Archaic period in the Americas

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In the sequence of North American pre-Columbian cultural stages first proposed by Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips in 1958, the Archaic period was the second period of human occupation in the Americas, from around 8000 BC to 1000 BC although as its ending is defined by the adoption of sedentary farming, this date can vary significantly across the Americas.

It followed the Lithic stage and was superseded by the Formative stage.

The Archaic stage is characterised by subsistence economies supported through the exploitation of nuts, seeds and shellfish. Numerous local variations have been identified; in the Great Basin and western interior the period has been subdivided into Desert Archaic, Middle Archaic and Late Archaic whilst in south-western North America only a single Southwestern Archaic is recognised.

1 History of investigations
2 Early Archaic (8000 BC to 6000 BC)
3 Middle Archaic period (6000 BC to 3000 BC)
4 Late Archaic period (3000 BC to 1000 BC)
5 Variations over different parts of America
6 Cultures of the North American Archaic
7 External links
8 References

[edit] History of investigations

William A. Ritchie (1932) first used the term "Archaic" in American archeological literature to describe the cultural material, primarily chipped stone tools, from the Lamoka Lake Site in New York. During the Works Progress Administration (WPA) excavations of the 1930s and 1940s, southeastern sites that were recognized as producing lithic materials similar to Lamoka Lake were also classified as Archaic. Today, archeologists use the term to describe a temporal and cultural period, differentiated from the earlier Paleoindian period and more recent periods on the basis of stylistic differences in stone point types, the appearance of other artifacts, and changes in economic orientation.

Before 1960, the major goal of Archaic period research was to develop a relative chronology. Information derived from excavations at deeply stratified quarry, habitation, and cave sites in the Southeast – such as Russell Cave in Alabama, Indian Knoll in Kentucky, and the Hardaway and Doerschuk sites in North Carolina – was used to develop the following chronology for the Archaic period.

[edit] Early Archaic (8000 BC to 6000 BC)

The Early Archaic period was defined on the basis of chipped stone projectile point technology and styles. This time period is associated with the final glacial retreat on the North American continent and an environment similar to that found in the Southeast today.

Excavations at stratified Early Archaic sites near permanent water sources or along rivers have produced corner, basal, and some side-notched points, such as Palmer, Kirk, and LeCroy, which are found throughout the south-eastern United States. Other points, such as St. Albans, Kessell, Big Sandy, and Kanawah, have a limited southeastern geographical distribution. It is this introduction of new point types that differentiates the Early Archaic period from the preceding Late Paleoindian subperiod.

Like the Late Paleoindian subperiod, it was presumed that the Early Archaic culture consisted of small mobile bands exploiting defined territories, but the increase in the number of sites and the recovery of nonlocal cherts tend to support an increase in population resulting in larger numbers of bands that traded resources with each other. The proliferation in point types appeared to also represent the ongoing regional specialization first apparent in the Late Paleoindian subperiod.

The range of lithic tools included knives, perforators, drills, choppers, flake knives and scrapers, gouges, and hammerstones. In addition, wet sites, such as the Windover archaeological site near present-day Titusville, Florida, which produced exceptionally well preserved organic materials, have enlarged this inventory to include: bone points, atlatl hooks, barbed points, fish hooks, and pins; shell adzes; wooden stakes and canoes; and fragments of cloth and woven bags. This new information on the Early Archaic has contributed to a view of a residentially stable hunting and gathering band society that seasonally occupied base camps along major water courses and exploited lithic and food resources within individual stream drainages.

[edit] Middle Archaic period (6000 BC to 3000 BC)

The Middle Archaic period in the Southeast is marked by a further intensification of regionalization of prehistoric cultures. A variety of new chipped stone points (for example, Stanly, Morrow Mountain, Levy, Eva, Benton, Cypress Creek, Arrendondo, White Springs, Sykes, and Newnan) and a series of ground stone tools and implements first appear in this period. These tools are used mainly for plant food processing.

The Middle Archaic appears to involve a very generalized resource exploitation strategy, which included the hunting of a variety of animals and the gathering of wild plants, such as nuts, fruits, berries, and seeds. This period demonstrated the first occurrence of shellfish collecting within river valleys and along the seacoast. At these base camps are found storage pits, remains of house floors, and prepared burials, all indications of increased sedentism at certain sites. Recent radiocarbon samples in Louisiana have provided considerable evidence of a mound-building tradition in Louisiana at least by 3000 BC. There was also a moderate increase in the amount of trade in nonlocal chert materials supposedly due to a continued growth in prehistoric population. Trade networks that focused on specialized resources developed when people began to live in sedentary base camps.

[edit] Late Archaic period (3000 BC to 1000 BC)

The Late Archaic period consisted of regional specialization using a generalized subsistence technology to efficiently exploit locally available plant and animal resources. For example, freshwater mussels from the Green River in Kentucky provided the basis for an expanded dietary inventory that included seed crops and native and tropical cultigens, suggesting that this culture was experimenting with horticulture. Late Archaic cultures along the South Atlantic coast developed sedentary settlements based on the utilization of the saltwater oyster beds. The Late Archaic Poverty Point culture in the lower Mississippi River Valley developed large permanent towns with satellite communities. These were linked in a program of trade in exotic nonlocal lithic raw materials as well as in the production and trade of finished goods made from these materials throughout much of the eastern United States. The treatment of burials at the Green River sites, some containing exotic trade materials, may reflect the beginnings of a hierarchy of individuals whose sole responsibility was the establishment and maintenance of these trade networks.

At the end of the Late Archaic, fiber-tempered plain and decorated ceramics appeared along the South Atlantic coast during a change known as the container revolution. This ceramic technology spread westward to the coastal plain of Alabama and Mississippi, to the Poverty Point culture area, southward into Florida, and eventually over most of the southeastern United States. The appearance of this new technology has traditionally been viewed as the transitional period between the Archaic hunting and gathering societies and the emergence of settled Woodland period villages and communities, where existence depended on a combination of horticulture and hunting and gathering. Finally, the Archaic saw the beginning of a southeastern mound-building tradition that would be further elaborated on in the succeeding Woodland and Mississippian periods.

[edit] Variations over different parts of America

[edit] Southern North America

In Mesoamerica, the Mexican Archaic lasted from c. 9500 BC to 2500 BC and it was here that nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers first began to domesticate maize, squash and bottle gourds as the earliest of three (or possibly four) regions to independently develop farming in the Americas. This began as a managed exploitation of wild plants but by the end of the period had become full agrarian food production. Around 2000BC, this technology spread into southern North America where the knowledge of maize farming was able to be adopted as a much quicker transition than the slower original development further south. An alternate theory is that some Mesoamerican farmers colonised northwards themselves, bringing their farms with them.

The site of Las Capas in southern Arizona has revealed irrigation canals dug in the Late Archaic indicating sophisticated methods of water control were being adopted. Terraced fields were also a feature of farming in Mexico's Northern Chihuahua province. Dating to around 1200BC. Hunting and gathering were still an important element in the lives of the inhabitants but they lived in identifiable permanent villages of pit houses associated with storage features and roasting pits.

[edit] Eastern North America

In eastern North America, the landscape of pine forest, swamps and lakes in the Archaic provided a diet of hickory nuts, freshwater mussels and gourds to supplement hunting. The use of gourds as fishnet floats may have impelled their planting and cultivation. Simple cultivation may have begun as early as 6000BC independently of advances further south. The first earthworks appear as well as shell middens. Florida's wetlands have preserved vast quantities of organic material from the period such as the human burials at Windover archaeological site, the sinkhole at Little Salt Spring whilst the Archaic camp at the Koster Site in Illinois indicates a kind of seasonal sedentism focusing on cultivated food sources along with river fish and game, hunted with the assistance of some of the earliest domesticated dogs. Other significant sites include Eva and Icehouse Bottom in Tennessee.

Seeds stood in for maize as the main cultivated food source during the Middle and Late Archaic in eastern North America. Selective breeding of sunflower, sumpweed and chenopod plants created larger seeds which would have rendered the specimens unable to reproduce without human assistance.

[edit] Western North America

In Western North America, agriculture did not gain a foothold and peoples of the Great Plains and the Pacific North West continued to develop hunting and gathering techniques. Beneficial plant species were managed where they could provide medicine, plant fibre or building material but crop domestication did not take place. Although this meant that most of the peoples in this region remained as nomads, sedentary populations reliant on fishing and managed plant exploitation did emerge in California and the continent's north west coast.

Elsewhere, people were reliant on hunting. On the Great Plains, sites such as the later Head-Smashed-In in Alberta attest to the practice of driving bison over a cliff to kill them. The climate was colder and wetter at the time and killed bison could be preserved in the winter snows and dug out and thawed as needed. Summer species hunted included porcupine, deer and rabbit. Later in the Middle Archaic period the climate warmed and Bison numbers fell, leading humans to find new methods to survive. In the Rocky Mountains, people developed large nets to trap mountain goats and sheep and at Mustang Springs a well was dug to maintain a water supply. In the Later Archaic the weather cooled again and bison numbers recovered. Some groups built bison pounds in which to keep live animals until they were needed for slaughter. Teepees and medicine wheels appeared for the first time.