It's the end-of-semester crunch for many of us in the academic world. My Facebook feed is filled with posts by people who been grading for too long and finding too many cases of student plagiarism. The end of my road was easy this semester, as I taught a very pleasant field school populated by a good group of students. Having taught a 4/4 one year, I feel for all of you still slogging away.

I wanted to take a minute to write about two stories related to claims for sites of Middle Pleistocene age in two different corners of the world. Unless you're grading papers in a lead-lined underground bunker, you heard about the claim for a 130,000-year-old archaeological site in California that was published in Nature yesterday. That's the first one. The second one involves an age estimate of 250,000 for the Homo naledi remains first described in September of 2015. The first claim is buzz-worthy because of its extreme earliness (a good 115,000 years prior to what most archaeologists accept as good evidence for human entry into the Americas). The second claim is surprising for its lateness.  Let's do the second one first.

Homo naledi is Only 250,000 Years Old?

The announcement of Homo naledi and the results of the Rising Star Expedition made a huge splash in the fall of 2015 (I gave my take on it here). One of the main unresolved issues at the time of the initial announcement was that the remains were not dated.  The lack of an age estimate made it difficult to frame the analysis in terms of evolutionary relationships with other hominins and the implications of the claims that Homo naledi was burying its dead. If the remains are very early (say, close to 2 million years old . . . ), the claims for organized mortuary behavior are spectacular. If they're very late, the mosaic of primitive and derived features becomes very curious. 

Two days ago, the New Scientist ran a story titled "Homo naledi is Only 250,000 Years Old -- Here's Why that Matters."  Here is a quote from that piece:

"Today, news broke that Berger’s team has finally found a way to date the fossils. In an interview published by National Geographic magazine, Berger revealed that the H. naledi fossils are between 300,000 and 200,000 years old.
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“This is astonishingly young for a species that still displays primitive characteristics found in fossils about 2 million years old, such as the small brain size, curved fingers, and form of the shoulder, trunk and hip joint,” says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London."

If you click on the link to the interview in National Geographic, you'll find that it leads to a photograph of a magazine page posted on Twitter by Colin Wren. I'm unable to access the original piece in National Geographic. I'm not quite sure what is going on, but presumably a formal publication explaining the age estimate is in the works and will be out soon. 

A 250,000 year age would, indeed, be surprising. Previous age estimates have ranged widely, from 900,000 years old  (based on dental and cranial metrics) to 2.5 to 2.8 million years old (based on overall anatomy). Age estimates based on the anatomical characteristics of the remains are problematic, obviously, as they rely on assumptions about the pattern, direction, and pace of evolutionary change that may not be correct. Hopefully the latest age estimates are independent of the anatomy (i.e., have a geological basis). This blog has some additional background.

And now on to the second one, which concerns . . .

A Middle Pleistocene Occupation of North America?

It's hard to know where to even start with this one. The claim is bold, the journal is prestigious, the popular press has been all over it, and the reaction from professionals has been swift and (as far as I can tell) overwhelmingly negative. The reactions I have seen among my colleagues and friends have been almost universally skeptical, ranging from amusement to mild outrage. I'll just summarize all that with gif I saw in an online discussion about the paper:

The claim centers around an assemblage of stones and mastodon bones that the authors interpret as unequivocal evidence of human activity in California at the Middle/Late Pleistocene transition (ca. 130,000 years ago). Here is the first part of the abstract of the Nature paper by Steven Holen and colleagues:

"The earliest dispersal of humans into North America is a contentious subject, and proposed early sites are required to meet the following criteria for acceptance: (1) archaeological evidence is found in a clearly defined and undisturbed geologic context; (2) age is determined by reliable radiometric dating; (3) multiple lines of evidence from interdisciplinary studies provide consistent results; and (4) unquestionable artefacts are found in primary context. Here we describe the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site, an archaeological site from the early late Pleistocene epoch, where in situ hammerstones and stone anvils occur in spatio-temporal association with fragmentary remains of a single mastodon (Mammut americanum). The CM site contains spiral-fractured bone and molar fragments, indicating that breakage occured while fresh. Several of these fragments also preserve evidence of percussion. The occurrence and distribution of bone, molar and stone refits suggest that breakage occurred at the site of burial. Five large cobbles (hammerstones and anvils) in the CM bone bed display use-wear and impact marks, and are hydraulically anomalous relative to the low-energy context of the enclosing sandy silt stratum. 230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicates a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production." 

The 130,000 year-old date is way, way, way out there in terms of the accepted timeline for humans in the Americas. Does that mean the conclusions of the study are wrong? Of course not. And, honestly, I don't even necessarily subscribe to the often-invoked axiom that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I think ordinary, sound evidence works just fine most of the time when you're operating within a scientific framework. Small facts can kill mighty theories if you phrase your questions in the right way.

So how should we view claims like this one? For this claim to stand up, two main questions have to withstand scrutiny. First, is the material really that old? Second, is the material really evidence of human behavior?

If we accept the age of the remains, we're left with the second question about whether those remains show convincing evidence of human behavior. As you can see from the abstract, the claim for human activity has several components (modification of the bones, the presence and locations of stone cobbles interpreted as tools, etc.). The authors contention (p. 480) is that

​"Multiple bone and molar fragments, which show evidence of percussion, together with the presence of an impact notch, and attached and detached cone flakes support the hypothesis that human-induced hammerstone percussion was responsible for the observed breakage. Alternative hypotheses (carnivoran modification, trampling, weathering and fluvial processes) do not adequately explain the observed evidence (Supplementary Information 4). No Pleistocene carnivoran was capable of breaking fresh proboscidean femora at mid-shaft or producing the wide impact notch. The presence of attached and detached cone flakes is indicative of hammerstone percussion, not carnivoran gnawing (Supplementary Information 4). There is no other type of carnivoran bone modification at the CM site, and nor is there bone modification from trampling."

My impression is that most archaeologists are, like me, are skeptical that all other possible explanations for the stone and bone assemblage can be confidently rejected. I'm no expert on paleontology and taphonomy, but as I thought through the suggested scenario, I wondered how all the meat came off the bones before before the purported humans smashed them open with rocks. The authors state that there's no carnivore damage, and unless I missed it I didn't see any discussion of cutmarks left by butchering the carcass with stone tools. So where did the meat go? If it wasn't removed by animals (no carnivore marks) and wasn't removed by humans (no cutmarks) did it just rot away? If so, would the bones have still been "green" for humans to break them open?  

The absence of cut marks would be perplexing, as we have direct evidence that hominins have been using using sharp stone tools to butcher animals since at least 3.4 million years ago. The 23,000-year-old human occupation of Bluefish Cave in the Yukon is supported by . . . cutmarks. We know that Neandertals and other Middle Pleistocene humans had sophisticated tool kits that were used to cut both animal and plant materials.

Is it possible that pre-Clovis occupations in this continent extend far back into time?  Yes, I think it is. Does this paper convince me that humans messed around with a mastodon carcass in California at the end of the Middle Pleistocene?  No, it does not. 

Some of my friends seem angry that the paper was published. I have mixed feelings. I'm not at all convinced by what I've read so far, but I think claims like this serve a useful purpose whether or not they turn out to be correct. I can understand the concerns I've heard voiced about unfairness in the standards of evidence and argument that are acceptable at various levels of publication, but I also think there should always be room for making bold claims about the past as long as those claims have some basis in material evidence that can be independently evaluated. It will be interesting to see how the buzz over this paper plays out. Will other professionals carefully examine the remains and offer up their opinions? Will the claim be quickly dismissed and forgotten about?

One thing I can guarantee is that the "fringe" will be on the Cerutti Mastodon like a wet diaper:  they've already got a laundry list of "Neanderthal" remains from the New World (some buried in Woodland-age earthen mounds!) and "pre-Flood" sites into which they'll weave this report into. Maybe Bigfoot will even be implicated. Maybe the mastodon was killed by Atlanteans.
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Onward.

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.

The gears of science almost always turn more slowly then I would like. It was about a year ago that I first hatched the idea of the Kirk Project, and I've just now submitted my first formal publication related to describing and understanding variability in Kirk points from the Southeast.  The paper, titled "A Preliminary Analysis of Haft Variability in South Carolina Kirk Points," will be published in the next issue of South Carolina Antiquities.

The paper considers haft variation in a sample (n = 46 total) of Kirk points from the Larry Strong Collection (n = 41, Allendale County, South Carolina) and the Nipper Creek cache (n = 5, Richland County, South Carolina). The Larry Strong portion of the sample is a large "long time” assemblage that contains Kirk points from the full range of time those points were produced in the region. The Nipper Creek cache, in contrast, is a “short time” assemblage that was produced during a small window of time.  Comparison of these assemblages can be used to explore which aspects of haft morphology may be carrying useful stylistic information that is sensitive to change through time and, potentially, patterned in ways that can eventually tell us something meaningful about Kirk societies. This table summarizes the sample and provides links to the downloadable 3D models that I used (I also posted the table on my Data page). 

My analysis focuses on various aspects of shape as characterized by a series of landmarks placed on 3D models. Although 3D models are the starting point, I purposefully performed the preliminary analysis in the paper in only two dimensions (i.e., utilizing just the shape of the outline of the haft region and getting rid of data related to thickness).

The main take-away point from the paper is that shape variation in the lateral haft margins appears to be a better candidate for capturing stylistic change through time (and potentially also stylistic variability across space) than the the morphology of the basal edge and the overall length:width proportions of the haft. The "short time" Nipper Creek assemblage is more consistent in the degree of haft flare and shape of the lateral/basal junction than the "long time" Larry Strong assemblage, which is what one would expect if design of the lateral haft margins was strongly influenced by some kind of cultural-bound choice (i.e, if lateral haft morphology is essentially isochrestic). This is a potentially important observation, as basal edge shape and treatment are often thought to be good attributes upon which to base “type” distinctions that are presumed to have temporal significance. While basal edge morphology appears to account for the greatest amount of variability overall in the shape analysis, it may not be strongly linked to style within the Kirk Corner Notched cluster (and may, in fact, be linked to function through haft repair and maintenance). It will be important to sort this out going forward to avoid inclusion of non-stylistic variability in a stylistic analysis.

I'll let you know when the paper is available. In the meantime, I'll be working on expanding the analysis in several different directions. I'm hoping that making my primary data sources (i.e., the 3D models) available as freely downloadable files will encourage others to do the same. We're really not doing ourselves any favors by not taking better advantage of the data-sharing potential offered by the digital age.

Funds to support inventorying and analysis of the Larry Strong Collection were provided by the Archaeological Research Trust.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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. 

It's possible to develop a suite of hypotheses and archaeological expectations to evaluate the idea of a large scale abandonment. 

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.

I've spent some time over the last few days generating some basic morphometric data from the 3D models of Kirk points that I've processed so far (n = about 50) . I'd like to have about double that for a formal analysis to publish, but I also would like to discuss some preliminary results as part of my presentation at the SEAC (Southeastern Archaeological Conference) meeting that's coming up in a few weeks. So you go to war with the Kirk assemblage you've got, not the Kirk assemblage you want.

Before I talk about the data, I'd like to congratulate myself on having the forethought to take a day last spring to write down the workflow right after I got it figured out. There were a few details that I neglected to mention in that blog post, but overall it was a huge time saver. Figuring out the steps was enough of a pain-in-the-ass the first time. Let us never do it again.​

For each point, you have to tell the software how the landmarks correspond to those on the "atlas" model. The simplest thing to do is to always place the landmarks in the same order. You still have to manually define the correspondence between each model and the atlas ("View Correspondences" in the "View" menu).

I followed the same steps I described in the previous post to export and edit the data so that I could import it into MorphoJ. I used MorphoJ to perform a principal components analysis (PCA), the purpose of which is take all the variability in the 3D data and boil it down to its most important components. PCA lets you flatten the variability in a dataset into scores that you can plot in two dimensions.

Here are the basic results of the PCA performed on the points currently in the sample:

I haven't spent any significant time digging into the data yet, but my initial reaction is that the first principal component may well be measuring variability related to time. If you look at the examples of points that fall at the far left end of the plot, they look very Taylor- or Thebes-like, with relatively long hafts, deep notches, and small/shallow basal concavities/indentations separating broad convex basal edge segments. The points at the far right of the plot, conversely, have relatively short hafts, shallow notches, and broad basal concavities. If you squint a little, maybe, you can see how that end of the Kirk spectrum is trending toward a bifurcate/lobed haft morphology. In the center of the plot are points like 5947, which I think we can agree is a "modal" Kirk Corner Notched.

With the exception of the Nipper Creek cache points (shown in green), all the points in the sample are from Allendale County, South Carolina, and are made from Allendale chert. This all but eliminates the possibility that the variability is due to space or raw material.

My next step is to explore the possible "time" component of the PCA by gathering some data from the point forms that bracket Kirk: Taylor (on the earlier side) and lobed/bifurcate points (on the later side). If I'm correct that the first principal component shown above is telling us something about time, the Taylor points should plot to the left and the bifurcate/lobed points should plot to the right.  It's notable that four of the five points from the Nipper Creek cache plot close together. Those points were almost certainly produced during a short period of time (but so was 5963 NC 4, so . . . something to think about).

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).

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.

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). 

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.

It's been two weeks since my last blog post.

I've spent much of that two weeks away from my computer, which has been a nice change. Since the semester ended, I've been working in the field, doing stuff around the house and with my family, and prepping my office for a move. Today I'm relocating from the main SCIAA building to a larger, nicer office suite right in the heart of campus. I'll have plenty of room to ramp up my research, process and analyze artifacts, store collections I'm working on, and (hopefully) start getting some student work going. It's really an amazing thing to have the space -- it's larger and nicer than many fully functional archaeology labs where I've worked in the past.

A 6000-Year-Old Moment Frozen in Time?

Archaeological sites are places that contain material traces of human behavior.  While the human behaviors that create archaeological sites are ultimately those of individuals, we usually can't resolve what we're looking at to that level.  Traces of individual behaviors overprint one another and blend into a collective pattern. The granularity of individual behavior is usually lost.

Usually, but not always.

I spent portions of the last couple of works doing some preliminary excavation work at a site I first wrote about last October. Skipping over the details for now, documentation of an exposed profile measuring about 2.2 meters deep and 10 meters long showed the presence of cultural materials and intact features at several different depths.  The portion of the deposits I am most interested in is what appears to be a buried zone of dark sediment, fire-cracked rock, and quartz knapping debris about 1.9 meters below the present ground surface. 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, I'm guessing that buried cultural zone dates to the Middle Archaic period (i.e., about 8000-5000 years ago).​

The Anthropology of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands?

Earlier in the month, I had the privilege of visiting the archaeological field schools being conducted at Topper. I wrote a little bit about the claim for a very early human presence at Topper here. The excavations associated with that claim aren't currently active. Field schools focused on Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene (Mississippi State University and the University of West Georgia) and Woodland/Mississippian (University of Tennessee) components at Topper and nearby sites have been running since early May. Seeing three concurrent field schools being run with the cooperation of personnel from four universities (and many volunteers) is remarkable.

On the day of my visit, I gave a talk titled "The Anthropology of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands?" I argued that not only is it possible to do the anthropology of prehistoric peoples, but it should be a fundamental goal. Skipping over the details for now, I argued (as I have elsewhere) that complex systems science provides a set of tools for systematically trying to understand how history, process, and environment combine to produce the long-term, large-scale trajectories of prehistoric change that we can observe and analyze using archaeological data. I talked about each of the components of my three-headed monster research agenda.  And I got to eat various venison products prepared under the direction of my SCIAA colleague Al Goodyear. And I got to see alligators swimming in the Savannah River.  As a native Midwesterner . . . I anticipate that working near alligators will remain outside my comfort zone for some time to come.

When Did Humans First Move Out of Africa?

Archaeologists love finding the earliest of anything and people love reading about it. While we often want to know how/when new things appear, identifying the "earliest of X" often gets play in the popular press that is disproportionate to its relevance to a substantive archaeological/anthropological question. And you can never really be sure, of course, that you've nailed down the earliest of anything: someone else could always find something earlier, falsifying whatever model was constructed to account for the existing information and moving the goal posts.

Exactly a year ago, I wrote about the reported discovery of 3.3 million-year-old stone tools from a site in Kenya. Those tools are significantly earlier than the previous "earliest" Oldowan tools.  I think they're really interesting but not particularly surprising:  several other lines of evidence (cut marks on bone, tool-use among chimpanzees, and hominin hand anatomy) already suggested that our ancestors were using tools well before the earliest Oldowan technologies appeared.

I anticipate that we still haven't seen the "earliest" stone tool use. 

A recent report from India argues that our ideas about the "earliest" humans outside of Africa also miss the mark. (Note: when I say "human" I'm referring not to "modern human" but to a member of the genus Homo.) This story from March discusses a report of stone tools and cutmarked bone from India purportedly dating to 2.6 million-years-ago (MYA), blowing away the current earliest accepted evidence of humans outside of Africa (Dmanisi at 1.8 MYA) by about 800,000 years. With an increasing number of Oldowan assemblages dating to about 1.8-1.6 MYA are being reported outside of Africa (e.g., in China and Pakistan), would it be that surprising to find evidence a migration pre-dating 1.8 MYA?  Probably not.  Do the finds reported from India cement the case for human populations in South Asia at 2.6 MYA?  Not yet: the fossils and tools reported from India so far (as far as I know anyway) don't have a context that allows them to be convincingly dated.

I had a pleasant conversation with Scott Wolter yesterday. I emailed him to touch base about his participation in my class in the fall, and we ended up talking for about 45 minutes. It was the first time we've spoken and we had more to talk about than we had time to talk. We talked about the Wolter-Pulitzer partnership, of course, but I'm not going ​to go into the details of our discussion (I just invite you to read for yourself Pulitzer's bizarre word salad blog post from Wednesday containing his reference to me as "some back woods rural South Carolina Pseudo-Archaeologist who never worked in the field, but only learned from books").  My sense is that Wolter is someone with whom I can have a frank and vigorous discussion about the merits and interpretation of archaeological evidence and how it is used to evaluate ideas about the past. I'm looking forward to his participation in my class. My plan is to start a Go Fund Me campaign to raise money to fly him down here so he can interact with the students on a face-to-face basis.  

And now the movers are coming for my filing cabinets.  And now my chair is gone.  And now you are up-to-date.

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.