Southeastern Archaeology News

Current Paleoindian research

The most fascinating question in American archaeology today is how, when and by whom North and South America were first peopled. One of the highlights of the 2007 Southeastern Archaeological Conference was an all-afternoon session on Paleoindians, which reported on some recent research related to this question.

One major research topic is how the first Americans spread across North and South America in a relatively short period of time, occupying an area from Alaska to Patagonia. Did they travel on foot overland, or more easily by sea-going watercraft as some researchers have suggested?

The SEAC Paleoindian symposium kicked off with a paper by Juliet E. Morrow of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey (http://www.clt.astate.edu/jmorrow/ )about whether Paleoindians might have used watercraft. Morrow suggested researchers not leap too quickly to accept some of the radical new theories being proposed.

“These are challenging times in Paleoindian archaeology,” Morrow said. “New ideas are being thrust into the mainstream and we are being asked to give up our old ways of thinking. But before we embrace these sometimes intriguing, exotic and even fantastical concepts, we should re-examine the empirical evidence.”

Early Paleoindians traversed great distances and carried stone tools far from their source areas. Some have suggested that Paleoindians may have used watercraft. “But did the makers of fluted points also make boats?” Morrow asked.

To answer this question, Morrow studied fluted points found in the Mississippi River valley. Her intent, she said, was not to discuss the plausibility of early trans-oceanic voyages to the new world, migration theory or the potential of sea voyages by the initial people arriving on the North and South American continents.

To date there is no evidence of watercraft dating to the early Paleoindian period, so the issue has to be examined indirectly. Heavy duty chopping tools are conspicuously absent or at best extremely rare in early Paleoindian sites, she reported. “The presence or absence of heavy duty wood working tools does not itself demonstrate or negate the manufacture of wooden watercraft. However, considering the prevalent absence of such tools it appears that if early Paleoindians made boats they probably weren’t producing dugout canoes. It may have been possible to use the more typical tools in the early Paleoindian repertoire to construct simple watercraft, such as skin or bark vessels. At the same time, the possibility hardly demonstrates its plausibility,”

The distribution of stone tools provides an important way of tracking the movement and inter-regional contact of Paleoindians. “The Mississippi would have presented a formidable obstacle to people lacking watercraft,” Morrow noted. Today it’s over a mile wide in many places and would have been even larger in Paleoindian times because of melting glaciers upstream. If early Paleoindian peoples living in the area lacked watercraft, we would expect to see a noticeable lack of stone tools made of stone found on the opposite side of the river. “Conversely, if these people did indeed make and use boats, they would have had little difficulty carrying themselves and stone tools across the river,” Morrow said. “Did early Paleoindians ship lithic raw materials across the Mississippi River?”

To study this question, Morrow analyzed a database of fluted points and pre-forms documented in public and private collections in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, Arkansas and western Kentucky.

Morrow’s research, she said, clearly shows early Paleoindian peoples distributed stone for tools extensively “and at a scale larger than our present-day state boundaries. Fluted points made from stone from 300, 400 and 500 kilometers and more from their geologic sources areas are well represented in this sample. The data also demonstrate several examples of lithic raw materials crossing over the Mississippi River.”

“The answer to the question ‘Did early Paleoindians move lithic raw materials across the Mississippi River?’ is obviously ‘yes’,” Morrow said. “We could end the analysis right here and conclude that these people must have had boats of some kind. But that conclusion could be in error.”

Why? Morrow’s research shows that while some stone tool material made it across the Mississippi, others did not. Those that made it across the river come from sources lying in the northern part of the study area, while further south some stone from the Ozarks in Missouri which were used extensively by early Paleoindians in Arkansas and southern Missouri don’t show up in adjacent Illinois and Kentucky.

“The available data indicate a marked pattern,” Morrow said. Raw stone tool materials were taken across the Mississippi River in the northern part of the region. In contrast, few materials moved across the river from about the Ohio/Missouri border southward.

How to explain this? Winter.

“People living in the more northerly latitudes didn’t need boats to get across the Mississippi River,” Morrow noted. Every winter, the northern portions of the river sometime freeze from bank to bank just north of the Des Moines rapids, bringing a seasonal end to modern barge traffic. The ice can approach almost a meter in thickness. “It’s likely Paleoindians residing in present day Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and northern Illinois could have walked across the river in Winter,” Morrow said.

So, in conclusion, Morrow said, “there’s no compelling evidence that Paleoindians in the area used watercraft. Quite the opposite. All indications are that they did not.”

Later in the symposium, Dr. Al Goodyear of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (http://www.cas.sc.edu/sciaa) presented a paper by himself and Shane Miller of the University of Arizona discussing evidence for a possible population decline in the Southeastern United States following the Clovis period.

Among the evidence for this is the “Redstone” point, named after Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, which are medium to large fluted projectile points first recognized by avocational archaeologists in Alabama and Tennessee in the mid 1960s. Long believed to be a variant of Clovis points, Goodyear acknowledged that he and other archaeologists have wrongly been calling Redstone points “Clovis.” Goodyear gave a detailed talk about the differences between the points. Redstone points were larger than Clovis points, shaped differently, and very different technique was used to make them: Clovis points were fluted by percussion (that is, direct striking of the stone point blank) whereas it’s believed instruments were used to flute Redstones. Clovis points were good for piercing and cutting, Redstones were good for piercing and pentetrating.

Goodyear said that when he realized that Redstones had been confused with Clovis, he went back through the South CarolinaClovis points for every Redstone. Interestingly, this decline in points coincides with what’s known as “The Younger Dryas” climatic period. databases of points, and found that there were four or five

The Younger Dryas, according to the National Climatic Data Center (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data_glacial.html) “was an over 1,000 year-long cold period between the last ice age and modern conditions. The Earth’s climate abruptly warmed at the end of the last glacial period approximately 14,500 years ago. It then cooled back to glacial conditions over the next 3,000 years. After 1,000 years of conditions comparable to the last glacial climate, the Earth’s climate suddenly warmed, with much of the change happening in less than a decade.”

The Younger Dryas not only saw the Clovis people disappear suddenly, but also mammoths and mastodons. “About 10,800 [B.P.] is a wall that the elephants and Clovis people hit,” Goodyear said. In September 2007 another suspected cause of the extinctions and human population decline was proposed, a comet or other extraterrestrial object which may have hit the earth (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-09/nau-rts092407.php) . “The question of course for us as archaeologists is did it make any difference to human life,” Goodyear said.

Returning to projectile point databases, Goodyear said a database from the central Savannah River region shows 45 ClovisDalton points. Goodyear said he estimates the Clovis points would have been deposited on the ground by 12,800 B.P., the Redstones perhaps by 12,500 B.P. and the Dalton points by an estimated 12,000 B.P., Goodyear said. “We’re talking about an 800 year difference which essentially spans The Younger Dryas,” Goodyear said. points, 10 Redstones and 200

Goodyear said he’s now curious about the ratio between Clovis points and what are considered to be immediately post-Clovis fluted points, “to see how broad and wide this kind of pattern might be throughout the East.”

Summing up, Goodyear said he got interested in this research question because some collectors showed him some points that he and his colleagues had misclassified as Clovis, which he now realizes are Redstones. “The conclusion would be if we recognize Redstones based on the fluting technique, we’ve got more accurate culture history here. We’re not conflating two point types that may represent 500, 600, 700 years of time. We don’t want to do that.” Within limits, he said, fluted points can serve as potential proxies for population density between the Clovis and Dalton periods. Goodyear said he’s interested in the 800 year period between Clovis and Dalton. “There’s a major post-Clovis decline in human population during The Younger Dryas. … I think we’re going to see probably from the Plains to the East that there is some sort of drop in post-Clovis projectile points. The issue of the comet needs to be thought about.”

Big picture emerging from Paleoindian database

Al Goodyear spoke in the paper above about how the study of databases of projectile points is yielding intriguing insight into possible changes in Paleoindian populations. Continuing on this theme, Dr. David Anderson of the University of Tennessee (http://web.utk.edu/~anthrop/faculty/anderson.html) next presented a paper on research conducted by a large team of archaeologists using the Paleoindian Database of the Americas.

“We have big questions that are in the news and of interest to our profession,” Anderson said to the large audience at the symposium. “When did the first peoples come to the New World, how did they get here, where did they come from, what happened to them once they get there. I’m going to show you how you can use artifact data to explore some of these questions.”

Hosted by the University of Tennessee, this database (http://pidba.utk.edu/main.htm ) allows researchers to search data compiled from publications and research projects.

Anderson said that with the PIDBA database, he and colleagues J. Christopher Gillam (South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology), D. Shane Miller (University of Arizona), Erik N. Johanson and Jason O’Donoughue (University of Tennessee), Michael K. Faught (Panamerican Consultants Inc.) and Stephen J. Yerka (University of Tennessee) have been compiling primary artifact data, not just on projectile points, but for other types of stone tools. In addition to North American researchers, other researchers are working in Latin America to compile data. “We’re using the data to explore research questions,” Anderson said. They’re synchronizing archaeological and environmental data, such as sea level data and climatic history.

As of the day before the symposium, Anderson said, the database included about 16,500 fluted and related points. Data from Canada, Alaska and Mexico is in the database. “A lot of people have participated in this effort,” he said. The database includes distribution of points by location – but much more. “We have over 10,000 Paleoindian points from the Southeast for which we have attribute data online, including about 3,000 Daltons [Dalton points] and early side-notched points. So it’s a good data set,” he said. Using the data, the researchers are studying routes and patterns of settlement, emergence of subregional cultural traditions, and local adaptations. One of the things that’s really interesting, Anderson said, is that the database reveals an uneven distribution of fluted points, which suggests Paleoindians did not advance in a wave across North America. “If people moved from concentration to concentration, a leap frogging strategy seems more likely.”

The researchers are also looking at whether dense concentrations of fluted points may be where concentrations of people were, “if you can assume points equal people, which is dangerous. But it’s what we have to work with. And from these dense concentrations you can perhaps envision Clovis people radiating out over the landscape.”

In the past few years, Anderson said, researchers have begun to plot the distribution of specific forms of projectile points. “Perhaps these represent habitual use areas or territories of some of these later peoples,” he said.  They’ve also been looking at the locations where these artifacts have been found and then looking at their ecological correlants and then looking for other areas where these artifacts could occur. “These are kind of like large-scale predictive modeling exercises,” Anderson said.  

Segueing from Al Goodyear’s previous talk, Anderson next presented a discussion of possible changes caused by The Younger Dryas. There does appear to be a fairly interesting pattern. In the Southeast, there appears to be a drop in fluted points across North America after Clovis followed by a resurgence. “There’s a suggestive drop but we’re not really sure what is happening,” he said. “Did something come from outer space to end Clovis? I really don’t know. I’m not on the physical sciences side of this. The artifacts are suggestive, perhaps strongly suggestive to some, that a decline of some kind did occur.”

Where do we go from here? “We’re going to continue to compile data,” Anderson said. “We’re going to continue to look at raw material sources and add data to the database. We’re going to explore the impact of climatic events.” Anderson ended by asking archaeologists to send their data on Paleoindian points so it can be included in the database.