Category: Michigan

Early Eastern Hunter-Gatherers and Holiday Travel

11/24/2015

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.

Columbia, South Carolina, November 2015.

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.

Distribution 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.

A 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).

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.

Questions about the Michigan Mammoth

10/8/2015

The skull of a mammoth is hoisted from a muddy field near Chelsea, Michigan.

The story of a partial mammoth skeleton excavated from a field near Chelsea, Michigan last week made national and international news, showing up on media sites like Fox News, The Huffington Post, the BBC, the Washington Post, and CNN. Articles about the mammoth were posted all over the various archaeology-related groups I follow on Facebook, and I'm pretty sure #mammoth was trending for a while on Twitter.

There's no doubt the unearthing of the mammoth captured the public's attention -- the extent of the press coverage demonstrates that pretty clearly. The images of the enormous, tusked skull being hoisted out of the ground are hard to beat for drama. But I know from conversations and comments that I saw online that many archaeologists have questions about the excavation that go beyond the "gee whiz" factor that the press and the nonprofessional public love. I'm probably going to get some flack for writing this post, but I'm going to write it anyway and give voice to some of those questions.

Full disclosure: I met Dr. Dan Fisher when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and I know several of the archaeologists who were involved with excavating the mammoth.

Fisher has spent decades building a case that Ice Age humans in the Great Lakes were hunting mastodons and mammoths, butchering their remains, and storing pieces of the animals underwater to retrieve later. His argument is based on a pattern of partial skeletons (some with cutmarks) found in wet settings with artifacts suggesting the carcass locations were marked. He has done experiments to show that meat can be kept edible for long periods of time by submerging it in cold water. Formal stone tools (such as scrapers and projectile points) are not found at these "sub-aqueous caching" sites, and given the nature of what's being proposed there really isn't any reason to expect that they would be. I haven't read all of his papers carefully, but my general impression is that the case is a good one. And it's interesting. Here is a (somewhat dated) summary article from Mammoth Trumpet that lays out the main points.

Fisher thinks that the Chelsea mammoth unearthed in Michigan last week, like many other sets of remains he has considered, was probably butchered and stored underwater. The following paragraphs are from the University of Michigan press release:

"The team's working hypothesis is that ancient humans placed the mammoth remains in a pond for storage. Caching mammoth meat in ponds for later use is a strategy that Fisher said he has encountered at other sites in the region.
   Evidence supporting that idea includes three basketball-sized boulders recovered next to the mammoth remains. The boulders may have been used to anchor the carcass in a pond.
   The researchers also recovered a small stone flake that may have been used as a cutting tool next to one of the tusks. And the neck vertebrae were not scattered randomly, as is normally the case following a natural death, but were arrayed in their correct anatomical sequence, as if someone had "chopped a big chunk out of the body and placed it in the pond for storage," Fisher said."

So the key pieces of evidence are: big rocks next to the remains; stone flake; articulated neck vertebrae. Check, check, and check. In my opinion, that all seems to make sense. Even better if the tell-tale cutmarks are present where Fisher expects to find them.

It's not the working hypothesis I'm worried about, however, but whether the information produced by the excavation in Chelsea is going to be sufficient to really evaluate that hypothesis. I think what bothered many archaeologists about the Chelsea mammoth excavation is what we saw (or didn't see) in the stills and videos from the single day of excavation.

Yes, they excavated an entire mammoth from 8-10' underground in a single day.

A day.

I once spent at least two days excavating the burial of small dog.

The news articles explain that the Chelsea mammoth was excavated in a single day because that's all the time that was available (the following is from the Washington Post):

"After establishing that [the landowner and farmer] Bristle could only spare one day for the mammoth extraction, Fisher and his team went into overdrive. On Thursday they were deep in the muck, doing their best to carefully document and extract the bones at top speed.
   “We don’t just want to pull the bones and tug everything out of the dirt,” Fisher explained. “ We want to get the context for how everything was placed at the site.”
   There are a few things that make this particular mammoth exciting: It’s a very complete skeleton (although it is missing its hind limbs, feet and some other assorted parts), compared with most of the mammoths found in Michigan and surrounding areas. And because it has been carefully extracted by paleontologists, the bone has the potential to be studied much more thoroughly than those that are haphazardly pulled out of the ground.
"We'll have the potential to say way more about this specimen,” because of the careful excavation, Fisher said."

I wasn't there and I don't know the whole story, but I can tell you that in archaeology the combination of "carefully document" and "top speed" is a tough one to pull off. As in many technical pursuits, you can't typically find a strategy that optimizes all three corners of the "good, fast, cheap" triangle.

Non-archaeologists may be impressed (or dismayed) by how much time we can spend picking away at things in the field, drawing maps, filling out logs, arguing over sediments, writing notes, taking photographs, etc. But the fact is that we're not just wasting time: details matter when you're trying to understand what you're taking apart. The working hypothesis is that the Chelsea mammoth site was the product of human behavior, so, yes, context and associations matter a great deal when you're trying to understand how the site was created. Archaeological work, ideally, is careful and thorough enough to let you more-or-less put the site back together in a virtual fashion based on the information you collect as you take it apart. Excavation is destruction, and you don't get a do-over.

It's hard for me to put aside my feelings about the importance of control and details and get super excited about raising the skull out of the ground when I look at the images from the Chelsea mammoth excavation. In the video clips I saw, it looked like an incredibly sloppy, irregular operation. I know that I saw only what TV cameras and news photographers chose to show me, but I saw no evidence of how spatial control was being maintained (no grid? no total station for electronic mapping?), and no hint of the existence of a level of care that I would normally associate with professional archaeology. Was there a screen? How about a profile wall? I really don't know. I've seen WWF mud wrestling matches that looked more controlled than what I saw in some of the images from that excavation.

If you think I'm being too picky, I invite you to compare and contrast what you see in the images from the Chelsea mammoth excavation with this mammoth excavation in Kansas, or this one in Mexico,or the multiple seasons of work that took place on the Schaefer mammoth site in Wisconsin, or this short 2008 paper about the excavation of mastodons from wet sites in New York. Those examples are far more typical of what a professional excavation of a human-associated mammoth site generally looks like. These things are generally not unearthed during the course of single day for a reason: you lose information. A story about a mastodon being excavated by amateurs and volunteers in Virginia describes what might be considered a "normal" procedure:

"Scans produced by ground-penetrating radar have shown that bone-size objects are waiting about five feet down. Four feet of soil will be dug out using heavy equipment, then the last foot will be carefully removed by hand."

Why the rush to remove the Chelsea mammoth in just a single day? I don't really know the answer to that. The news stories report that the farmer "could only spare one day for the mammoth extraction," but they don't say what would have happened if the mammoth had not been removed during that single day. Was this some kind of "now or never" situation that justified quickly yanking the bones out of the field? Was the mammoth going to be destroyed if it was left in place? Was it going to turn into a pumpkin if it wasn't out of the ground by Thursday at midnight?

Maybe leaving the mammoth in the ground until it could be carefully excavated in the spring (or a year or two down the road) really wasn't an option. Maybe whatever plan there was for drainage was actually going to totally destroy the site and there was no way to simply avoid the mammoth until arrangements could be made to do what has been done in the past for similar finds: use probes or geophysics to delimit the bone scatter, use heavy equipment to strip off the overburden, and then treat the remains as an archaeological site using standard excavation methods. Maybe the single day, salvage-style excavation really was the best option. I honestly don't know.

What I do know, however, is that I'll be surprised if the manner in which the Chelsea mammoth was excavated has no adverse impacts on how the analysis and interpretation of the remains are regarded by archaeologists in the Midwest and elsewhere. The nature of Clovis and pre-Clovis occupations in the Great Lakes is still controversial, and I'm concerned that the potential of the Chelsea mammoth to contribute important information to the debate has been lessened by the speed and style of the excavation. It's hard to look at those pictures of the excavation, know that it was all done in one day, and not wonder what would have been different if more time and care had been taken.

I know from social media that I'm not the only one asking the "why" and "what if" questions about the Chelsea mammoth excavation, but I am the one writing them down and I'll be the one to take the heat for them. I probably won't make any new friends with this post. I may even get told that I'm out of line. That's fine. Calling me names won't make the questions go away, and I've been called names plenty of times. I think the discovery is exciting, and I hope my "outsider" impressions of the excavation are incorrect. I look forward to reading the published results.

The "Oxhide Ingot" from Lake Gogebic, Michigan

4/10/2015

Clear your schedule for the next five minutes, because you’re not going to want to stop reading this blog post. My quest to understand the story of the alleged “oxhide ingot” from Lake Gogebic, Michigan,"heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightning-paced, intelligent thriller…surprising at every twist, absorbing at every turn, and in the end, utterly unpredictable…right up to its astonishing conclusion" where I remain frustratingly unable to track the claim back to its source. I'm guessing it's pretty much like The Da Vinci Code, to which the above quote refers. I haven't actually read The Da Vinci Code, but, as I'm learning, becoming familiar with primary sources is not a requirement when doing "research" about things like the presence of Old World copper miners in eastern North America.

Copper oxhide ingot from the Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck found off the coast of Turkey (source in text).

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an oxhide ingot is an ingot of copper cast into a quadrilateral shape with concave sides and four "handles" (apparently its called an “oxhide” because it resembles a stretched animal hide in shape). During the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean (ca. 3200-1000 BC), copper was smelted and cast into ingots of this shape weighing about 60-70 pounds (~30 kg) for transport. We know something about oxhide ingots because they’ve been found on shipwrecks, were depicted in art across the region, and have been analyzed to try to understand their role in Bronze Age production and exchange networks. The photo to the right (from this site) shows two people holding one of the ingots from the Uluburun shipwreck so you can get an idea of the size of these things. If you skim through the pictures available online, you'll notice quite a bit of variability in shape. If you want to get further into the nitty gritty of the Bronze Age copper trade, a recent (2007) thesis by Michael Rice Jones titled Oxhide Ingots, Copper Production, and the Mediterranean Trade in Copper and Other Metals in the Bronze Age is available here.

What does this have to do with Lake Gogebic? Proponents of the idea that the ancient copper mines of Michigan were actually worked by miners from the Old World (rather than Native Americans) have latched on to various "artifacts" over the years as proof of trans-oceanic contact. I'm not even going to attempt to get into all that - none of the various inscribed tablets, petroglyphs, etc., has held up to scrutiny. What caught my attention this week was a claim that an actual oxhide ingot had been found in the New World. I became aware of this claim when I saw a post in a Facebook group by David Towle, one of the guests on this interview. Towle stated that multiple full-size (i.e., 60-70 pound) oxhide ingots had been found near Lake Gogebic, in the western Upper Peninsula.

Towle's statement got my attention: finding an actual oxhide ingot in good archaeological context would be a game changer for proponents of a Bronze Age connection with the New World, and the claim that one actually had been found was news to me. An actual oxhide ingot that had been created in a mold would provide direct evidence of New World participation in a Bronze Age raw materials economy. That would be much clearer evidence than any kind of chemical test on Old World bronze artifacts that I can think of, because it would remove ambiguity about the changes introduced into the signature of the copper through refinement and mixture. Given how important such a find would be, I was surprised when my first attempt at an online search came up empty: no story, no photos, nothing. Where could I read about this find from Lake Gogebic? When I asked Towle about it online, I got a response which I would characterize as less than helpful:

Okay – so no help there. Towle had pointed me to yet another website that talked about copper mining in the New World but showed images of oxhide ingots from the Old World. And it looked like the number of Michigan oxhides was growing - now we were at seven. As you can see from my exchange with Towle, by then I had succeeded in finding a written source that mentioned the alleged oxhide ingot. Frank Joseph’s (1995:40) book Atlantis in Wisconsin contains the following sentence:

“Closer to the focus of our investigations, a sixty-pound copper ox hide was discovered near Lake Gogebic, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.”

So that was something: I had found a written source. There is an endnote attached to the sentence, but, frustratingly, I couldn’t read it because the limited view available in Google Books didn’t allow me to see the last portion of the book. I asked around online and couldn’t find anyone who owned a copy. So it looked like my search would be on hold until I could get a copy of Joseph's book to read that endnote.

Dammit.

After more searching, however, mostly by just Googling phrases with various combinations of key words related to the ingot and its location, I found some online chatter that had paraphrased part of a (1993) article by Better Sodders that had appeared in Ancient American magazine (Volume 1, Number 2, pp. 28-31). This seemed promising, as it would take me back two years before Joseph's book and maybe get me to the source of the story or more information. I dutifully paid my $4.95 for a pdf of the issue so I could read the story (“Who Mined American Copper 5,000 Years Ago?”). In that article, Sodders writes:

“A wall-painting in the Egyptian Tomb of Rekmira depicts red-skinned men, possibly American Indians, carrying oxhydes on their shoulders to the tax collector. The copper ingots are exact duplicates of a specimen excavated near Lake Gogebic in Michigan’s Ontonagon County.”

Frustratingly, there was no source given for the story or any other information provided. So that seemed like another dead end. I found Betty Sodders online, however, and sent her an email asking about the alleged oxhide ingot from Lake Gogebic. She sent me a very nice reply the next morning and directed me to her (1991) book Michigan Prehistory Mysteries Two (the second volume of a two-volume set). She even told me what pages to look on and said that there were . . . wait for it . . . photos of the oxhide ingot. Thank you Betty Sodders.

Okay, now I was getting somewhere. I found Michigan Prehistory Mysteries on Amazon.com, but was disappointed to learn that the second volume, unlike the first, was not available electronically.

Dammit!

I looked around for other ways to get ahold of the book, but couldn’t find a way to download it anywhere without feeling like I was putting my computer at risk of being infected by something. Then, in a stroke of genius, I remembered that I actually work at a university that has a real library with real books. Lo and behold, Grand Valley’s library owns a copy of Michigan Prehistory Mysteries Two. Even better, it turned it was actually housed in a “library use only” collection less than 200 yards from my office.

So, it was really time to take David Towle's admonition to heart and get out of my La-Z-Boy and go the Seidman House library (disclosure: my desk chair is actually made by Steelcase, as is just about everything at Grand Valley). I made plans to go and look at the book that afternoon. Brian Fagan was doing an informal question-answer session with some of our students from 3:00-4:15 that afternoon, so I planned to go to that and then stop by the Seidman House library on the way back to my office. Fagan was great, and I hung around for a few minutes afterward to introduce myself and shake his hand. I got to the Seidman House at 4:28 and the door was locked: the library there closes at 4:30.

Dammit.

Map showing the distance I had to cover to see a picture of the alleged oxhide ingot from Lake Gogebic. It was raining really hard, so I borrowed an umbrella from our Office Coordinator.

So I had to wait until the next morning to finally get a look at the elusive oxhide ingot of Lake Gogebic. I taught class from 8:30-9:45, then I had office hours from 10:00-12:00 – my students are working on their papers, so I expected I would be busy and I was. By the time noon came around it was raining like a $%*!(&$@ outside. But I made the journey anyway, because science is important.

I had to fill out a form to see the book, but I did it, because science is important. When I finally got my hands on Michigan Prehistory Mysteries Two, I was not disappointed. I skimmed the chapter that Betty Sodders had pointed me to and photographed all the pages.

And there, as promised, was a picture of the alleged oxhide ingot.

At first glance it looks “better” than I thought it would. It is about the right size, has four sides, and appears to be tabular. It is not a great match for any of the Mediterranean oxhide ingots that I've seen pictures of, however: two of the sides are concave, one is convex, and one appears to be roughly straight. The surface is rough and the edges are rough. And that's about all I can tell from looking at the photo.

It is shown being held by Dr. James Scherz, who is identified as the finder in the caption. Here is what Sodders writes about it:

“This particular oxhyde Scherz is holding was photographed by Warren Dexter at Topaz near Lake Gogebic, east of Bergland and Matchwood in the western confines of the U.P.”

That’s not much more than I already knew, but at least there is another name: James Scherz is going to be the key to wrapping this story up. So far, I have been unable to identify a publication of his (he has written many having to do with New World-Old World contacts) that tells the story of this artifact. I have also been unable to find a current email address for him so that I can ask him about it directly. Doing a little bit of searching makes it apparent that he has been involved in Burrows Cave, the story of which is beyond the scope of anything I plan to write about.

So what is the rest of the story behind this artifact? Where did it come from? In what context was it found? Where is it now? I'm pretty sure James Scherz could answer all of these questions. If anyone knows how he can be reached or can make him aware of this post, I would appreciate it. Then maybe we'll have a conclusion to the exciting story of the oxhide ingot from Lake Gogebic.

I emailed Bruce H. Johanson, President Ontonagon County Historical Society, and he informed me the alleged oxhide ingot is not in their collections.

Now you can go back to whatever else you were doing.

Bored With The Same Old Debate About The "Copper Culture"? Maybe You Should Look Into The 500-Million-Year-Old "Super Ancient Copper Culture"

4/8/2015

Copper arrowhead embedded in 500-million-year-old sandstone: may or may not have been used to kill a dinosaur.

The idea that ancient copper mining in Michigan's Upper Peninsula was connected to the European Bronze Age has a long history. I don't know who the first person was to suggest such a connection, but the idea has surely been around since the 1800s. It is still around today, with claims predicated on much of the same "evidence" that has been cited for the last hundred years. Susan Martin's (1995) paper in The Michigan Archaeologist (you can read it here) goes through many of these claims. None of them holds up to scrutiny.

A recent attempt to breath life into the "debate" about Old World peoples mining copper in the New World comes from J. Hutton Pulitzer, a treasure hunter and one of the self-described "foremost Inventors in modern times." Pulitzer began this quest by getting himself kicked off one of the larger online communities of people interested in ancient copper use in the Great Lakes. When I interacted with Hutton on that site, he accused me of being "out of date" on all of the new information that was available, and indicated that I should listen to his audio interviews in order to educate myself.

Fair enough.

So far, I have only listened to one interview. In the description of this episode (titled "Copper Culture- Where are the Skeletons, Camps, Boats and Signs of Civilizations?"), we are assured that all of the hard evidence that skeptics say is absent has, in fact, already been found. The two people who are going to tell us about these fantastic discoveries, Dave Towle and Scott Mitchen, are presented as experts because they've spent a combined 89 years looking for sites. We are told that they are credible because they, unlike some "white-haired, pony-tailed professor who believes he knows everything," had put "boot to dirt" and gone out to investigate firsthand.

Over the course of the hour, the guests make many assertions about artifacts and other things that they have found. Some of these -- melted copper, a furnace/casting site, etc. -- sound interesting, but as far as I know there are no photos posted online so that we can see them for ourselves (this includes the allegedly melted/cast "starfish" piece Hutton specifically says he's going to post a photo of - maybe it's around but I haven't been able to find it yet [see addendum below]). So most of the interview is just a string of assertions and speculation, not connected to anything that the audience can use to judge the evidence. Is it that difficult to post a photo or two?

In the absence of photos or any other tangible way to evaluate the guests' interpretations of the incredible things they claim to have found, I suggest you listen especially carefully to the portion of the interview from about 43:20 to 48:30. In this segment, you will hear the guests state that they have found copper tools inside blocks of sandstone that are 500 million years old. You will hear a thoughtful discussion of several explanations for this, ranging from (and I'm paraphrasing here) "were they shot into the sandstone when it was soft?" to "polar shifts" to "Man was around then." A little later (about 50:00) we get a mention of "megalithic dinosaur bones" that one of the guests has found on the bottom of Lake Superior.

Now, I think this 500-million-year-old Super Ancient Copper Culture is a game changer for this new exploration of copper mining in ancient North America. At least it's much more interesting than tired tales of Minoans and Phoenicians. In his intro to this interview, Hutton warns us that, unlike stodgy academics, he's going to "address as many sides as possible to talk about the Copper Culture," including the dramatic idea that New World copper mining actually started twelve thousand years ago or more. That's great, because the hypothesis of 500-million-year-old super ancient copper miners hunting dinosaurs to extinction (I'm adding that last part myself - why not teach the controversy?) clearly fits the bill for the "or more" category.

At the end of the interview, Hutton assures us once again that "these are real finds by real people." These, in fact, are the experts since no academic would ever touch such controversy. Given how "volatile" this idea of a 500-million-year-old Super Ancient Copper Culture is, I will expect future interviews in this series to, as promised, fully explore the idea. Hutton, I think you've found your true calling. Great job on the interviewing. Maybe post some photos next time?

Addendum (04/09/2015): In response to this blog, Hutton Pulitzer has posted a photo of the "starfish" piece of copper that is described as being melted/cast. I reproduce it here so you can see it for yourself. Although I do not have the expertise to determine conclusively if this is just a natural piece of copper, it certainly does not have the regular shape or even surfaces that I would anticipate would be produced by a casting process. The photo does not convince me that this piece of copper was made by humans - opinions?

In addition to posting this photo, Hutton also posted a screenshot showing that the interview I discuss in this blog post has been played nearly 76,000 times. It is amazing to me (and somewhat disheartening) that apparently I was the first person out of tens of thousands of listeners who actually asked to see the "artifact" they said that we should see. That's kind of a bummer.

Data from "Functional and Stylistic Variability in Paleoindian and Early Archaic Projectile Points from Midcontinental North America"

3/3/2015

I have added an Excel file of the basic dataset for my 2013 paper in North American Archaeologist to the "Data" section of the website. The file contains basic information on provenience (county), UTMs (county center), typological category, and morphometric data for the 1,771 Paleoindian and Early Archaic projectile points that I used in that study. Like the 2014 AENA paper, the NAA paper was produced from a portion of the analysis in my dissertation.

The samples I used for the morphometric analysis in my dissertation and in the NAA paper were identical, so the data in the Excel file are also in the appendices of my dissertation. I'm hoping that providing the data in an electronic format will save someone a great deal of time doing data entry, and will encourage the use of the dataset that took me who-in-the-hell-knows-how-many hours and miles to collect, compile, and produce. The measurements used, as well as the procedures for taking them, are defined in the paper and in my dissertation.

The ultimate goal of the two analyses (raw material and morphometric) was to produce a quantitative description of the apparent sequence of material culture change from homogenous (Early Paleoindian) --> regionalized (Late Paleoindian) --> homogenous (Early Archaic) that characterizes the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Midcontinent. A quantitative description allowed an "apples to apples" comparison with data from model experiments, providing a basis for evaluating some alternative scenarios explaining the regionalization as a result of various changes in social network structure. As the time to my defense was ticking away, I had to sacrifice some of the modeling work in order to get finished. I was able to draw some conclusions, but a satisfying analysis of the "social boundary" question is still in the future. Once I get set up at my new job I'll be able to restart the modeling work, add data from the southeast to my dataset, and reboot on the question of the social networks of early hunter-gatherers in eastern North America.

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

3/2/2015

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.