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Periodicity and Sync in Coupled Socio-Natural Systems: Some Fastform Thoughts

6/26/2017

7 Comments

 
It already sounds like a paper title -- just replace what's after the colon with "A Model-Based Approach."

I'm coming up on the end of my second year in South Carolina. I think it takes a few annual cycles before you start to "get" the rhythms and tempos of seasonality in a new environment. Prior to coming here I had lived in the Midwest for most of my life, so there's a lot to learn. 

As an archaeologist, I don't try to understand the environment just so I can give it a round of applause (if I had to pick what to applaud here, however, it probably would be the birds, flowers, and insects). Human societies and natural environments are inter-linked in numerous and  complex ways -- figuring out those linkages and understanding how the "social" and "natural" parts of those coupled systems affect one another is an intrinsically interesting and profoundly important part of understanding how human societies work and how they changed in the past.

My point in writing this isn't to compose a fully-formed, well-researched argument, but rather to jot down a few observations/ideas/questions that have struck me since I transplanted myself into a region of the country with environments that are, in many ways, dissimilar from those of the Midcontinental interior with which I am most familiar (i.e., the Ohio Valley, the Till Plains, the Great Lakes). I don't have time to pull all these strings yet -- I'm just noting them.

First, the Deer . . .

Early on, I commented on what must be differences in the demography and behavior of a key Holocene large game species (white-tailed deer) across the different regions of the Eastern Woodlands. One would expect that those regional differences -- whatever they are -- would have articulated somehow with the behaviors of the human populations that exploited them.  Generally, we presume that periodic (i.e., seasonal) aggregations of hunter-gatherer populations are useful to those societies for a number of demographic and social reasons. Logically, aggregations of large numbers of people have to take place when and where the resource base can support them. I would guess that most archaeologists in the north have a "fall aggregation" model in their heads, based in part on when deer are the fattest and least cautious. Are those conditions different in the Southeast, where the seasonal gradient is much less severe than in the north?  Do deer populations go through boom/bust cycles? If so, are those linked to periodicities in mast production? Do those periodicities differ from region to region in the Eastern Woodlands? Deer hunting isn't everything, but it's surely something.

​Second, the Sea . . .

At some recent conference, I had a conversation with a colleague who has been working in this region for a long time. It was clear he had had a few drinks, so he was probably telling me the truth. He said that the rhythms and tempos of hunting and gathering on the coast are very different than in the interior. I've never done coastal archaeology -- when I go to the beach it's usually to let the kids play, watch birds, and look for shells.

We were at Edisto last year during the time when the loggerhead sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. These are big animals, with adults weighing about 300 pounds (up to about 1000 pounds). The females come ashore at night during the summer to lay about 120 eggs in a nest in the sand. 

Watching the Edisto turtle patrol identify and check nests every morning, I became curious about how turtle nesting behavior articulated with prehistoric coastal hunter-gatherers in this region. The nests are easily spotted by the tread-like path that turtles leave as they move across the sand. Caught in the act, the adult turtles are large packages of meat, sitting in the open, defenseless. Presumably a couple of people could flip one on its back and return later for an on-the-spot feast or to butcher the animal.

How much archaeological evidence is there of sea turtle exploitation on the Carolina coast? Does it change through time? Where would sea turtles rank in terms of a seasonally-predictable resource that could be used to support periodic aggregations? Were sea turtles part of coastal Carolina hunter-gatherer cosmology (perhaps in connection with the summer solstice)? I don't know the answers to any of these questions.
Third, the Air . . .

The birds here are beautiful, plentiful, varied, and constant. Of the 914 species of birds documented in the United States, over 400 occur in South Carolina. That's a lot of birds. Some sing all year round. Some even sing at night. It's fabulous.
PictureMigration and range of the Mississippi Kite (map from www.allaboutbirds.org).
One bird I have learned about since I moved here is the Mississippi Kite. It is a smallish, grey raptor that winters in South America but breeds in the southeastern United States.

These birds eat mostly flying insects, and you can see them circling over my neighborhood during much of the summer. Their appearance in the region seems to coincide with what I interpret as the "high" insect season -- the cicadas are hatching in force and there are things buzzing around everywhere. They're a signal of a season change here, perhaps much in the same way as the yearly arrival of Turkey Vultures north of the Ohio River. 

However the annual long-distance migration/breeding pattern of the kites evolved, I would guess that the dense insect populations of the Southeast are a key to making it viable. That got me thinking about the effects of longer-term periodicities, particularly the those of the 13-year and 17-year periodical cicadas. The emergence of buhzillions of cicadas at the same time would surely make for easy living for the kites, as well as for game animals with an insect-based diet (e.g., turkeys). The periodical cicadas tend to damage trees, however, which reduces mast production (and hence could have a suppressing effect on deer populations). Did any of this factor into the characteristics (social, behavioral, cosmological, etc.) of the prehistoric human societies of this region? I don't know.

Finally, from the Periodic to the Anomalous . . .

The completion of my second year in Columbia will be marked by a total solar eclipse that I'll be able to experience from my backyard on August 21 at 2:41 p.m. I've never seen a total eclipse before, and I may never see one again. Most people don't see one in their lifetime. I'm really looking forward to it. Thankfully I won't have to stay up late at night to see it.

Obviously, it's now old hat for us to predict these "anomalous" astronomical alignments with a great deal of accuracy (business depends on it). Given how infrequently these things occur and the low probability of any one person accidentally being in the right place at the right time to witness it, it's natural to wonder what prehistoric peoples would have made of this sort of phenomenon. I'm really curious as to what it will feel like to experience it firsthand (I'd also like to know what's it like to be in a hurricane, to break the sound barrier, to be close to a tornado, to fly at the edge of the atmosphere, to experience zero gravity, etc., in case your looking for ideas for my birthday).

So What?

Somewhere in all this mess, there's a question to be crystalized about how human societies "tune" themselves to the predictable and unpredictable fluctuations in their environments. What are the feedbacks? What are the dampers? What are the common denominators? What is the range of risk/variability that societies create cultural rules or behaviors to respond to? What happens when the needle moves outside of that range? Which parts are robust? Which parts break? How do responses scale to the size and predictability of perturbations across time and space?  I have no answers right now, just questions.

And now I've got to move on and do other things.
7 Comments
Greg Little
6/26/2017 09:25:55 am

Thoughtful musings all.

I hope you will (or perhaps you already did) check out the shell mounds and shell rings on Edisto, Spanish Mount, and so on. The shell mounds on the Gulf Coast are a bit different, and were supposed to have been used seasonally. I'm fascinated by the huge rings on the Atlantic coast and have been told that earlier ones are likely to be found in the submerged shelf. We used side scan sonar a bit along Florida's Atlantic coast looking for some and I'd like one day to do the same along the SC coast--basically in the "shallow" waters just off the existing ones.

Reply
Andy White
6/26/2017 01:44:23 pm

There's not much left of Spanish Mount -- most has been lost to erosion over the last couple of decades. SCIAA (led by Karen Smith) has done salvage excavations in several pulses over the last year or so to excavate what's left before it falls into the channel. I'm not sure if they've got sea turtle remains from there or not.

Reply
Ken Sassaman
6/28/2017 03:21:22 pm

Hi Andy,

We have a nice archaeological convergence of marine turtles, deer, birds, fish, and astronomical events at a place called Shell Mound, not too far north of Cedar Key, FL. It’s on the Gulf, not Atlantic Coast, and relatively late (cal AD 400-650), but still H-Gs. This is one of many Middle Woodland civic-ceremonial centers in the greater region, but it's a good bit different in its mound configuration. It sits atop and along a relict parabolic dune arm, which formed in the Pleistocene by the hundreds and have, since the mid-Holocene, been eroded by rising water. At ca. AD 400, the regional community converged at this particular dune arm (peninsula) for events involving lots of food processing infrastructure and remarkable assemblages of vertebrate fauna (along with tons of oysters). Massive pits along the slope of the dune contain the bony remains of sea turtle, juvenile white ibises, immature deer, and a bunch of mullet. Matching the big pits are big pots that do not seem to have been made to last (and indeed were “killed”), and some exotic items unsurprising for the times. Associated with Shell Mound is Palmetto Mound, the densest Woodland cemetery on the coast, with more effigy pots than Kolomoki. This mortuary feature pre- and postdates Shell Mound sequence by many centuries and seems to have been the reason why Shell Mound was sited on this dune arm. My grad students and I are working on a paper to document the "ritual economy" of Shell Mound, which, we imagine, was centered on ancestor veneration. What's especially interesting is the timing of these events: evidently, the juvenile white ibises were harvested in mid- to late-June (massive rookeries today on offshore islands some 10 km away). What is more, the marine turtles (adults), mullet (3-yr-olds stuffing themselves nearshore in prep for their first spawning run in Fall), and 2nd-year deer all point to June events. Now, those dunes that blanketed the landscape---on which people since Late Archaic times placed their dead, and where Shell Mound was sited for events resulting in large pots, pits and these bones---just so happen to be oriented to the solstices (head pointing to rising summer solstice sun; arms extended to setting winter solstice sun). Coupled systems indeed!

My father used to fly little Piper Cherokee planes and he and my uncle flew my sibs and me to Norfolk, VA to see a total eclipse of the sun on March 7, 1970. I was 12 years old. If you see what I saw back then, you will see long waves cross the earth at full eclipse. It lasted a good while. Freaky.

ken

Reply
Andy White
7/9/2017 05:18:06 am

Thanks for the comment, Ken. If I remember correctly, there were some papers on Shell Mound at the Claassen session at the last SEAC -- interesting stuff.

If these coastal hunter-gatherer systems were really "different" from those in the interior, I wonder how the social articulations between interior and coastal societies worked.

Reply
E.P. Grondine
7/8/2017 09:41:32 am

Hi Andy -
just stopping by to catch up -
Deer will summer in the mountains, then move down watersheds to winter on the coasts.
Deer like salt, and salt licks do not move. Also, a quick brine soak improves the flavor of deer meat.

Reply
Andy White
7/9/2017 05:14:20 am

Hi E.P.,

You've made your deer migration assertion before on this blog. I can assure you that it's incorrect for this region. Deer do not vacate the mountains in the winter.

http://dnr.sc.gov/news/2016/may/may26_deer.html

Reply
E.P. Grondine
7/10/2017 11:40:16 am

Hi Andy -

Perhaps the deer have modified their habits due to human settlements in your region. Coyote skins make great fur jackets.




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