I had some time today to upload some current Kirk Project files and do a little re-organization of the pages.  The main page is still located here, but I've split off some of the content that used to be on that page and created separate pages for datasets, a list of 3D models organized by state (so far they're all from South Carolina), embedded links to 3D models organized by ID number, and 2D images. There is nothing on the 2D image page yet, but my plan is to start adding images as I have time.

I've been steadily accumulating 3D models (there are 22 now that I've uploaded to Sketchfab). I still haven't started wrestling with them to extract usable morphometric data, but I've got a plan for a paper that will compare variability in the large, surface collected sample from Allendale County (South Carolina) to the variability present in smaller assemblages from excavated contexts (and shorter windows of time). One of those assemblages will be the Nipper Creek cache. Another (hopefully) will be the Kirk material from G. S. Lewis-East.  Hopefully I'll be able to get one or two more "narrow time window" assemblages.

In terms of data, I've produced an updated GIS map of the current sample (n=905). It now includes several points from Pennsylvania (donated by Bill Wagner). I've also provided a file of the metric data that I have for 699 of those points. As explained on the data page, the sample of points for which metric data are available is smaller than the larger Kirk sample because I did not measure all of the points during my dissertation work (some were too fragmentary) and I have not started generating linear measurements of the points I'm adding now.  

The linear measurements have alphabetic designations (A through I, as defined in this figure). I calculated them by digitizing landmarks using a freeware package, and it was kind of a pain in the butt.  I'm hoping to find a better software package than I used before, and I plan on adding some additional 2D dimensions/angles since I won't also be dealing with lanceolate points.

I did not produce 3D models of any of the points in my dissertation dataset, as I did not have access to the equipment to do that at the time. ​

I plan on adding a "Contributors" page soon. And I hope to start incorporating more data from external sources in the dataset. I've got lines on some data from Ohio, Tennessee, and a few other areas. I would love to start filling in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina.

As I mentioned briefly in a post yesterday, I've become interested in looking into the evidence for an abandonment of large portions of the Southeast at the end of the Early Archaic period.  

This (2012) paper by Michael Faught and James Waggoner provides an example of how this could be done on a state-by-state basis.  Faught and Waggoner use multiple lines of evidence to evaluate the idea of a population discontinuity between the Early Archaic and Middle Archaic periods in Florida. One of the things they discuss is the presence of a radiocarbon data gap between about 9000 and 8000 radiocarbon years before present (RCYBP). They are able to identify that gap (which is consistent with a significant drop in or lack of population at the end of the Early Archaic using a dataset of 221 pre-5000 RCYBP radiocarbon dates from Florida. 

Assembly of radiocarbon datasets for states across the Eastern Woodlands would be really useful for seeing if there is a similar "gap" in other areas of the Southeast that correlates with technological and statigraphic discontinuities. It seems to me that small bifurcate points (e.g., LeCroy cluster) and/or larger lobed points (e.g., Rice Lobed cluster) are good candidates for marking a contraction or retreat of late Early Archaic hunter-gatherer populations.  While common in the Midwest, such points are absent (?) from Florida and present in only parts of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama. 

I'm aware of the Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia Radiocarbon Database published by Cultural Resource Analysts, Inc. I'm wondering if there are similar existing compilations (either print or electronic) for other eastern states, especially those south of the Ohio River. I've only spent a short amount of looking, but I haven't come across any yet. At the risk of being accused of being lazy, I thought I'd throw the question out there and see what turns up. I will be very surprised if radiocarbon compilations haven't been produced for many areas of the east, and it seems worthwhile to ask about existing resources (which may not yet be easily "discoverable" online) before I contemplate yet another large-scale data mining effort.  Please let me know if you can help.

Update (3/27/2016): I've created this "Eastern Woodlands Radiocarbon Compilation" page to store links and references to radiocarbon compilations.

I'm going to skip the usual discussion of how I wish I had more time to write, and go straight to the summary of things I would've written about if I had more time. I'm limiting myself to one paragraph per topic.

Abandonment of the Southeast During the Early Archaic

I finally finished reading Ken Sassaman's (2010) The Eastern Archaic, Historicized (previous posts here and here). I had a nice email exchange with Sassaman.  Reading his book has gotten me thinking about some new questions to ask of the Archaic record in the Eastern Woodlands.  The suggestion that a large part of the Southeast (south of the Ohio River) was abandoned or very thinly populated/used during the later part of the Early Archaic, connected to the scenario of a population influx during the Middle Archaic, is something that can be evaluated empirically by (I think) assembling data that we've already got on hand. The northward retreat of Early Archaic populations that seems to be marked by the distribution of bifurcate points in South Carolina (see David Anderson's 1991 paper referenced in this post) prompted me to look into Early Archaic point chronology in Florida. Sassaman directed me to this very nice (2012) paper by Michael Faught and James Waggoner.  Faught and Waggoner's discussion of multiple lines of data (radiocarbon, typological, and statigraphic sequences) relevant to evaluating the idea of Early/Middle Archaic population discontinuities in Florida could be used as a blueprint for state-by-state studies across the east.

Eight Wheels of Death: Totally Worth Seven Dollars

This post marks two firsts: my first mention of roller derby and my first movie review. The short film Eight Wheels of Death is a homegrown effort associated with the Bleeding Heartland Roller Derby in Bloomington, Indiana. I picked up a copy when I went to see my daughter skate last weekend (she's in the junior league Bloomington ThunderBirds). The movie is about what you'd expect, and that's going to be the extent of my review (here's the trailer).It was not the cinematography that made it worth $7 to me, but the fact that purchasing it supports roller derby. I was pretty impressed with the creativity, energy, and team-building that I saw both at my daughter's practice and at the actual event. I didn't see much of the adult league match (a hometown contest between the Farm Fatales and the Slaughter Scouts) because I got drafted for a shift in the concession stand, but I came away with both a lot of positive feelings and substantial curiosity about roller derby.  As best I can tell, we're now in at least the fourth or fifth generation of popularity of roller derby. There's a really interesting history as to how this activity has changed over the decades as its popularity has cyclically risen and fallen.  I'm not anywhere close to understanding it, but it's fascinating. And it's also got me pondering why and under what circumstances we sometimes (but not always) describe cultural/technological change as "generational."  It seems like identifying "generations" is kind of a real-time way of temporal typologizing (imposing nominal categories on more-or-less continuous variation). We do it for fighter aircraft and roller derby, but not for basketball and cars.

The Siege of Fort Motte and the Carolina Spring

I spent Friday working with Steve Smith (Director of SCIAA) and two volunteers on a survey at Fort Motte, site of a Revolutionary War siege and battle. There is a lot of interesting historic period archaeology here, and going out with Steve was a nice opportunity to participate and learn something new. Steve and Jim Legg are using systematic metal detecting survey, among other things, to try to pin down where on the landscape various parts of the Fort Motte story unfolded.  Yesterday we were working in the general area where some of the Patriot forces would have been camped during the siege. We found several good colonial-period artifacts (e.g., a musket ball, cast iron kettle fragments, and a brass finial probably from a flag or spontoon), I got some experience using a metal detector, and had a good time talking with the volunteers. I also saw the first dragonfly I've seen so far this year, and got to complain about the early March heat. It really is a different world down here as far as the weather.  I'm going to need to hustle if I'm going to get any of my own fieldwork going before the spring explosion of plant growth makes things like long distance total station work impossible.

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.   

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: 

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:

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.

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.
​
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.

This has been a busy couple of weeks and the blog writing has once again slipped down the priority list. Preparing two "extra" presentations this month (one for the Archaeological Society of South Carolina meeting last weekend and one for my talk at Mercer University tomorrow) were at the top of the list along with keeping the Kirk data collection going, teaching my class, and falsely promising to get caught up on emails.

The Mercer presentation is going to be fun. I'm sure I'm several standard deviations from the mean in terms of my interest in thinking and talking about anthropology and pseudoscience, so it will be a struggle to get my presentation down to length. I was told I would have to reduce the talk from its original 8 hours to about 45 minutes. My last counter-offer was to meet somewhere in the middle, say around 6.5 hours. I didn't hear anything back after that, so I think we've reached agreement.  The organizer (Craig Byron) is an old friend of mine, so I'm sure he'll understand if I have to go to 7 hours or so to make all my points.  That will still get us done before midnight, even allowing for a five minute bathroom break.

Don't worry, I'm kidding. You should still come to my talk, if only for my animations of flying watermelons. I promise I won't take up a single minute more than three hours of your time.

On another topic, I have been happily reading the comments on my blog post reacting to Chris Moore's American Antiquity paper. If you're interested in Paleoindian, hunter-gatherers, and/or the Pleistocene/Holocene transition in the Eastern Woodlands you should check it out -- it's nice to see professionals chime in and share information and ideas in a public setting like a blog. Hopefully we can get that happening more often. I want to respond to and/or follow up on several of the comments, but I've been forcing myself to take care of other business first (see above).

Here's another thing I'd like to have a good look at: this new paper on Fishtail projectile points from Brazil by Daniel Loponte, Mercedes Okumura, and Mirian Carbonera. It has metric data, nice images, maps, and a summary of what's known about dating.  I don't know much about Fishtails -- the last thing I can recall reading about them (some time ago) was the 1999 "Geographic Variation in Fluted Projectile Points: A Hemispheric Perspective" by Juliet Morrow and Toby Morrow (American Antiquity 64(2):215-230). It will be interesting to read the 1999 paper again and look at the new paper.

What if the Clovis adaptation in the Eastern Woodlands had nothing substantive whatsoever to do with mammoths and mastodons? 

What if all of those dioramas and illustrations of Paleoindian peoples swarming a mastodon mired in the muck are complete baloney?

What if one of our most popular baseline notions about Clovis in the east is totally wrong?

The thought isn't an original one, of course, but one that I've been thinking about since listening to a presentation by Christopher Moore (SCIAA colleague) at the Archaeological Society of South Carolina (ASSC) meeting on Saturday. Moore is the senior author of a recent American Antiquity paper (which is unfortunately behind a paywall) that presents protein residue analysis of 142 hafted bifaces (i.e., stone projectile points/knives) from the Savannah River area of South Carolina and Georgia.  Protein residue analysis uses chemical tests to identify trace residues left on stone tools through contact with the blood of various groups of animals.

Here is a summary figure from the published paper:

The results that Moore et al. present are striking for two main reasons. First, there is positive evidence for the exploitation of bison in the region during the Paleoindian through Middle Archaic periods.  Second, there are no indications that any of the Paleoindian tools they examined were involved with processing proboscideans (i.e., mammoths and mastodons).

As explained in the American Antiquity paper, the positive evidence for bison populations in the region in the Late Pleistocene is consistent with several other data points (including previous protein residue studies and radiocarbon-dated remains such as the Wacissa bison). The new residue data also support the continued presence of bison in the region into the mid-Holocene. That's pretty interesting to me, as it suggests that the exploitation of a large game animal that is more-or-less invisible in the faunal records (both archaeological and natural) may have been important to the food economies of the Archaic peoples I'm keenly interested in understanding.

And what about the absence of hits for proboscidean?  That's pretty interesting as well. Near the end of his ASSC presentation, Moore informally posed a great "what if" question (and I'm paraphrasing here): what if the evidence for human involvement with mammoths/mastodons in eastern North America actually pertains to pre-Clovis rather than Clovis peoples?

For me, pondering that question was one of those nice "wait a @#!%*$# second . . ." moments that happens every so often in science. What if we have not just exaggerated the embrace between Clovis and megafauna in the east, but allowed our romantic notions (and the very clear evidence of Clovis-age megafaunal predation in the west) to blind us to the real pattern that's present?

Impossible, you say?  Let's ask a series of questions. I'll give you the answers based on what I know off the top of my head and what I have time to assemble on Monday morning of a busy week.  Please correct me if I'm wrong on something or help me add things I've left out -- I'm not making any claim that this listing of evidence is exhaustive. Note: when I say "eastern North America" I mean east of the Mississippi River.

Question: Are there any direct associations between Clovis stone tools and mammoth/mastodon remains in eastern North America?

Answer: No. As far as I know, Kimmswick (Missouri) is the farthest east Clovis-associated megafaunal kill site.

Question: Are there any human-butchered mastodon/mammoth remains in eastern North America that have been dated to the Clovis period (i.e., 11,050-10,800 radiocarbon years before present [RCYBP]; ~13,250-12,800 Calendar years before present; ~11,300-10,850 BC)?

Answer: Not that I know of off the top of my head. The eastern cases of purported mastodon/mammoth butchery of which I am aware pre-date the known age range of Clovis. Here are some examples:

• Hebior mammoth (Wisconsin): ~12,500 RCYBP;
• Burning Tree mastodon (Ohio): ~11,500 RCYBP (Fisher et al. 1994);
• Aucilla River mastodon tusk (Florida): ~12,200 RCYBP;

Question: Is there any direct evidence that mammoths/mastodons survived into Clovis times in eastern North America?

Answer: Yes. There are directly-dated mammoth and mastodon remains that demonstrate that proboscideans survived into and beyond Clovis times. The period 10,500-10,000 RCYBP (i.e., post Clovis) is probably a reasonable extinction window for mastodons in the east.  Here, for example, is a report of a mastodon from northern Indiana dated to about 10,000 RCYBP. 

Question: Is there any direct evidence that Clovis peoples used parts of mammoths/mastodons obtained from recently deceased animals?

Answer: Yes, apparently. There are ivory and bone tools from Florida that are attributed to Clovis. Here is a quote from a paper by Bruce Bradley:

"While most of the known specimens were recovered from stratigraphically mixed deposits, recent archaeological excavations have found them in late Pleistocene deposits directly associated with extinct fauna, including mammoth and mastodon. Flaked stone projectile points and other tools are also associated with these artifacts. Projectile point types commonly include Clovis fluted and Suwanee."

​I don't have the time to delve into the literature right now and investigate the nature of the associations between the ivory tools and the Paleoindian points, or to see if any of the ivory tools have been directly dated. 

So there you go.

It seems pretty clear that Clovis peoples existed on the landscape (or were at least present in eastern North America at the same time) as proboscideans.  They apparently used parts of those animals to fashion tools. But the case for active Clovis-age predation of mammoths and mastodons continues to be based on circumstantial evidence. As more and more purported proboscidean butchery sites of pre-Clovis age are reported from the Eastern Woodlands, it seems less likely that the east-west contrast in megafaunal kill sites is solely the result of a preservation bias: it's not the elephants that are missing, but the direct evidence that Clovis peoples hunted them.

If we take mammoths and mastodons out of the Clovis picture, there's a lot of explaining to do. What was the point of all that beautiful technology? I was one of several junior co-authors on a paper (Speth et al. 2013) that attempted a political re-imagining of Early Paleoindian fluted point technologies. While I'm not convinced by all the arguments in that paper, I think it was a useful exercise. There are other alternatives to the dominant "Clovis meat machine" model that can be constructed.

And what if bison was an important game animal in some portions of the Eastern Woodlands into the Middle Archaic? What if bone preservation issues really are part of the problem for our interpretations of the Early and Middle Holocene and we've been unable to see (and therefore to factor into our models) a large herbivore that may have been a huge part of the subsistence economies of early hunting-gathering societies in the region? That deserves a very hard look.

I've used all the time I can spare to write about this today. I'm hoping some of you find this question interesting and point out things I'm not aware of. I'll be returning to this as I have time - it's a pretty cool set of questions to think about. 

Today I'll be giving a short presentation at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Society of South Carolina. Being a new transplant to South Carolina, this will be my first time attending the meeting. I'm looking forward to meeting my new colleagues from around the state and hearing about what they're working on.

I decided to talk about the Kirk Project at today's meeting. Although I've been working on it steadily over the last few weeks, my energies so far have been channeled into prepping the database and streamlining the process for producing 3D models.  So, unfortunately, I don't yet have any coherent data or analysis to present. My presentation is an informal discussion of the question of the Kirk Horizon and what we can do to address it.

Here's a pdf of the slides I'll be talking from today.  Unfortunately I ran out of time to provide complete citations for the parenthetical references.  I'll fill those in and provide a complete version later. 

Last Thanksgiving break, I wrote this post about the Early Archaic corner-notched point horizon in the Eastern Woodlands, discussing some of the things we know and pondering some of the questions we can't currently answer. As a refresher, the “Kirk Horizon” (dating to about 8,800-6,600 BC) is marked by a distribution of Kirk Corner Notched points that extends across a huge area, from the lower Great Lakes to the Florida Keys. Its existence has been noted for over four decades (i.e., at least since James Tuck’s 1974 paper “Early Archaic Horizons in Eastern North America”).  

Although many authors have remarked on the striking similarity of Kirk Corner Notched projectile points from across the east, as far as I know there has never been a concerted effort to assemble a dataset of sufficient detail and spatial scope to allow us to characterize and analyze the kinds, amounts, and spatial components of variability among these points. Given how widespread Kirk is, that's a big job.

I assembled a relatively large dataset of Kirk points from the Midwest as part of my dissertation work, and have used that information in a couple of publications (e.g., this one and this one).  I've now started the process of adding to that dataset, beginning with information from Kirk points in large collection from Allendale County, South Carolina, that was donated to SCIAA in the 1990's.  I'm working my way through the Kirk Cluster points in that collection, adding them to my existing database and producing 3D digital models. 

The Eastern Woodlands is big. It took me years of intermittent work with both private and institutional collections to assemble my Kirk dataset from the Midwest.  It's going to take me a while to build a dataset of similar size in the South Carolina and the adjacent Atlantic Coast states.  As you can see from the map, I have no data from the deep south or the Northeast.  

If you're like me and are interested in questions about Kirk (including where it comes from and what it can tell us about the Early Archaic societies of the Eastern Woodlands), I ask you to think about the idea of producing the largest-ever Kirk dataset ever assembled. How similar are Kirks, really, across this large area? How does variability within Kirk break down according to space? Can we identify regional differences in "stylistic" variation?  Are there discontinuities or is variability clinal? What about regional differences in the scales of raw material transport? Is morphometric variability isomorphic with lithic raw materials? Can we identify regional variation in "functional" attributes such as resharpening patterns, haft size, blade configuration, etc.?  Just from looking about the first 30-40 Kirk points I've examined from South Carolina, I'm guessing there might be a higher incidence of beveling (all left hand beveling so far) here than in the Midwest.

Anyway, this post isn't supposed to be high pressure. I won't necessarily be able to devote a great deal of time to this on any given day. I'm just letting you know that if you're interested in Kirk and want to think big, I'm right there with you. Let me know if you want to participate in an effort to create a massive Kirk dataset that we can use to address all kind of potentially interesting questions about early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands. Please pass it on to anyone you think might be interested.

Update (2/12/2016): Guidelines for contributing data to the Kirk Project.