Andy White Anthropology
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An Update on the Kirk Project

3/6/2017

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Without thinking about it too hard, it seems like a disproportionate amount of my work on the early hunting-gathering societies of the Eastern Woodlands has been done in the company of sick children. Today's update on the Kirk Project comes to you from a crowded chair, with my typing arms constrained by the presence of a 3-year-old in pajamas watching Fireman Sam. For the full effect, play this in the background while you read this post.

I have four updates, one of which includes an apology.

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South Carolina Antiquities Paper

The first salvo of analysis related to the Kirk Project comes in the form of a paper in South Carolina Antiquities titled "A Preliminary Analysis of Haft Variability in South Carolina Kirk Points." The paper uses morphometric data from 46 Kirk points, considering shape variability in the haft regions and asking which dimensions of that variability are most likely to be linked to change through time. The majority of the points are from the Larry Strong collection (from Allendale County, South Carolina), a surface assemblage that was presumably created over a long span time of time. I compare variability in the Larry Strong points to variability in points from the Nipper Creek cache (Richland County, South Carolina), which was presumably created over a very short period of time. You can find a link to the paper on my Annotated Journal Articles page. Eventually I'll add files with the data I used in the analysis.

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Morphometric Analysis on Two Tracks

Although based ultimately on 3D models, the analysis in the South Carolina Antiquities paper was done in 2D. I will continue working with the 3D models I'm producing, finding ways to capitalize on the richness of those data. At the same time, however, I plan to pursue a large scale 2D analysis that will allow me to make use of the large amount of data that I collected for my dissertation.  I've begun organizing and posting the "rough" scaled images of Kirk points from my Midcontinental data set by state here. It will take me a while to get all those photos in order, as there are over 600.

Once the images are assembled, I will be able to extract and analyze comparable 2D shape data from all the Kirk points in my dataset. At that point, we can finally start addressing questions about patterns of Kirk variability across large expanses of space. With a system in place, it will be much easier to feed new points from other regions into the analysis. That brings me to my next update . . .

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Apologies for My Sluggishness, Alabama . . . and Tennessee . . . and Georgia . . .

As I wrote several weeks ago, a mention of the Kirk Project in the newsletter of the Alabama Archaeological Society spurred several people to contact me about their collections. I have continued to get emails, but I haven't yet started assembling them in an attempt to take advantage of the offers for help and information. Starting to get back to people is next on my "to do" list today. I truly appreciate the communication, and I apologize for not responding to everyone in a more timely manner. The  "zero inbox" grail has always eluded me. It's a personal failing.

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Processing a Large Collection from Aiken County, South Carolina

Over the holiday break, SCIAA received a large, donated artifact collection from Aiken County, South Carolina. Processing the entire collection (which has taken over much of my lab) is a long term proposition. One of our highest priorities is inventorying and labeling the Paleoindian and Early Archaic materials so that we (by "we" I mean primarily Al Goodyear, Joe Wilkinson, and myself) can include them in analyses. Look for those materials to be incorporated into the Kirk Project in the future.


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"Social Implications of Large-Scale Demographic Change During the Early Archaic Period in the Southeast"

11/1/2016

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I've loaded a pdf version of my 2016 SEAC presentation "Social Implications of Large-Scale Demographic Change During the Early Archaic Period in the Southeast" onto my Academia.edu page (you can also access a copy here). Other than a few minor alterations to complete the citations and adjust the slides to get rid of the animations, it's what I presented at the meetings last Friday. I tend to use slides as prompts for speaking, so some of the information that I tried to convey isn't directly represented on the slides. There's enough there that you can get a pretty good idea, I hope, of what I was going for.
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"Early Hunter-Gatherer Societies" Symposium at SEAC

10/26/2016

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Archaeological conferences serve several purposes. For me, there are three main attractions, all selfish: (1) meeting people; (2) learning about things I didn't know that I didn't know about; and (3) clarifying and catalyzing my own research. Conferences are fun, but they're also a bit mercenary -- I want something from them.

This year's Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) is in Athens, Georgia, which I hear is very nice. I put together a small symposium titled "Hunter-Gatherer Societies of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Southeast" (session 35 in the program). I originally wrote about the idea last April. We ended up with papers by seven presenters: Al Goodyear, Doug Sain, David Thulman and Maile Neel, Kara Bridgman Sweeney, Joe Wilkinson, Sarah Gilleland, and me. Here is the symposium abstract:

"Societies are groups of people defined by persistent social interaction.  While the characteristics of the late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies of the Southeast certainly varied, archaeological data generally suggest that these societies were often geographically extensive and structurally complex.  Patterns of artifact variability and transport, for example, demonstrate that small-scale elements (e.g., individuals, families, and foraging groups) were situated within much larger social fabrics. This session aims to explore the size, structure, and characteristics of early Southeastern hunter-gatherer societies, asking how patterns of face-to-face interactions at human scales “map up” to and are affected by larger social spheres." 

I decided to use my contribution to think about the issue of a possible abandonment of the deep south during the later portion of the Early Archaic period. Here is the abstract for my presentation, titled "Social Implications of Large-Scale Demographic Change during the Early Archaic Period in the Southeast:"
 
"Previous studies of radiocarbon and projectile point distribution data have suggested the possibility of a significant shift in the distribution and/or behaviors of human populations during the later portion of the Early Archaic period (i.e., post-9000 RCYBP). This paper considers the evidence for an “abandonment” of large portions of the Southeast following the Kirk Corner Notched Horizon and explores (1) possible explanations for large-scale changes in the distribution of population in the Early Holocene and (2) how those demographic changes, if they occurred, might have articulated with social changes at the level of the family, foraging group, and larger societies."  

I first became interested in the Early Archaic abandonment issue while reading Ken Sassaman's (2010) book Eastern Archaic, Historicized. Working on this presentation was fun because it forced me to try to think through some of the issues about how we would recognize a large-scale abandonment, what the abandonment process actually would have been like, and what the social ramifications might have been for the people and societies involved in that process. I'll tweak the presentation before I give it, but it's pretty close to done.

​The first question is to ask is whether or not there was a large-scale abandonment of parts of the Southeast. On the surface (at least), I think the case is fairly compelling. Following the example of Faught and Waggoner's (2012) paper about Florida, I started compiling radiocarbon data from across the Eastern Woodlands to evaluate the idea. At 9,500 dates and counting, the radiocarbon database that I'm working on clearly supports the idea that there are far fewer than expected dates from 9000-7000 radiocarbon years before present (RCYBP) in the deep south:
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A chi square easily defeats the null hypothesis: there just aren't as many radiocarbon dates from 9000-7000 RCYBP below the southern corner of South Carolina as you'd expect by chance. The pattern holds when you consider the number of dates during that period in the entire Atlantic Plain vs. the other major physiographic regions of the eastern United States (the Appalachian Highlands and the Interior Plains). 

The idea of a large-scale abandonment is also consistent with the distribution of post-Kirk lobed/bifurcate projectile points, which (unlike Kirk), does not extend into Louisiana, Florida, and southern Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
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If we presume that a post-Kirk abandonment/marginalization of the Atlantic Plain did occur, we can move on to the "why" and "how" questions. Regarding the "why" question: the limited environmental data I've looked at (e.g., the 1980 pollen core from White Pond, South Carolina) suggest that the period 9000-7000 RCYBP was one of significant change.  Oak and hickory decreased and pine increased. In simplest terms, this shift may have been related to a decrease in mast production, perhaps affecting the density of white-tailed deer (probably the primary game species for early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands).

But how would an abandonment actually take place? I can think of several ways that populations could shift out of an area. My gut is that an abandonment of the Atlantic Plain during the late Early Archaic would have most probably involved a contraction of populations into the Appalachian Highlands and Interior Plains. One of my favorite of Lew Binford's papers is his (1983) discussion of how hunter-gatherers often make extensive use of the landscape. Keeping his examples in mind, it's easy to imagine how "abandonment" could actually be the end result of a long-term process involving segments of the population getting "pulled in" to better quality environments in the course of normal decisions about movement.

Assuming population size stayed constant, this shift would have necessarily involved changes in mobility. If (based on Midwestern data) we assume that Kirk "bands" had a group mobility radius of about 200 km, there would have been room for about 18 such "bands" in the Eastern Woodlands. If you took that same population and crammed them into an area 33% smaller (i.e., the Eastern Woodlands minus the Atlantic Plain), the scale of group mobility would have to be reduced by 17% (mobility radius of 165 km) to keep everything else the same.
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That level of population contraction would have almost certainly had ramifications up and down the levels of those post-Kirk societies. Residential moves would have decreased in frequency and/or distance, there may have been shifts in logistical vs. foraging strategies, and the lowered "cost" of maintaining extra-local inter-personal relationships may have de-emphasized gift exchange and inter-group marriage as mechanism for creating and maintaining distant social ties. 
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It's possible to develop a suite of hypotheses and archaeological expectations to evaluate the idea of a large scale abandonment. 
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Make no mistake: these are long-term propositions.  My entire dissertation, for example, was focused on using a combination of modeling and archaeological data to try to understand how changes in patterns of variability in material culture were related to changes in the characteristics and properties of social networks. It's not trivia, and it's not easy. 

For me, this presentation was a machine for thinking. I can't "prove" anything, but going through the process of committing to an idea and preparing a presentation has forced me to attempt to think through some complex, interesting issues. I'm hoping I'll get some good feedback on my ideas ("interesting" and/or "you're full of it"), which obviously involve an extensive geographic area that I make no claim to have mastered. 

I also hope to take full advantage of my hotel and at least quadruple my supply of ink pens. Every little bit helps.
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Three-Headed Research Monster: A Brief Update

9/8/2016

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We're now into the fourth week of the semester here at the University of South Carolina. As usual I've been writing for this blog less than I'd like (I have several unfinished draft posts and ideas for several more, and there's currently a backlog of Fake Hercules Swords). A good chunk of my time/energy is going into the Forbidden Archaeology class (you can follow along on the course website if you like -- I've been writing short synopses, and student-produced content will begin to appear a few weeks from now). Much of the remainder has gone into pushing forward the inter-locking components of my research agenda. This is a brief update about those pieces.


Small-Scale Archaeological Data

At the beginning of the summer I spent a little time in the field doing some preliminary excavation work at a site that contains (minimally) an intact Archaic component buried about 1.9 meters below the surface (see this quick summary).  Based on the general pattern here in the Carolina Piedmont and a couple of projectile points recovered from the slump at the base of the profile, my guess is that buried cultural zone dates to the Middle Archaic period (i.e., about 8000-5000 years ago).​

My daughter washed some of the artifacts from the site over the summer, and I've now got an undergraduate student working on finishing up the washing before moving on to cataloging and labeling. Once the lithics are labeled we'll be able to spread everything out and start fitting the quartz chipping debris back together. Because I piece-plotted the large majority of the lithic debris, fitting it back together will help us understand how the deposit was created. I'm hoping we can get some good insights into the very small-scale behaviors that created the lithic deposit (i.e.,perhaps the excavated portion of the deposit was created by just one or two people over the course of less than an hour).
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Drawing of the deposits exposed in profile. The numbers in the image are too small to read, but the (presumably) Middle Archaic zone is the second from the bottom if you look at the left edge of the drawing. Woodland/Mississippian pit features are also exposed in the profile nearer the current ground surface.
When the archaeology faculty met to discuss the classes we'd be offering in the spring semester, I pitched the idea of running a one-day-per-week field school at the site. Assuming I can get sufficient enrollment numbers, that looks like it's going to happen. The site is within driving distance of Columbia, so we'll be commuting every Friday (leaving campus at 8:00 and returning by 4:00). The course will be listed as ANTH 322/722. It's sand, it's three dimensional, and it's pretty complicated -- it's going to be a fun excavation. I'll be looking to hire a graduate student to assist me on Fridays, and I'll be applying for grant monies to cover the costs of the field assistant's wages, transportation, and other costs associated with putting a crew in the field. 

Large-Scale Archaeological Data

Some parts of my quest to assemble several different large-scale datasets are creeping along, some are moving forward nicely, and some are still on pause.
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​In the "creeping along" department is the Eastern Woodlands Radiocarbon Compilation. My daughter did some work on the bibliography over the summer, so that was helpful. I'm still missing data from big chunks of the Southeast and Midwest. I've got some sources in mind to fill some of those gaps, and I've also got a list of co-conspirators. Our plan is to combine everything we've got ASAP and make it available ASAP.  I don't really have a timeline in mind for doing that, but for selfish reasons I'm going to try to make it sooner rather than later: I'm going to be using information from the radiocarbon compilation in the paper I'm going to give at this year's SEAC meeting in October. So . .  Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois . . . I'll be coming for you.
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I've got two undergraduate students working on processing the Larry Strong Collection, a large collection of artifacts (mostly chipped stone projectile points) from Allendale County, South Carolina.  Mr. Strong, who gathered the materials himself over the course of decades, donated the collection to SCIAA in the 1990's. Large surface collections such as this have significant research potential. I'm most interested in this collection for two reasons: (1) it provides a large sample of Kirk points from a single geographical area made from a single raw material, improving the possibility of teasing apart functional, stylistic, and temporal dimensions of variability (the large majority of 3D models of Kirk points I've produced so far have come from the Larry Strong collection for just this reason); (2) it provides a basis for making robust statements about the relative frequencies of various point types. When you have an n in the many thousands, you can have some confidence that the patterns you're seeing (such as drop in the numbers of points following the Kirk Horizon) are real. That will also factor into my SEAC paper. Curation of the Larry Strong collection is being funded by a grant from the Archaeological Research Trust.
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Finally, in the "paused" category there is the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project. That effort has been on hold since early last year (I have money to support it and I had an assistant hired, but she moved on to a greener pasture). I'd really like to get this going again but I need to find someone who can work on it more-or-less independently. And I need a bit more office furniture and another computer. Hopefully I can get the EWHADP moving again after things stabilize with my new crop of employees and I have time to take a trip to the surplus building and see what I can scrape up.

Complex Systems Theory and Computer Modeling

Complex systems theory is what will make it possible to bridge the small and large scales of data that I'm collecting. Last year, I invested some effort into transferring my latest computer model (FN3_D_V3) into Repast Simphony and getting it working. I also started building a brand new, simpler model to look at equifinality issues associated with interpreting patterns of lithic transport (specifically to address the question of whether or not we can differentiate patterns of transport produced via group mobility, personal mobility between groups, and exchange).  

As it currently sits, the FN3_D_V3 model is mainly demographic, lacking a spatial component. Over the summer I used it to produce data relevant to understanding the minimum viable population (MVP) size of human groups. Those data, which I'm currently in the process of analyzing, suggest to me that the "magic number of 500" is probably much too large: I have yet to find evidence in my data that human populations limited to about 150 people are not demographically viable over spans of several hundred years even under constrained marriage rules. But I've just started the analysis, so we'll see. I submitted a paper on this topic years ago with a much cruder model and didn't have the stomach to attempt to use that model to address the reviewers' comments. I'm hoping to utilize much of the background and structure of that earlier paper and produce a new draft for submission quickly. I also plan to put the FN3_D_V3 code online here and at OpenABM.org once I get it cleaned up a bit. I also discuss this model in a paper in a new edited volume titled Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis in Archaeological Computational Modeling (edited by Marieka Brouwer Burg, Hans Peeters, and William Lovis). 
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How big does a human population have to be to remain demographically viable over a long span of time? Perhaps not as big as we think. The numbers along the bottom axis code for marriage rules (which will be explained in the paper). Generally, the rules get more strict from left to right within each category: 2-0-1 basically means there are no rules, while 2-3-8 means that you are prohibited from marrying people within a certain genetic distance and are compelled to choose marriage partners from within certain "divisions" of the population.
It will be a relatively simple thing to use the FN3_D_V3 model in its non-spatial configuration to produce new data relevant to the Middle Paleolithic mortality issue I discussed at the SAA meetings a couple of years ago. I'm also going to be working toward putting the guts of the demographic model into a spatial context. That's going to take some time.
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Kirk Project Presentation at the ASSC Meeting

2/20/2016

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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. 

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Early Eastern Hunter-Gatherers and Holiday Travel

11/24/2015

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If you’re like me, there’s always some part of your brain that is thinking about hunter-gatherers.  Sometimes when I’m at work the percentage can get as high as 95 percent.  Most of the time it’s lower, of course, but it never gets down to zero. I’m always on duty.

Yes, I just said that with a straight face. And yet I'm a surprisingly poor poker player.
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Columbia, South Carolina, November 2015.
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Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 2015.
Over the last few days, I’ve travelled by car, air, and then car again to get from South Carolina to northern Georgia, Georgia to central Indiana (that was the air leg), then central Indiana to southeast Michigan.  The purpose of the trip is to see family over the Thanksgiving break.  But it also served up a reminder of the nature of seasonal differences in environment across the Eastern Woodlands.  As a recent transplant from the Midwest to South Carolina, my seasonal clock is still adjusting: how can the semester be coming to a close when I’m still gardening in a short sleeve shirt?  Seeing my breath on the jetway after landing in Indianapolis nudged my seasonal clock forward; the drive north to an Ann Arbor blanketed in snow finished off the reboot.  

The quick transplantation back to Ann Arbor made me ponder how hunter-gatherer societies would have handled regions of the Eastern Woodlands with such contrasts in the character, severity, and potential suddenness of seasonal changes.  Just as Midwesterners today have to employ a set of behavioral and cultural strategies to deal with winter that is quite different from those necessary to survive the occasional day in Columbia when the temperature dips below freezing, there is no way that hunter-gatherers in the temperate Great Lakes could spend the winter doing the same things as hunter-gatherers in the sub-tropical Carolinas.   This is not a profound idea, of course:  hunter-gatherers have to deal with the characteristics of their environments in very direct ways, and whatever the particular social, cultural, and behavioral characteristics of a hunter-gatherer system, those characteristics have to allow the system to “fit” within its environment.  Environment isn’t everything, but it’s important.
One of the interesting things about the hunter-gatherer archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands is that, for some chunks of early Holocene prehistory, some aspects of material culture appear to be amazingly uniform across vast regions of space.  An Early Archaic “Kirk Horizon” (dating to about 8,800-6,600 BC) is marked by a distribution of Kirk Corner Notched points that extends north-south from the southern Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast and east-west from the Mississippi corridor to the Atlantic.  That's a big area.  
PictureDistribution of Kirk Corner Notched cluster projectile points (adapted from Justice 1987).
And not only does this initial "horizon" emerge in the context of what by all appearances are very thinly distributed, highly mobile hunter-gatherer populations, but projectile points styles seem to change in lockstep across this same region of North America for at least some time after.  How can we explain this?  Although lithic raw material data suggest that Kirk groups were highly mobile (e.g., see this paper) the area of the "horizon" is much too large for it to be the product of a single group of people: the hunter-gatherers discarding Kirk points in Ontario are not the same individuals as those discarding Kirk points in Florida.

But that doesn't mean they weren't part of the same society.  We can define a "society" as a population defined by the existence of social ties among and between groups and individuals.  Ethnographic hunter-gatherers have numerous mechanisms for creating and maintaining social ties (e.g., marriage, exchange, group flux, periodic aggregation), and there is no reason to suspect that all of those same behaviors were not utilized to knit together the social fabric of early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands.  Maintaining social ties that extend beyond "over the horizon" may be especially important to high mobility hunter-gatherers operating at low population densities, as such ties allow local populations to gather information about large areas of the landscape.

PictureA couple of Kirk cluster points from northwest Indiana.
So maybe the apparent uniformity of lithic style that we recognize as the Kirk "horizon" emerged as simply the unintentional product of the presence of a continuous, "open" social network that stretched across the Eastern Woodlands. That's a logical possibility. Demonstrating that such an explanation is plausible, however, is a multi-faceted problem.  

First, you need data that actually let you characterize the degree of variability in the Kirk Corner Notched cluster and how that variability breaks down with regard to space (and raw material use). Given how widespread Kirk is, that's a big job.  But it's a doable job with the right commitment: Kirk points are common and fairly easy to recognize (they really are remarkably similar in different parts of the east, at least the ones I've looked at). I started working on assembling a Kirk dataset from the Midwest as part of my dissertation work and grant work while I was at IPFW.  I'm going to continue that work down south: I've applied for some grant money to start working on inventorying and collecting data from a large collection of points from Allendale County, South Carolina, and there are numerous other existing collections available.  My plan is to create 3D models of the points as I analyze them, which will aid in both morphometric analysis and data sharing. I don't think I'll have to create the whole Kirk database myself (see this post about 3D modeling of points from the Hardaway site in North Carolina). 

Second, it's a modeling problem.  How much interaction across a social landscape the size of the eastern United States would be required to produce and maintain the degree of stylistic uniformity that we see? You can't answer that without a model that lets you understand how patterns of social interaction might affect patterns of artifact variability (run-of-the-mill equation-based cultural transmission models won't cut it, either, because they typically don't take spatially-structured interaction into account).  I started to try to tackle that question in my dissertation and with some other modeling work. The simple assumption that the degree of homogeneity would be proportional to the degree of interaction is probably wrong: network theory suggests to me that a nonlinear relationship is more likely (a small degree of interaction can produce a large degree of homogeneity).

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Finally, circling back to the beginning of the post, we need to have some understanding of environmental variability across the Eastern Woodlands and the implications of that variability in terms of the hunter-gatherer societies that dealt with it. While there are some environmental commonalities in terms of plants and animals that help unify the Eastern Woodlands as a single macro region (and a “culture area” throughout prehistory), it's obviously not all the same.  Seasonal differences in the weather would not only affect human behaviors directly, but indirectly through their effects on primary game species such as white-tailed deer. I'm not a deer hunter or a wildlife biologist, but the contrasts between the modern deer-hunting practices and laws in Midwestern states (e.g., Ohio, Michigan, Indiana) and in South Carolina are striking in terms of the length of season, the bag limits, etc. While I'm sure that modern history, culture, and land-use play some role in these differences, I would be very surprised to find that environmental differences don't contribute significantly to the amount of hunting that deer populations can bear in these different regions.

Significant differences in the density and behaviors of deer populations would have had implications for the hunter-gatherer populations that exploited them, perhaps especially during the Fall and Winter.  I would guess that variability in deer populations and behavior vary continuously across the Eastern Woodlands along with other aspects of environment (temperature, mast production, etc.). Different strategies, perhaps involving patterns of seasonal mobility and aggregation, would have surely been required in the far north and far south of the region. Whatever the components of those differences, however, they were apparently not sufficient to produce hunter-gatherer societies that were disconnected on the macro level during the Early Archaic period. It may be the case, in fact, that differences in seasonality across the region, in a context of low population densities, actually encouraged rather than discouraged the creation of an "open" social network that resulted in the emergence of the Kirk Horizon. Later on in the Archaic we do indeed see a regionalization of material culture that makes the Midwest look different from the Southeast.

Whatever the characteristics of their larger social networks (and smaller social units within those networks), those Early Archaic societies provided a foundation for much of the Eastern Woodlands prehistory that follows. It's going to require theory-building and a lot of data from a large area to understand it. We need some kind of Kirk Manhattan Project.

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Data From "Changing Scales of Lithic Raw Material Transport Among Early Hunter-Gatherers in Midcontinental North America"

3/2/2015

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I am a proponent of openly sharing information, and one of my purposes in creating this website was to create a way that I could make available data from own papers and research projects.  I realized when I recently paid my bill for the site that it has been a year and I have yet to post any data.  So I'm starting now.

I have added an Excel file of the basic dataset for my recent paper in Archaeology of Eastern North America to the "Data" section of the website.  The file contains basic information on provenience (county), UTMs (county center), raw material, and typological category for the 926 projectile points that I used in that study.  The AENA paper was produced from a portion of the analysis in my dissertation.

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