Andy White Anthropology
  • Home
  • Research Interests
    • Complexity Science
    • Prehistoric Social Networks
    • Eastern Woodlands Prehistory
    • Ancient Giants
  • Blog
  • Work in Progress
    • The Kirk Project >
      • Kirk 3D Models list
      • Kirk 3D Models embedded
      • Kirk 2D images >
        • Indiana
        • Kentucky
        • Michigan
        • Ontario
      • Kirk Project Datasets
    • Computational Modeling >
      • FN3D_V3
    • Radiocarbon Compilation
    • Fake Hercules Swords
    • Wild Carolina >
      • Plants >
        • Mosses
        • Ferns
        • Conifers
        • Flowering Plants >
          • Grasses
          • Trees
          • Other Flowering Plants
      • Animals >
        • Birds
        • Mammals
        • Crustaceans
        • Insects
        • Arachnids
        • Millipedes and Centipedes
        • Reptiles and Amphibians
      • Fungi
  • Annotated Publications
    • Journal Articles
    • Technical Reports
    • Doctoral Dissertation
  • Bibliography
  • Data

A Note on Middle Archaic Bone Pins

3/7/2016

3 Comments

 
I'm now on chapter 5 (out of 6) of Ken Sassaman's (2010) book The Eastern Archaic, Historicized. As I wrote a few days ago, Sassaman's book is a fascinating attempt to re-boot our understanding of the Archaic archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands. It takes a fresh look at change over the course of the eight millennia of the eastern Archaic, augmenting the familiar processual lens (with it's focus on ecology and adaptation) with one that foregrounds historically-continent phenomena such as migration, diaspora, ethnogenesis, and short-term events. It's a good read.

The Eastern Woodlands is a big area, and I don't know any archaeologist who claims mastery of all of it. As far as the Archaic, the part I'm most familiar with probably remains the central Ohio Valley and the lower Great Lakes.  I worked in southern, central, and northern Indiana for a total of nine or ten years, give or take, between the mid-1990s and 2006.   
One of the first peer-reviewed papers I authored was this 2003 Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology (MCJA) paper on Middle Archaic bone pins. These pins -- small, carved bone objects that may have served as hair pins or parts of clothing -- have been found at several sites in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys dating to about the period 6000-5000 RCYBP. The pins vary in both head shape and the engraved decoration. Dick Jefferies (University of Kentucky) has written a lot about the pins. I'll reproduce a couple of figures from my MCJA paper to show you some of the main sites that have produced the pins (there may be more now -- I haven't kept up with the literature) and the range of shape and decoration.
Picture
Sites with Middle Archaic carved/engraved bone pins (left); head shapes and decoration types (right).
Sassaman (2010:129) discusses the pins in the context of his ideas about Middle/Late Archaic social boundaries and ethnogenesis.  Following Jefferies' analyses, he suggests that variation in the pins is essentially telling us about the composition and external relationships of the societies that made them: 
". . . Jefferies (2004, pp. 71-73) views diversity in style as a measure of social diversity and the distribution of styles as a proxy for social networks.
    Among the broader inferences Jefferies was able to make with bone pin data is that the Ohio River was a definite boundary separating cultural traditions fully engaged in the production of bone items."
The impetus for my 2003 MCJA paper was to ask if any the variability in the pins was related to time. The carved and engraved pins were produced, after all, over a period of at least 1000 radiocarbon years. If styles come and go through time (as they tend to do), then the mixtures of styles present at any one site may be a result of the passing of time in addition to (or instead of) various kinds of social interactions. This is an analytically important issue: it's tough to interpret variation correctly if you don't have a handle on the time component. Imagine trying to use junkyards to understand the structure of the auto industry without knowing that a '57 Chevy comes from a different era than a '95 Toyota.

Based on what I did, I think there's a good case to be made that at least some of the variation in pin characteristics is temporal. I used combinations of head type and decoration to create a seriation of the bone pins. I combined the relative sequence suggested by the seriation with radiocarbon data to produce a chronology:
Picture
My chronology, which I regard as preliminary, suggested that square-top an fishtail pins were produced relatively early in the sequence and t-top and crutch-top pins rather late.  Not having kept up with the literature (and falling out-of-touch with many of my colleagues actively doing CRM in the Ohio Valley), I do not know whether pins discovered since the MCJA paper have falsified the chronology I proposed. Occurences of t-top or crutch-top pins prior to 5500 RCYBP or square-top or fishtail pins after 5500 RCYBP would suggest that the ordering and dating of my chronology is wrong. I would be interested to know about pin finds since 2002, or any other sources of data that are relevant (I'm travelling right now and don't have access to my printed sources and the time/space to spread everything out and have a fresh look).

Carved bone pins were produced during the Middle/Late Archaic in several areas of the Eastern Woodlands, and there is significant variability both within and between these regions. This 2004 paper by Dick Jefferies ("Regional-Scale Interaction Networks and the Emergence of Cultural Complexity along the Northern Margins of the Southeast") discusses the Midwestern pins and others. Jefferies (2004:Figure 4.3) illustrates pins from the Savannah River region that appear (at least superficially) to share some design elements with pins from the Midwest.  The Stallings Island pin assemblage appears to contain pins very similar to the crutch-top or t-top styles, which is interesting given the general time range of Stallings Island (ca. 4500-3500 BP?) relative to the late positioning of the style in my preliminary chronology from the Midwest (ca. 5000 RCYBP). I'll have to take some time to get caught up and go through the available data carefully and  see if it's worth formally revisiting the issue of temporal variation in pin styles in the context of Sassaman's ideas about the Archaic.
3 Comments
Bob Jase
3/9/2016 05:56:53 am

Fashion - it just keeps changing, wonder what next season's bone pins will look like?

Reply
Sharek link
3/9/2016 02:52:39 pm

Do you have data on these objects associated with their placement during their excavation.
Are these "hair pins"?

Reply
Michelle Vitale
5/17/2019 06:12:29 pm

We have a wide variety of pins and pin designs found on the Savannah river. We would love to chat. 843.476.9281

Reply



Leave a Reply.


    All views expressed in my blog posts are my own. The views of those that comment are their own. That's how it works.

    I reserve the right to take down comments that I deem to be defamatory or harassing. 

    Andy White

    Follow me on Twitter: @Andrew_A_White

    Email me: andy.white.zpm@gmail.com

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner


    Picture

    Sick of the woo?  Want to help keep honest and open dialogue about pseudo-archaeology on the internet? Please consider contributing to Woo War Two.
    Picture

    Follow updates on posts related to giants on the Modern Mythology of Giants page on Facebook.

    Archives

    January 2023
    January 2022
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    March 2021
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014

    Categories

    All
    3D Models
    AAA
    Adena
    Afrocentrism
    Agent Based Modeling
    Agent-based Modeling
    Aircraft
    Alabama
    Aliens
    Ancient Artifact Preservation Society
    Androgynous Fish Gods
    ANTH 227
    ANTH 291
    ANTH 322
    Anthropology History
    Anunnaki
    Appalachia
    Archaeology
    Ardipithecus
    Art
    Atlantis
    Australia
    Australopithecines
    Aviation History
    Bigfoot
    Birds
    Boas
    Book Of Mormon
    Broad River Archaeological Field School
    Bronze Age
    Caribou
    Carolina Bays
    Ceramics
    China
    Clovis
    Complexity
    Copper Culture
    Cotton Mather
    COVID-19
    Creationism
    Croatia
    Crow
    Demography
    Denisovans
    Diffusionism
    DINAA
    Dinosaurs
    Dirt Dance Floor
    Double Rows Of Teeth
    Dragonflies
    Early Archaic
    Early Woodland
    Earthworks
    Eastern Woodlands
    Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project
    Education
    Egypt
    Europe
    Evolution
    Ewhadp
    Fake Hercules Swords
    Fetal Head Molding
    Field School
    Film
    Florida
    Forbidden Archaeology
    Forbidden History
    Four Field Anthropology
    Four-field Anthropology
    France
    Genetics
    Genus Homo
    Geology
    Geometry
    Geophysics
    Georgia
    Giants
    Giants Of Olden Times
    Gigantism
    Gigantopithecus
    Graham Hancock
    Grand Valley State
    Great Lakes
    Hollow Earth
    Homo Erectus
    Hunter Gatherers
    Hunter-gatherers
    Illinois
    India
    Indiana
    Indonesia
    Iowa
    Iraq
    Israel
    Jim Vieira
    Jobs
    Kensington Rune Stone
    Kentucky
    Kirk Project
    Late Archaic
    Lemuria
    Lithic Raw Materials
    Lithics
    Lizard Man
    Lomekwi
    Lost Continents
    Mack
    Mammoths
    Mastodons
    Maya
    Megafauna
    Megaliths
    Mesolithic
    Michigan
    Middle Archaic
    Middle Pleistocene
    Middle Woodland
    Midwest
    Minnesota
    Mississippi
    Mississippian
    Missouri
    Modeling
    Morphometric
    Mound Builder Myth
    Mu
    Music
    Nazis
    Neandertals
    Near East
    Nephilim
    Nevada
    New Mexico
    Newspapers
    New York
    North Carolina
    Oahspe
    Oak Island
    Obstetrics
    Ohio
    Ohio Valley
    Oldowan
    Olmec
    Open Data
    Paleoindian
    Paleolithic
    Pilumgate
    Pleistocene
    Pliocene
    Pre Clovis
    Pre-Clovis
    Prehistoric Families
    Pseudo Science
    Pseudo-science
    Radiocarbon
    Reality Check
    Rome
    Russia
    SAA
    Sardinia
    SCIAA
    Science
    Scientific Racism
    Sculpture
    SEAC
    Search For The Lost Giants
    Sexual Dimorphism
    Sitchin
    Social Complexity
    Social Networks
    Solutrean Hypothesis
    South Africa
    South America
    South Carolina
    Southeast
    Stone Holes
    Subsistence
    Swordgate
    Teaching
    Technology
    Teeth
    Television
    Tennessee
    Texas
    Topper
    Travel
    Travel Diaries
    Vaccines
    Washington
    Whatzit
    White Supremacists
    Wisconsin
    Woo War Two
    World War I
    World War II
    Writing
    Younger Dryas

    RSS Feed

    Picture
Proudly powered by Weebly