A comment on yesterday's blog post about the Middle Archaic brought up the issue of the origin and age of the Carolina bays. The bays are elliptical depressions with a northwest-southeast orientation. They vary significantly in size and occur along the Atlantic coast in a band extending from New Jersey to Florida.  There is a similar set of features (with different orientations) in Nebraska and Kansas.

Carolina bays are interesting for several reasons. They're obviously peculiar, geographically-widespread features formed by some sort large scale event or natural process. There is significant disagreement as to how and when formed and, subsequently, their relationship to the early prehistory of the Eastern Woodlands.  The most dramatic scenario sees the Carolina bays as impact sites from debris that rained down after an apocalyptic comet strike 12,900 years ago that triggered the Younger Dryas and caused the "extinction" of the Clovis peoples. The less dramatic scenario sees them as results of some regular terrestrial process that ran its course well before humans were even present in the region.  

How did the Carolina bays form?

Today there are two main schools of thought about how the Carolina bays formed: (1) through wind-wave action associated with Pleistocene conditions unlike those of today; and (2) as impact sites of debris ejected by a comet strike in Michigan or Canada.  

My impression is that the geomorphological (i.e., terrestrial) explanation enjoys a lot of support from geologists who specialize in the Pleistocene. I'm just going to paste in a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry that sums it up:​

The second proposition -- that the bays were formed in connection with an extraterrestrial impact -- is the more exciting one.  It has been around for a while in various forms (so far the earliest paper I've seen dates to 1933; here is a paper from 1975). Proponents of this idea point to the elliptical shape of the bays, their peculiar orientations and limited geographic distribution, and other characteristics that appear difficult to explain using the terrestrial model (why, for example, do similar features occur in Nebraska?).

This page proposes that

In other words, an oblique comet strike on the continental ice sheet (this paper says the orientations of the bays suggest the impact site was located at Saginaw Bay, Michigan) and ejected into the air a massive load of sand and ice. That debris landed in an pair of arcs, one stretching across the Atlantic coastal plain and forming the Carolina bays. 

You'll notice I have bolded the word "Illinoisan" in the quote above. That brings us to the next question.

When did the Carolina bays form?

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that, even if the Carolina bays were the result of an extraterrestrial event rather than terrestrial processes, they formed long before humans were present in eastern North America. The Illinoian stage of the Pleistocene referenced above dates to about 190-130 thousand years ago.

This paper by Mark Brooks et al. (2001) discusses stratified sequences of natural deposits in a Carolina bay that have been directly dated by radiocarbon to tens of thousands of years before the Younger Dryas (12,900 years ago) impact proposed by Firestone et al. (2007). That paper also details encroachment of a sand dune over and into a Carolina bay at around 48,000 years ago, indicating that the bay has to be older than 48,000 years.

Because many Carolina bays held water, they were attractive to both animals and humans in the regions they occurred. This 2010 paper (also with Mark Brooks as senior author) describes the presence of archaeological sites associated with Carolina bays near the Savannah River. Clovis artifacts are associated with the bays, which means that the bays could not have been the result of some event that "wiped out" the Clovis peoples: the bays were there before, during, and after the Early Paleoindian period.

Conclusion

I used "terrestrial or extraterrestrial" in the title of this post because I thought it would attract readers. While I'm curious about that question, however, it doesn't ultimately appear to have much bearing on the early prehistory of the Eastern Woodlands. The Carolina bays, however they were formed, predate the Paleoindian period by at least tens of thousands of years - there's a lot of positive evidence for that. Even if a comet strike at about 12,900 years ago did precipitate the Younger Dryas and cause environmental changes to which human societies would have had to adjust, that impact did not produce the Carolina bays.

No-one would have been around to experience the effects of a very ancient (e.g., Illinoian age) impact into the ice sheet.  Maybe I should have titled this post "If a comet hits the ice but there's no-one around to see it, does it make a difference?" It does, of course, if it re-shaped the environment in some way that was significant to later peoples. But I don't think it is those kinds of effects that most extraterrestrial impact fans are excited about. 

I am willing to bet that if you asked every archaeologist in the Eastern Woodlands vote for his or her favorite chunk of prehistory, less than five percent would say "Middle Archaic."  The Middle Archaic probably wouldn't make many Top Ten Most Interesting Sub-Period lists (most of us divide prehistory into eleven or twelve sub-periods).  It might win the vote for "Most Boring," presuming people remember that it exists. If the Middle Archaic went to the Eastern Woodlands archaeological prom, it would probably spend the evening standing quietly against the wall.  But it probably wouldn't get invited anyway.  And it will get picked last for dodge ball every time. That's a given.

I feel you, Middle Archaic, I feel you.

Based on the looks on my students' faces during class yesterday, the lack of enthusiasm for the Middle Archaic is not limited to professionals.  I'm lucky I had a few slides about the Lizard Man of Lee County to get the lecture going. It was all downhill from there. Perhaps the proximity of spring break contributed, and perhaps it just wasn't my best-prepared or best-delivered class.  But I think their lack of interest in the Middle Archaic is, like that of many archaeologists, real.
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Where's the love for the Middle Archaic?

The privation suffered by the Middle Archaic is certainly not due to a lack of importance. It is the longest sub-period in Eastern Woodlands prehistory, consuming three thousand years between about 8000 and 5000 radiocarbon years before present (RCYBP) (~8900-5800 calibrated YBP; ~6900-3800 BC). While there is still much we don't understand about what happened during those three millennia, we do know that the societies that emerged at the end of the tunnel were quite different than the Early Archaic societies of the earliest Holocene. The Late Archaic world was filled with semi-sedentary societies inter-connected by webs of ritual and exchange that moved artifacts across vast distances of the east. Many Late Archaic societies were somewhat dependent on domesticated plants. There is evidence of territoriality, violence, and perhaps incipient craft specialization. The population of the Eastern Woodlands was undoubtedly significantly higher than it had been a few thousand years earlier. Between 8000 and 5000 RCYBP, just about everything changed.

The Archaic middle child, however, just doesn't rate much interest in many regions. My impression is that some of that neglect is due to the nature of the material culture -- much of the lithic technology of the Middle Archaic is just not objectively pretty.  And in some parts of the country, like the Midwest, we still have difficulty identifying Middle Archaic sites based on stone tools. Either we're not recognizing the point styles as Middle Archaic or there just aren't that many sites. The situation is different in the Carolinas, where Middle Archaic sites thickly blanket portions of the landscape. It's a confusing picture that probably contributed to the Middle Archaic being unrecognized as a meaningful cultural-historical unit until after the advent of radiocarbon dating.

Not every change in material culture signals the arrival of a "new" people, of course, but in some cases it certainly does, and maybe this is one of those cases.  Sassaman is proposing an influx of populations from the outside as a hypothesis to explain not just the appearance of a new point style, but what we can now recognize as a patterned suite of changes --technological, demographic, and social -- that unfolds across the Eastern Woodlands. His migration explanation is based on far more data than were available in the 1930s and 1940s, and it is launched from a position of much greater theoretical sophistication than the Archaic migration explanations of the past. As he presents it, it fits several differently lines of data and explains some things that explanations wed to in situ ecological change have difficulty with.

Second, the brave new world of theory in which we now operate means that there are potentially many different ways to approach, evaluate, and flesh out the hypothesis of a major migration into the region during the Middle Archaic. Sassaman highlights, for example, some basic contrasts between the behaviors and belief systems of diasporic communities ("those that share a common history but not a common place") and coalescent communities ("those that share a common place but not a common history") and asks how we might understand the record of the Middle and Late Archaic using that lens.  As someone who has spent time wrestling with Archaic lithic technologies, I  like the idea that maybe there are other ways to approach the confusing space-time tangle of projectile point styles and connect changes in that tangle to other aspects of history, process, and interaction.  Diasporic communities, eventful history, and ethnogenesis in the Middle and Late Archaic? Now that sounds like fun.

Third, a new framework for examining alternative narratives for the Middle Archaic facilitates a fresh look, I think, at the "bread and butter" questions of intensification and complexification of hunter-gatherer societies in the Eastern Woodlands.  What happens to our explanations of settlement and subsistence change if we can't presume demographic (i.e., biological) continuity through time? Look at Bruce Smith's map (in this 2011 paper) of where the earliest domesticated plant remains have been recovered with the core area of the Shell Mound Archaic superimposed:

Although plants such as Chenopodium are not classified as "domesticated" until the Late Archaic period (ca. 3700 calibrated YBP), the processes of domestication began thousands of years earlier, during the Middle Archaic. If Sassaman is correct about population movements into the region during the Middle Archaic, domestication of several key plants may have been associated with populations relatively new to the area rather than as a result of a "settling in" process with roots in the Late Pleistocene.

​Readers of this blog know that I love entertaining so-called "alternative" ideas that run counter to prevailing interpretations but also fit the available evidence. This is a good one.  As I'm reading Sassaman's book (I'm on chapter 4 of 6), I'm finding myself flipping through my internal store of knowledge, opinions, and assumptions about the Midwestern (especially Ohio Valley) Archaic that I know fairly well and the new things I'm learning about the Carolina Archaic. Any book that prompts that kind of reshuffling is, in my opinion, a good book.

There is a great amount of work to be done, and I hope that Sassaman's book stimulates some new thinking about this chunk of time. If you can read through his treatment of regionalized mortuary practices, craft and trade, and mound building and monumentality during the Middle Archaic and not be convinced that this sub-period is not only worthy of much more attention but, when viewed at a macro scales, fascinating . . . you probably haven't read this far into this blog post anyway. Sassaman's book doesn't just dress up the Middle Archaic in a rented tuxedo for the night to make it look good:  it constructs a legitimate re-boot that students of Eastern Woodlands early prehistory should have a look at.

Maybe I can make my next class on the Middle Archaic a little spicier without relying on the Lizard Man. There are a lot of nuts and bolts things that we need to know about how the rhythm and tempo of Middle Archaic life at small scales (hence my interest in finding some well-preserved sites to go along with all of the surface data here). But tying those things into larger sets of questions that move beyond simple ecology (or at least considering a larger range of social and demographic settings in which to situate those ecological questions) can't hurt. Whatever happened in the Middle Archaic happened, and there's no changing that now. It's not the Middle Archaic's fault if we're not smart enough to figure it out. Don't blame the victim. 

I know that some of you follow this blog are professional archaeologists and some are not. I find Sassaman's book to be very readable, but there is some technical content that probably won't appeal to all audiences.  You can find the first chapter here as a pdf if you'd like to have a look.