Comments on Early Archaic papers

Abstract

As Miller and colleagues (this volume) point out, the Early Archaic period presents an interesting arena in which to study human responses to rapidly changing climatic, environmental, and social conditions. As such, I extend my thanks to Ashley Smallwood and Shane Miller for organizing the 2021 symposium and this special volume of Southeastern Archaeology. It is a treat to see so many articles considering variations of Early Archaic lifeways across the broader Southeast. And I am incredibly honored to have my research considered in the same sentence as Anderson and Hanson (1988) and Daniel (1998, 2001), whose models were seminal to my explorations of early Holocene lifeways. As I read through this collection again, I was struck by the advances we’ve made over the past two-plus decades. Halligan and colleagues (this volume), Strawn and colleagues (this volume), and Gingerich (this volume) all employ a larger set of sites in their respective regions to explore site choice among Early Archaic foragers. This is enabled partly by the additional archaeological investigations that have been performed in the intervening years, but also by the increased accessibility to large datasets fostered by the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (Anderson et al. 2017). All four sets of authors, including Jennings and colleagues (this volume), overlay site locations with distributions of resources, ecotone associations, and physiographic locales to ascertain factors that played into mobility decisions of early foragers. Several of the papers also expand on lithic analyses, delving deeper into assemblages from previously excavated sites to discern site use (Gingerich, this volume) or comparing hafted biface morphologies to sort out communities of practice (Jennings et al., this volume). Both present avenues by which we can reassess the large quantities of lithic artifacts from previously excavated sites and avocational collections. Perhaps above all, these articles also highlight the fact that there is not a one-size-fits-all model that applies to all situations. Daniel (1998, 2001) observed this when he compared the data he saw in North Carolina, where tool stone distributions are much different than in the Piedmont and Coastal Plains of South Carolina, to Anderson and Hanson’s (1988) model. I similarly found that the stone-rich landscape of northwest Alabama produced a different pattern than Randy or David saw. Each set of authors here come to similar conclusions – that there are some areas where these three models may apply better than others, but each region also presents a particular distribution of particular sets of resources that may vary (more or less) in time and space. And it is exciting (and perhaps should not be surprising) – that we do not see the same sets of decisions in each of these areas, but that people tailored their decisions to local situations. These four articles, as well as our three models, also demonstrate that we are still in sore need of finergrained environmental reconstructions. If Early Archaic foragers were making decisions based on local resources, primarily within 10-30 km of base camps, we need to have amuch better understanding of the distribution of plant and animal resources within these areas, and their variability and predictability over time and space, in order to develop useful models of how past peoples used these resources. We still rely on shockingly few pollen cores across the entire Southeast to extrapolate what resources were available in millennial increments in particular locations. But while we wait for those pollen and phytolith samples to be collected and analyzed, we can still creatively engage with the environmental data that we do have at hand. To the extent that local geologies influence soil properties, we can compare physiographic zones and ecotones within our research locations. It is not just the number of unique ecotones that early foragers may have had access to, but the quality of those ecotones that matters. We can explore in more detail the plant