increasing "efficiency" in
the exploitation of an ever broader spectrum of natural food resources until a "primary forest efficiency" was achieved. Evidence for this "settling in" is the appearance in the Archaic of specialized resource procurement and processing equipment, such as plant food grinders, heavy wood-working tools, and fishing paraphernalia; a focus on less mobile resources than big game within smaller exploitation territories; larger and more permanent sites; less portable tool kits; and evidence of an increase in human population sizes. But the processes involved were certainly more complex. Among other likely possibilities were the impact of post-glacial climatic trends that reached a peak between 7000-3000 B.C. in the warm-dry Hypsithermal Interval; rapid melting of northern glaciers, which led to a continued rise in sea levels and a flattening of the gradient of interior streams; lake and drainage maturation; and human population growth that "filled in" space so that earlier "free" wandering lifeways became a decreasing option. In combination, these processes may have led to an increasing aggregation of denser populations within rich but circumscribed resource zones, restricted mobility, semi-sedentism, increased conflic_t over resources, new tools to exploit a wider range of the resource base, and so on. Regional variations oD these themes add to the complexity of this emerging picture. It was most likely the combined effects of these natural processes and of less visible cultural processes like the logic of culture histories that account for observed changes in the Archaic archaeological record.
Still other problems exist with the lifeway approach. In contrast to Paleoindian big-game hunters on the Plains, earlier Paleoindian economies south of the late glacial environments of the Great Lakes were apparently already diverse, with deer, smaller mammals, fish, and plants integral components of the diet. And later, as broad-spectrum economies continued to develop in the deciduous forests of the Eastern Woodlands, more focal economies continued to exist for thousands of years in some regions of the upper
Great Lakes and the Northeast. Broad generalizations abou~tne ~a~Ftern Woodland Archaic are, then, often difficult to draw.
Since the 1950s, the Archaic in the Eastern Woodlands has been sub-divided into Early, Middle, and Late segments. However, the beginning and end dates of the Archaic, and the timing of the divisions between the Early-Middle and Middle-Late Archaic, may differ widely depending on whether the Archaic is investigated through lists of traits or as a perceived adaptive shift. In areas of the upper Great Lakes, Paleoindian complexes persisted until the middle of the Middle Archaic (ca. 5000 B.C.), and Woodland ceramics appeared hundreds of years earlier in some coastal and southern areas than they did in the Upper Mississippi Valley. Even when Woodland ceramics were adopted, many peoples seemed to have continued living what is traditionally considered an Archaic lifeway. Likewise, the boundaries between the Early-Middle and Middle-Late Archaic often vary widely, with some archaeologists beginning the Late Archaic, for example, at 4000 B.C. and others at 2500 B.C. These shifting boundaries affect what archaeological complexes are included in one division or another, and the primary processes that are thought to be at work, among many other aspects of the Archaic.
Overviews of the Early, Middle, and Late Archaic in the Eastern Woodlands are provided in separate entries.
See also Archaic, Eastern Woodlands Early, Middle, and Late Archaic Further Readings Bense, Judith. 1994. Southeastern Archaeology (?). Academic Press, New York. Custer, Jay F. 19xx. Delavare Prehistoric Archaeology: An EcologicalApproach. University of Delaware Press, Newark, and Associated University Presses, London and Toronto. Ellis, Chris J., Ian T. Kenyon, and Michael Spence. 1990. The Archaic. In The Archaeology of Southern Ontario toA.D. 1650, edited by Chris Ellis and Neal Ferris, pp. 65--124. Occasional Publications of the London Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society, No. 5. Fagan, Brian. 1991. Ancient North America. Thames and Hudson, New York. Mason, Ronald . 1981. Great LakesArchaeologv. Academic Press, New York. Morse, Dan, and Phyllis Morse. 1983. Archaeology of the CentralMississippi Valley. Academic Press, New York.
Neusius, S. W. (editor). 1986. Foraging, Collecting, andHarvesting: Archaic PeriodSubsistence and Settlement in the Eastern Woodlands. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
Phillips, J. L., and J. A. Brown. (editors). 1983. Archaic Hunters and Gatherers in the American Mimuest. Academic Press, New York.
Smith, Brace D. 1986. The Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: From Dalton to de Soto, 10,500 to 500 B.P. Am~ances in WorldArchaeology 5:1--92. Snow, Dean. 1980. The Archaeology ofNew England. Academic Press, New York.
Steponaitis, V. 1986. Prehistoric Archaeology in the Southeastern United States 1970--1985. Annual Review ofAnthropology 15:363--404.
Eastern Woodlands Early Archaic
Guy Gibbon, University ofMinnesota
In areas to the west in the upper Great Lakes, late Paleoindian lanceolate projectile point forms persisted to about 5000 B.C. Elsewhere in the Eastern Woodlands these forms had been replaced by apparent area-wide sequences of notched and stemmed point forms by 8000 B.C. The basis of these sequences was established in the 1950s by Joffre Coe's excavations at deeply stratified alluvial flood plain sites, such as Doerschuk, Lewder's Ferry, and Gaston, and at Hardaway on a promontory above the Yadkin River, in the North Carolina Piedmont, and later by Bettye Broyles' work at the St. Albans site in West Virginia. Because of the layered nature of these deep sites, it was possible to develop a secure ordering of point styles. Still later James Tuck (1974) proposed on the basis of radiocarbon determinations that the Early Archaic period in the Eastern Woodlands was characterized by three point horizons --- Dalton OIardaway), Big Sandy, Kirk --- and a uniformity of hunter-gatherer lifeways that stretched from the Southeast into the far Northeast. More recent work by Jefferson Chapman in the Little Tennessee Valley in eastern Tennessee at flood plain sites like Icehouse Bottom and Rose Island resulted in the addition of a fourth "Bifurcate" horizon to this Early Archaic sequence. Chapman also proposed that the style horizons or traditions were widespread throughout the Eastern Woodlands and that style differences within phases of the Bifurcate horizon could be used as chronological markers over much of this area.
The sequence of projectile point forms begins with a Dalton horizon (ca. 8500--8000 B.C.) characterized by Dalton or Dalton-like points, such as Hardaway Side-notched and Hi-Lo, that are thought to have been directly derived from Clovis-like fluted points in many regions of the Eastern Woodlands, for some Dalton points have thinning flakes that resemble flutes. Dalton or Dalton-like points have been found at Brand and other sites in northeastern Arkansas, over much of the Southeast, and in New England and westward across the southern Great Lakes in smaller numbers. Each of the subsequent horizons --the Side-Notched (ca. 8000--7700 B.B.), Corner-Notched (ca. 7700--6900 B.C.), and Bifurcate (ca. 6900-6000 B.C.) --- contain point forms with names like Big Sandy, Kessel Side-notched, Eva, LeCroy, and Merrow Mountain or some cluster designation like Kirk Corner-notched. Many archaeologists regard the Dalton horizon as a transitional phase and start the Early Archaic with the first appearance of notched points. In this scheme, the Early Archaic extends from ca. 8000 to 6000 B.C.; if the Dalton horizon is included, the period begins at ca. 8500 B.C. Other stone tools in Early Archaic tool kits were in general equally similar throughout much of the Eastern Woodlands. These include large triangular bifaces, expanding-base "drills," celts with ground bits, grinding slabs, mullers, pitted cobbles, and polished slate
2/22/98 Encyclopedia of North American Prehistory E
celts CEllis et al. 1990). Settlements were apparently relatively small and used seasonally for only short periods of time. The light structures that served as shelters reflect this mobile lifeway.
Many basic questions about Early Archaic projectile point forms remain unanswered, such as: Why were the forms uniform over such vast areas? What do the changes in form mean in cultural terms? How were the points used? One proposed reason for the uniformity of point styles is based on the need for scattered, small groups of people to maintain contact to exchange information mates, and material, among other transactions. According to this argument, as the small family bands of the Early Archaic became increasingly anchored to circumscribed territories, they began to establish networks in which points were one of a number of gifts that groups gave to each other in a pattern of reciprocal exchange. It has been proposed, too, that this process was facilitated by the presence throughout the Eastern Woodlands at the time of related Algonquian-Gulf languages. Reasons for the change from lanceolate to notched and stemmed forms remain elusive, but they may reflect shifts in how hunting weapons were used. The side-notch to corner-notch shift is thought, for example, to accompany a change from thrusting spears to lighter shafts propelled by an atlatl (throwing stick), and bifurcate forms are considered possible adaptations for hunting particular species of forest game. Other studies of these points have concentrated on their patterns of wear. They show that many "projectile points" were also used as knives and saws, or some combination of these and other uses.
The gradual adaptive shift of ancient Americans in the Eastern Woodlands from a freewandering Paleoindian lifeway focused on the capture of megafauna like mastodon and caribou to one based on a broader spectrum of forest foods like white-tail deer, nuts, and plants as big game vanished and oak-dominated deciduous forests spread northward is an hypothesis that has been used to structure research. Regardless of the economy of earlier people in the area, these trends in the Early Archaic seem to have been accompanied by the development within more restricted territories of regular seasonal movements from one base camp to another in pursuit of a broadening spectrum of rich animal, plant, and aquatic food resources that included deer, opossum, raccoon, rabbit, turkey, fish, hickory nuts, roots, and berries. This general picture is supported by food and artifact remains in stratified deposits, especiaclly in the Southeast. To the north in the mixed hard-wood forests of the upper Great Lakes, some Late Paleoindian projectile point styles persisted throughout this period, but their makers too may have been exploiting a broadening spectrum of resources within their more limited environment. A variety of models of Early Archaic lifeways have been proposed by Jefferson Chapman, David Anderson, the Morses, and others.
Also see Bifurcate Tradition, Brand'Site, Corner-Notched Tradition, Dalton, Eastern Woodlands Archaic, Hardaway Site, Tellico Archaic Further Readings
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Anderson, David G., and Glen T. Hanson. 1988. Early Archaic Settlement in the SoutheasteI11 United States: A Case Study from the Savannah River Valley. American Antiquity 53:262--286. Broyles, B. 1971. Second Preliminary Report: The St. Albans Site, Kanawka County. West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey.
Chapman, Jefferson. 1985. Tellico Archaeology. University ofTrennessee Press, Knoxville. Coe, Joffre. 1964. The Formative Cultures ofrhe Carolina Piedmont. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 54(5).
Ellis, Chris J., lan T. Kenyon, and Michael W. Spence. 1990. The Archaic. In The Archaeology of Southern Ontario toA.D. 1650, edited by Chris Ellis and Neal Ferris, pp. 65--124. Occasional Publications of the London Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society, No. 5. Morse, Dan F., and Phyllis A. Morse. 1987. Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley. Academic Press, New-York.
Tuck, James A. 1974. Early Archaic Horizons in Eastern North America. Archaeology of Eastern North America 2(1):72--80.
Guy Gibbon, University ofMinnesota
Eastern Woodlands Late Archaic
The time range of the Late Archaic period in the Eastern Woodlands varies from one region to another for several reasons. Archaeologists disagree, for instance, on what traits mark its beginning, and the Woodland pottery whose appearance is conventionally taken to mark its end did not appear in all regions at the same time but gradually spread inward and northwestward from the coasts. Some archaeologists even group "Late Archaic" and earlier Woodland societies together, for they believe their lifeways had more in common than they did with lifeways of earlier Early and Middle Archaic societies. As a result, the beginning of the Late Archaic period is generally placed somewhere between 4000 and 2500 B.C., and its termination between 1000 and 400 B.C. If"Late Archaic" and earlier Woodland societies are lumped together, the Archaic ends by ca. 3000/2500 B.C. The somewhat arbitrary bracket of 4000--700 B.C. adopted here is for convenience, for a longer time frame has the advantage of simplicity in a review of a plethora of somewhat similar processes and events that occurred at different times in different regions. The basic problem is a familiar one in subdividing cultural continua into smaller but still meaningful taxonomic units for analysis and discussion: concentration on the defining criteria of units tends to mask internal variability, promote discussions of difference, and detract from investigations of the nature of the continuum as a whole.
Most regions of the Eastern Woodlands attained their modern climate and biome distribution by ca. 3000/2500 B.C. as the warm-dry Hypsithermal climatic episode came to an end. With the final wastage of the northern glaciers, the Atlantic Ocean became warmer and attained its modern level at this
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time, too. Together these and other natural processes changed still further the character and distribution of the eastern forests. Because of the cooler, moister climate, deciduous trees spread northward and out onto the prairies to the west and northwest, and the carrying capacity of many uplands in the interior improved once again. Higher sea levels raised water levels in the Great Lakes and flooded river estuaries. As stream gradients were reduced and water flow became more sluggish, more swampy backwaters, resource-rich flood plains, oxbows, and other riverine habitats formed, expanding the aquatic exploitation niche of Archaic hunter-gatherers. These conditions also led to a northward expansion along the Atlantic coast of fish and shellfish habitats, and the warmer water improved fishing conditions in the Great Lakes.
The Late Archaic is traditionally regarded as the period in which the seeds of "primary forest efficiency" sown in the Early Archaic or Late Paleoindian period reached their fruition. The results were far-reaching changes that culminated in a florescence and climax of the Archaic way of life. Among the distinguishing features of this period are a trend towards greater social complexity and sophistication, with the emergence of social ranking and increasingly elaborate mortuary customs; a sharp rise in human population size (as reflected in much higher site densities); intensiftcation of long-distance exchanges to obtain a wider range of materials, including copper, galena, sea shells, and foreign cherts; more sedentary lifeways and the appearance of sites with large, dense middens and evidence of substantial dwellings; more restricted food procurement territories; a probable increase in the intensity of hunting and foraging @ossibly to meet demands for trade goods); increasing numbers of subterranean storage pits and advances in the technology of storage, with the first use of heavy containers of stone and pottery; the deliberate cultivation in small gardens of indigenous wild plants, such as sunflowers, marsh elder, and knotweed, as an ancillary food and plant product resource (see the Eastern Agricultural Complex entry); the appearance of "tropical" cultigens (squashes and gourds); construction of earthen burial mounds and other earthworks in some areas of the Midwest and Southeast; and greater regional variation in artifact and stylistic traditions, especially after 2000 B.C. Archaeologists usually consider these characteristics to have been causally intertwined, linked in part to higher population densities, and temporal expressions of long-term processual trends in the Eastern Woodlands.
Not all of these Late Archaic characteristics were present in all regions of the Eastern Woodlands or reached their Archaic peak at the same time. Squashes and gourds, for example, were present in some localities of the Midwest and Southeast in the third millenniun B.C., while cultivated indigenous plants like sunnower appear in the second Inillennium B.C. Fiber-tempered clay containers, which were possibly used for cooking and storage, are present along the coastal plain of Georgia and South Carolina by 2500 B.C., in the Lower Mississippi Valley by ca. 1300 B.C., and in northern Alabama by 1000 B.C. Steatite and sandstone vessels were present even earlier in some areas of the Southeast, with pottery containers possibly being a heavy container adaptation in areas further from the sources of these stone materials.
In recent decades, the geographic variability of Late Archaic complexes has been organized into a series of regional variants based on contrasting adaptations to different kinds of environmental zones. These include the Shield Archaic on the northern border of the Eastern Woodlands; the Maritime, Lake Forest, and Mast Forest traditions in the Upper Midwest and Northeast; the Central Riverine Archaic in the major river valleys of the southern Midwest and Southeast; and the Poverty Point culture in the Lower Mississippi Valley and along the adjacent Gulf Coast. See the entries listed below for further readings and discussions of these complexes and of other aspects of the Late Archaic period. See also Eastern Agricultural Complex, Eastern Woodlands Archaic, Central Riverine Archaic, Lake Forest Archaic, Maritime Archaic Tradition, Mast Forest Archaic, Poverty Point Culture, Shield Archaic
Eastern Woodlands Middle Archaic
Guy Gibbon, University of Minnesota
The temporal bracketing of the Middle Archaic period in the Eastern Woodlands by archaeologists varies widely because the nature and timing of natural and cultural processes during the mid-Holocene were not uniform throughout this vast culture area. While most dating schemes begin the period at ca. 6000 B.C., its termination is placed anywhere from 4000 to 2500 B.C. Some archaeologists even terminate the Archaic period itself at 3000/2500 B.C., because they believe that cultural adaptations after that date resemble Woodland adaptations more closely than they do those of Early and Middle
Archaic cultures. The 6000--4000 B.C. bracket adopted here is rather arbitrary, then, but it does allow a contrast between earlier Middle Archaic (ca. 6000--4500 B.C.) adaptations and later (ca. 4500--4000 B.C.) trends that eventually culminated in the florescence of the Archaic in the Late Archaic period.
Early Middle Archaic (ca. 6000--4500 B.C.) lifeways continued the trend toward an ever more "efficient" exploitation of a broadening range of food resources within increasingly restricted and , circumscribed territories that began in the Early Archaic, if not still earlier in the Late Paleoindianperiod. Small, scattered populations with a generalized hunter-gatherer economy apparently briefly occupied a series of warm weather base camps along flood plain levees and terraces, where they hunted white-tail deer and smaller mammals, fished, and harvested seasonal plant foods, such as roots and hickory nuts. During cold weather months, they may have exploited deer from smaller transitory camps in the uplands and along stream tributaries. The greatest occupational densities at this time seem to have been in river valleys and perhaps along the coast, where rich animal or plant resources, or both, were concentrated. The exploitation of coastal sea mammals and fisheries remains hypothetical, for the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, whose level did not stabilize until ca. 3000/2500 B.C., gradually inundated this region of the coastal strip as northern ice masses continued to waste during the mid-Holocene. However, the existence
of a rich coastal lifeway is supported by the discovery of evidence of sea mammal hunting and an earthen and stone burial mound dated to about 5600 B.C. at the site of L'Anse Amour far to the north in Labrador. The site was preserved when land rose as the weight of nearby ice sheets diminished. Shell mounds dating back to ca. 5000 B.C. have been found as well on high bluffs bordering the lower Hudson River valley in New England. Apparently, a fairly uniform hunter-gatherer culture stretched at the time from the Piedmont in the Southeast far into the northern sector of the Eastern Woodlands. Only minor variations in projectile point styles seem to distinguish one culture from another in the archaeological record.
Although the size of human populations in the Eastern Woodlands was still very low, these accelerating early Middle Archaic trends seem to have resulted in more permanent settlement as people became increasingly concentrated in areas with a greater diversity of food resources. Among the processes possibly responsible for these more circumscribed lifeways were gradual population growth, which may have stressed the carrying capacity of less favored environments, and a warmer, drier climate, which may have reduced the carrying capacity of bordering river valley uplands. Often cited evidence of reduced territoriality is a more esclusive use of local raw materials, with the implication that these and other processes had restricted the range within which people were able to move in their annual settlementsubsistence round.
The last centuries (ca. 4300--4000 B.C.) of the Middle Archaic period were marked by the onset of dramatic changes that heralded the florescence of Late Archaic lifeways. Among these are the appearance of more substantial and increasingly permanent flood plain midden sites located near shellfish beds, fish spawning grounds, and backwaters; a dramatic increase in the use of riverine aquatic resources; increased numbers of shell midden sites; even more restricted mobility within increasingly fixed territories; more careful seasonal scheduling to masimize the procurement ofa narrower range of readily exploitable "first-line" food resources (the attainment of "primary forest efficiency"); evidence of increased competition for resources and territories, fewer numbers of sites in some areas; the first appearance ofbluff-top mounds; and increasing regional variability in projectile point styles.
The reasons for these changes remain a focus of Middle Archaic research. However, they may have included climatic change (the peak of the Hypsithermal), rising sea levels, continued population growth, and the incursion of people associated with new language families. The warm-dry Hypsithermal climatic episode resulted in the encroachment of prairie along the western border of the Eastern Woodlands, lowered water levels in lakes, streams, and rivers in much of the Midwest and Southeast, and a further reduction of the carrying capacity of the upland forests. Rising sea levels after 4500 B.C. changed the gradients of interior streams and rivers, which stabilized drainage systems, increased the number of oxbows and backwaters. and resulted in the accumulation of silt in flood plains. These latter processes enhanced aquatic habitats for mussels and'bottom fish, and led in general to an increase in the level of aquatic biomass. Together these and other processes apparently "pushed" people from areas with
dwindling resources and "drew" them to the enriched resources of favored river valleys. Aquatic food resources now became increasingly important components of the Middle Archaic diet in these areas. According to this hypothetical scenario, as these still egalitarian societies became "fixes' in circumscribed river valley localities, some kin groups began to symbolically legitimize their right to local food resources by burying more people in their settlements and in nearby cemeteries, and by constructing low earthen mounds in highly visible locations, such as bluff tops.
As in the early Archaic, early Middle Archaic projectile point forms, such as Kirk Stemmed, StanlyMeville Stemmed, and Merrow Mountain Stemmed, were regional expressions ofa Stemmed horizon that extended throughout much of the Eastern Woodlands. By the late Middle Archaic, an apparent increasing regional variability in point fonn seems to parallel the increased restriction of people to a smaller number of scattered, river valley or lake edge locations. Other characteristics of the Middle Archaic tool kit include the appearance of fully ground and polished stone tools, like the grooved axe and bannerstone, and of notched pebbles. which were probably used as netsinkers; an increasing and extensive use of a wide range of lower grade stone materials for the manufacture of flaked tools, and an increase in numbers of plant processing artifacts, such as grinding stones and manes (Ellis et al. 1990).
Changes in Middle Archaic lifeways have been traced at least in part at many archaeological sites in the Eastern Woodlands, including Icehouse Bottom and Rose Island in the Little Tennessee Valley; Koster, Carrier Mills, and Modoc Rockshelter in Illinois; Rodgers Shelter and Graham Cave in central Missouri; and Neville in New II,vnpshire.
~S~ee also Eastern Woodlands Archaic, Koster, Modoc Rockshelter, Neville, Rodgers Shelter, Tellico Archaic Further Readings
Chapman, Jefferson. 1985. Tellico Archaeology. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Ellis, Chris J., lan T. Kenyon, and Michael W. Spence. 1990. The Archaic. In TheArchaeoloav of Southern Ontario toA.D. 1650, edited by Chris Ellis and Neal Fenis, pp. 65--124. Occasio~al Publications of the London Chapter No. 5. Ontario Archaeological Society. Dincauze, Dena. 1976. The Neville Site: 8000 Years atAmoskeag. Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
McGhee, R., and James A. Tuck. 1')77. An Archaic Indian Burial Mound in Labrador. Scientific American 235(5):122--12').
Morse, Dan, and Phyllis Morse. 1983. Archaeology of the CentralMississippi Valley. Academic Press, New York.
Snow, Dean. 1980. The Archaeology of New England. Academic Press, New York.
Guy Gibbon, University ofMinnesota