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SEAC 2019 Presentation: "The Size and Structure of Eastern Paleoindian Social Groupings"

11/9/2019

2 Comments

 
I spend all day yesterday at SEAC (Jackson, Mississippi) in the Paleoindian symposium organized by Scott Jones. There were lots of interesting papers -- among the best parts of these kinds of gatherings is being able to sit in a room and watch person after person talk about what they've been doing, what they've learned, what they think is important or interesting, etc. It's not necessarily the best way to get command of all the minutia of the work we do, but it is the best way to get a feel for what's going on across multiple regions, what people in different research programs have been working on, etc.  

One of the interesting aspects of a symposium like this is that you can see patterns of interest emerge -- different people working on different parts of the same problems in different regions.  As the discussant for the session, Joe Gingerich organized his thoughts on the papers along three main lines: landscape, technology, and issues of society. These articulate with one another in all kinds of interesting ways. The papers in the session as well as the "after session" discussions I had at the bar and at dinner made me optimistic that maybe we really are heading into an era where we can have some substantive discussions about Paleoindian societies that make innovative use of all the new data that have been gathered over the last few decades.

Anyway, I think my paper went well. I basically set out to ask if/how we can gain some traction on understanding how Paleoindian societies were organized internally in terms of their constituent "building block" parts: families, foraging groups, maximal bands, etc. This is a question where multiple lines of evidence can be brought to bear. That doesn't mean, however, that it's easy to answer. I think we have enough in front of us now from across the Eastern Woodlands, however, that we can take a hard look at it and try to move the ball forward. Here is a pdf of my presentation. I also put it in on my Academia page.
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Also, for the record: as far as I can recall, the Jackson, MS, airport is the only airport I have ever been in where the coffee shop also sells cold bottles of beer. 
2 Comments
Stuart Fiedel
11/16/2019 01:28:16 pm

Andy,

One should be wary of using the Thunderbird postmolds as evidence of a Paleoindian structure. The stratigraphy of the site was messier than it is often represented, and there is a Late Woodland component represented mainly by sherds. It is very doubtful that postmolds would still be discernible after 13,000 years in this environment; even pit features older than 3,000 years generally aren't visible.
Way back in 2000, I suggested some parameters for Paleoindian social organization:

Both empirical observation of Australian bands (Birdsell, 1968) and computer simulation (Wobst, 1976) suggest that the minimal effective size of human mating networks (and dialect tribes) is about 500 individuals. Based on these numbers, we can speculatively model a multitiered Paleoindian social landscape, with microbands of ca. 25 people in 5200-km2 territories, aggregating seasonally in macrobands of ca. 100 to 150. Four to six macrobands might form a network of about 500 people for exchange of spouses and trade items. This social entity would encompass a territory of about 100,000 km2, envisioned as an approximate circle with a radius of about 180 km [compare this to the archaeological record of
Terminal Pleistocene Northwest Europe, where three stylistically defined ethnic groups each occupied an area of ca. 100,000 km2, implying a ca. 180-km radius (Price, 1991, p. 199)]. In the continental United States, there might have been100 such territories, with a total population of about 50,000, around 12,500 B.P.
This social landscape would represent a late, stabilized situation; social organization during initial expansion into unbounded territory could have been quite different.
Several case studies of lithic distributions permit testing of this model against the actual archaeological record. In the area surrounding the Williamson quarry in southeastern Virginia, McAvoy (1992) recognized 58 Clovis points made of chert visually attributable to this source. Eighty percent (46 of 58) of these points were found within an 80-km radius. This may imply a ca. 20,000-km2 territory, occupied by a 100-person macroband (McAvoy suggests 75 people in a 13,000-km2
territory). Anderson (1996, p. 37) observes that similar artifact concentrations from identifiable lithic sources “tend to occur at roughly 250- to 400-kilometer intervals. ... This may indicate the geographic scale over which discrete Paleoindian groups ranged, probably at the band level and possibly incipient macroband level of organization.” Anderson (1995) hypothesized the existence of 15 Middle Paleoindian (ca. 12,500 B.P.) macrobands east of the Mississippi, each in a territory of ca. 20,000–80,000 km2. Haynes (1980a, p. 118) observed that “the figure of 300 km (200 mi) for the maximum distance from lithic sources turns up repeatedly in the literature.” At the Gainey site in southeastern Michigan (Simons et al., 1984), 60% of the tools were made from Upper Mercer chert, derived from outcrops in Ohio, about 350 km to the south. Similarly, over 65% of tools from the Paleo Crossing site in north–central Ohio (dated to 10,980 ± 75 rcbp) (Brose,1994) were made from Wyandotte and Dongala cherts, obtained about 480 km to the south (Stothers, 1996). At the Bostrom site in southwestern Illinois, 60% of the artifacts were made of nonlocal stone, including Attica chert from west–central Indiana (240 km to the northeast) and Dongola and Kaolin cherts from southern Illinois (160 km southeast). Knife River flint from southwestern North Dakota, almost 1600 km away, also was recognized at Bostrom (Tankersley, 1998); one of the concave-based points found in the Lamb cache in western New York also appears to be made of this material (Gramly and Funk, 1990). At Bull Brook in northeastern Massachusetts, the predominant material is St. Albans chert from Burlington, Vermont, 305 km to the northwest (Spiess et al., 1998, p. 204). It is improbable that exchanges between neighboring bands could account for such high percentages of cherts from distant sources. Direct procurement seems more likely, but there is no obvious way to determine if this was “embedded” in the normal subsistence round, or if, instead, special-purpose task groups made periodic expeditions to the stone quarries (Spiess et al., 1998).

The new genomic evidence provides a basis for new hypotheses. This is from an ms I'm working on:
Estimates of the size of the founding Paleoindian population, based on genetic diversity, have ranged from a low of about 43 (Ray et al. 2010) to a high of about 5400 (Kitchen et al. 2008). Most recently, Fagundes et al. (2018) estimate the founding population as about 230-300, with a 95% credible interval between about 100 and 3,700 individuals. Note that these are effective population sizes, probably (by analogy with recent Polar Eskimo), about 60% of the census population (Matsumura and Forster 2008). A census population of about 450 is

Reply
Stuart Fiedel
11/16/2019 02:13:33 pm

A census population of about 450 is reminiscent of the magic number of ca. 500 often cited as necessary for a forager mating network to avoid extinction (Birdsell 1953; Wobst 1974). However, White (2017) calculates that a population as low as ca. 150 is sustainable over the long term. If we assume the Paleoindian founders formed a single social group, it must have included at least four, or perhaps seven, distantly related or unrelated founding fathers (Q-CTS2730/Q-CTS1780; Q-M930/Q-M3; C3-B473; C3-MPB373; perhaps also the founders of the Q-M848, Q-Y4308, and Q-Y4276 sub-clades of Q-M3) and seven unrelated founding mothers (of mtDNA clades A2, B2, C1b, C1c, C1d, D1, and D4h3a). Based on their study of recent Australian foragers, Bird et al. (2019) state that “all human societies (including mobile foragers) are large and complex; all are tied together well beyond the local residential group, and well beyond a discrete community of ~150 members.” Sikora et al. (2017) report that five individuals buried at Sunghir, Russia, about 34,000 cal BP, all belonged to the same Y chromosome and mtDNA haplogroups; nevertheless, they were not closely related. Sikora et al. infer “that the human HG (hunter-gatherer) social structure of low levels of within-band relatedness, complex family residence patterns, relatively high individual mobility and multilevel social networks were already in place among UP [Upper Paleolithic] societies 34 kya.” They estimate the effective population size of the Sunghir group as about 200. Lundstrom and Riede (2019) calculate that the forager population of periglacial southern Scandinavia, ca. 14,000-12,700 cal BP, was on the order of 90-260, in an area of ca. 165,000 km2; this figure implies a density of only .001 or .002 per km2. Using the same density, the population of Alaska as a whole (1.7 million km2) would be about 1500-2700 people. If the emigrant Paleoindian founding population was at the high end of previous estimates (e.g., 3700 or 5400), their departure would have left eastern Beringia vacant. Kato (2017), based on the distributions of high-quality lithic materials, estimates that the Diuktai microblade-makers of Late Glacial northeastern China occupied territories with diameters of ca. 300-450 km. I previously speculated (Fiedel 2000) that North American Paleoindians might have constituted a “multitiered” social landscape, with microbands of ca. 25 people in 5200-km2 territories, aggregating seasonally in macrobands of ca. 100 to 150. Four to six such macrobands might form a network of about 500 people for exchange of spouses and trade items. This social entity would encompass a territory of about 100,000 km2 , envisioned as an approximate circle with a radius of about 180 km (or a diameter of 360 km). This figure falls exactly within the range of Kato’s putative Chinese Late Glacial territories. These various speculative models would imply a range from 1500 to as many as 8500 people in Alaska at 14,000 cal BP, comprising anywhere from three to 17 mating networks (of 500 people each).

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