Changing Scales of Lithic Raw Material Transport among Early Hunter-Gatherers in Midcontinental North America (2014, Archaeology of Eastern North America 42:51-75)
Like the paper in North American Archaeologist, this paper presents a portion of the archaeological data and analysis that was part of my dissertation. It examines raw material data from 926 Early
Paleoindian (Clovis/Gainey), Late Paleoindian (Dalton/Hi-Lo) and Early
Archaic (Kirk and Thebes) points from the Midcontinent (defined as
Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio). Here is the abstract:
Data from samples of diagnostic lithic projectile points are used to describe changes in patterns of raw material transport associated with the Early Paleoindian (ca. 11,050-10,800 RCYBP), Late Paleoindian (ca. 10,300-10,000 RCYBP), and Early Archaic (ca. 10,000-8000 RCYBP) periods in the Midcontinent. Relative measures of the dispersion of raw materials indicate that the scales of transport decreased between the Early Paleondian and Late Paleoindian periods. During the Early Archaic, a modest increase in mean transport distance was accompanied by a relatively large increase in maximum transport distance, suggesting the addition or intensification of some mechanism for moving small numbers of projectile points very long distances. The identification and description of these patterns of change, largely consistent with data from several smaller-scale studies from across the Midcontinent, provide a beginning framework for understanding large-scale changes in raw material transport patterns in terms of the human behaviors that produced those patterns. What I tried to do was quantify changes in the patterns of raw material transport that we see in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. The short version of the changes is that there was an apparent decrease from the Early Paleoindian to the Late Paleoindian period in the how far raw materials (in the form of hafted bifaces) were being moved from their sources. The scale of transport increases again during the Early Archaic. This paper was more about pattern recognition and quantification than interpretation. What I would really like to eventually develop is a framework for differentiating transport via mobility from transport via exchange. Some substantial modeling work will be required to move the needle forward on that, however. The basic dataset I used in the analysis is posted in the Data section. |