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From the Pleistocene to the Holocene
Human Organization and Cultural Transformations in Prehistoric North America
By C. Britt Bousman, Bradley J. Vierra Texas A&M University Press
Copyright © 2012 Texas A&M University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60344-778-2
CHAPTER 1
Chronology, Environmental Setting, and Views of the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene Cultural Transitions in North America
C. Britt Bousman and Bradley J. Vierra
Introduction
This compilation presents current views of the cultural transformations that took place across North America during the close of the Pleistocene and the ensuing Early Holocene. Most chapters began as papers for a symposium on Paleoindian–Archaic transitions in North America, given at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in Salt Lake City in 2005. Not all presenters submitted a chapter, so others were solicited to expand the geographic coverage of the volume. Each author has extensive experience in their specific region and discusses the regional prehistoric record in some detail, providing a new synthesis and analyzing the copious data which are now available, most from the voluminous gray literature emerging from Cultural Resource Management (CRM) projects, graduate dissertations and theses, and from other projects by professional or avocational archaeologists. The final revisions were submitted in early 2011. The sheer volume of recent writings on the Pleistocene/Holocene transition across such an immense area as North America is daunting and beyond the appetite of all but the most voracious archaeologists to digest. Here we set out to provide a much needed synthesis of an understandably neglected topic by a diverse team of local specialists—a review that we hope will provide readers with a clearer understanding of this important period in North American prehistory.
The propagation of Holocene Archaic societies from Pleistocene Paleoindian groups is often painted as a simple internal progression from one society to another. For many areas of North America, as the following chapters reveal, this characterization is a gross oversimplification. It is correctly viewed as the first major cultural shift to take place solely in the Americas, and it sets the stage for unique developments in cultural complexity that distinguish later Native American prehistoric societies from all others. These changes were complex and often unique, but one of the major obstacles to understanding this period is a poor chronological control and lack of high-resolution information. The chapters in this book seek to overcome these limitations.
The following chapters, placed on local scales, integrate massive datasets with an ever-swelling literature on paleoenvironmental studies. They then document how local societies adapted to changes in environmental and cultural landscapes that occurred across the Pleistocene/Early Holocene boundary in specific regions. Each author approaches the synthesis of the material in his/her own unique manner, reflecting specific theoretical interests and research backgrounds. As editors, we made no attempt to mask or standardize this diversity of approaches, since we believe each has its own merits and strengths and serves a greater heuristic purpose. The remainder of this chapter attempts to offer some organizational, environmental, and chronological clarity for this period.
Historical Setting
Ever since the earliest attempts to validate and describe Paleoindian and Archaic societies (Cook 1925, 1926, 1927; Figgins 1927; Howard 1935; Ritchie 1932; Roberts 1935; Wormington 1939) and to formulate regional culture histories in North America (Gladwin and Gladwin 1934; McKern 1939), archaeologists have tried come to grips with the Paleoindian and Archaic periods (Ritchie 1938, 1944; Sears 1948; Sellards 1952; Willey and Phillips 1958).
Cook (1925, 1926, 1927) and Figgins (1927) were the first investigators to demonstrate the presence of Native Americans in North America before the end of the Pleistocene, first at Lone Wolf Creek (although not accepted at the time) and then at Folsom. However, it wasn't until the work of Howard (1935) at Blackwater Draw and Roberts (1935) at Lindenmeier that the Paleoindian concept was established and seen more clearly as a cultural stage or period. Roberts (1940) was the first scholar to use the term Paleoindian (originally Paleo-Indian) as a recognized stage or period. With the excavations of E. H. Sellards (1938, 1940, 1952) and Sellards, Evans, Meade and Krieger (1947), the characterization of Paleoindians as specialized big-game hunters became popular.
William Richie (1932) first used the term Archaic to refer to occupations he excavated at Lamoka Lake in New York State. In 1944 Richie stated that the "archaic level as a whole shows (a) a large variety and numerical abundance of chipped stone types; (b) the lack of all the so-called problematical group of polished stone artifacts, except the bannerstone of several simple forms; (c) a considerable typological range in and large number of bone tools; (d) the prevalence of copper tools and the total lack of copper ornaments; (e) the want of pottery, except in perhaps the closing phase; (h) the nonexistence of agricultural traces; and (i) the large variety of burial practices, generally not involving mortuary offerings" (1944:319–320). This was the first use of the Archaic as a cultural level or stage and offered a comprehensive definition; the reader will note the lack of any discussion of a "broad spectrum economy."
The Archaic Period (or Stage) began to be seen by many as an interval of limited cultural change—a time of stable societies with simple hunting and gathering lifeways falling between Paleoindian "big game hunters" (Sellards 1952) and "settled agricultural societies" (Griffin 1952). Classic examples of this sort of Archaic scenario are represented by Caldwell's (1958) Primary Forest Efficiency model in the eastern woodlands, and the Desert Culture model of Jennings (1957; Jennings and Norbeck 1955) in the Great Basin. Both the Eastern Archaic and the Desert Culture were seen as regional traditions with long, slow developmental histories.
A more systematic and comprehensive effort to define the Archaic Stage and to contrast it with the Lithic Stage (Paleoindian period) was that of Willey and Phillips (1958), and later of Willey (1966), in which they outlined its distinctive traits and provided an organized scheme by which the two could be compared. Their discussion of the differences between Paleoindian and Archaic societies can be distilled down to nine elements (Willey and Phillips 1958:107–11):
1. Shift from large animal hunting to exploiting a variety of animals, perhaps through trapping as well as hunting.
2. Increase in plant food use and gathering.
3. Increase in the use of ground stone and other plant processing tools.
4. Greater numbers and varieties of chipped stone tools.
5. Manufacture of stemmed, corner-notched, and side-notched projectile points.
6. Greater population stability with less evidence for high residential mobility.
7. Greater use of organic materials for tool manufacture.
8. Systematic burial of the dead.
9. Intensive use of stone for cooking in ovens.
These comparisons and contrasts are still so widely used and recited word for word in textbooks (Fiedel 1992) that they have become oversimplified dogma, and now hinder rather than facilitate further understanding of what we know to have been a much more complex and variable transition.
In the last 15 or 20 years our concepts of the Archaic period have been re-sculpted by new excavations and theoretical approaches. For example, the recognition of social complexity in the Mid South at sites like Watson Brake and the spread of agricultural practices from Middle Holocene Archaic societies in Mexico to the greater Southwest as illustrated at Cerro Juanaqueña and other sites in the Southwest (Blake 2006; Hard et al. 2006; Piperno and Flannery 2001; Saunders et al. 1997, 2005) show that the Archaic is not a monolithic period of repetitive hunter-gatherers. To quote Ken Sassaman (2008) in his current reflections of this revolutionary period: "this is no longer your old professor's stale Archaic Stage."
While most interest in Archaic archaeology has veered toward the later half of the record, the earlier and transitional part of the Archaic timescale has come under intense scrutiny in some regions. Anderson and Sassaman (1996) have focused on Southeast Paleoindian and Early Archaic archaeology; Graf and Schmitt (2007) dealt with archaeology in the Great Basin at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary; and the Mid West has been the subject of a large, detailed treatment of the entire Archaic record, including the early portion (Emerson et al. 2009).
Likewise, most focus has been on the initial portions of the Paleoindian record, especially the Pre-Clovis (Adovasio et al. 1990; Dillehay 1999; Meltzer 2009). Recently Walker and Driskell (2007) have concentrated on Paleoindian groups at the end of the Pleistocene on a continental scale, but we have yet to see an equally wide treatment of the Pleistocene/Holocene cultural transitions that mark this era. These transformations set the stage for the complexity that develops later in the Holocene. In 1962 at a symposium entitled Prehistoric Man in the New World, Alex Krieger's (1964) presented a paper entitled Early Man in the New World, in which he noted the unique developments during this transitional period and attempted to bring attention to these events. This book represents an effort to address the issues that Krieger identified almost 50 years ago.
Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Climatic Changes
The regions discussed by contributors to this volume cover much of the North American continent, and they are climatically and environmentally diverse, some of them extremely so. Most chapters include information on the local paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental records that straddle the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary, but it is clear that most regional terrestrial paleoclimatic sequences have serious limitations, the greatest being gaps in individual depositional records. The next most severe problem is that of consistency between the various proxies used as evidence for climatic change—for example, how do we compare pollen diagrams with isotopic records, and so on. Then there are problems of dating precision and accuracy, and the difficult truth that not all events occur in every region. Finally, it is clear that proxy records have complex signals, some events may be time transgressive, and often climatic reconstructions are too far removed logically as third- or fourth-order extrapolations from their proxy evidence, resulting in reconstructions with varying levels of certainty and reliability (Caran 1998).
Clearly, no single climatic scheme is going to capture all climatic oscillations in every area discussed in the following chapters. However, the continental scope of the volume does demand an attempt to synthesize at least the main paleoclimatic and environmental events that occurred in North America at the end of the Pleistocene and in the early portion of the Holocene. Because of the diversity and scale of events, there are many ways that this complicated task can be approached. The method we have chosen is to use the most complete and well-documented sequence for the continent as the key sequence (i.e., a stratotype), and to compare discontinuous regional sequences to that key sequence. Deep-sea marine isotope stages serve a similar function for terrestrial sequences throughout the span of the Pleistocene, and the marine isotopic record is now an indispensible chronological device that functions as a yardstick for the Pleistocene worldwide, but we need a finer scale than the marine record can provide.
Consequently, we are obliged to turn to a Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene climatic record that is complete enough, sensitive enough, and close enough to North America to be of immediate use. The best available record is the stable isotope record from the Greenland Ice Cores (Rasmussen et al. 2007; Lowe et al. 2008). Recently an integrated effort, known as the Greenland Ice-Core Chronology 2005 (GICC 05), has improved ice core chronologies, providing a virtually continuous, extremely well-dated, and consistent record of proxy temperature estimates for the Arctic. In order to synthesize the climatic data, an event stratigraphic approach was tied to the GICC 05 record (Lowe et al. 2008). Event stratigraphy does not incorporate climatic events recorded from other sources or regions, such as the Scandinavian Younger Dryas or Allerod, but identifies internally consistent climatic events within the specific record—in this case, the Greenland Ice Core isotopic sequence. In 2008 the NGRIP ice core record was officially selected by the International Union of Geological Sciences (Walker et al. 2009; https://engineering.purdue.edu/Stratigraphy/gssp/, accessed 28 August 2010) as the global stratotype section for the base of the Holocene; this allows regional specialists, including archaeologists, to reliably correlate specific local events to the climatic events identified in the ice core record and use it as the key temporal sequence for the terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene. Its importance as a temporal sequence cannot be overestimated.
Chronology of Green Ice Core Sequence Events
GICC 05 was developed by integrating variations in the NGRIP, GRIP, and DYE-3 records, and counting back years as identified in annual snow falls, and annual δD and δ18O isotopic fluctuations (Andersen et al. 2006; Rasmussen et al. 2006; Svensson et al. 2006). This chronology now extends back to approximately 60,000 years ago (Svensson et al. 2008), and the record has been cross-checked with electrical conductivity and tephra markers. The detail and precision is stunning, but matters are soon complicated because the GICC05 uses calendar years before the year a.d. 2000 (B.P. 2k), unlike standard radiocarbon dates, which are years before a.d. 1950 (years B.P.), or tree-ring calibrated ages (cal years b.c./a.d. or cal years B.P. before a.d. 1950). To make chronological comparisons possible here, all dates quoted in this volume, including the ice core dates, will be presented in cal years B.P. (before 1950). Some authors specific chapters have elected to present standard radiocarbon carbon dates as well.
Figure 1.1 shows the δ18O isotope values from the GRIP and NGRIP cores spanning the period from 16,000 until 5000 cal B.P. (~13,450–4200 14C yrs B.P.). These are smoothed to 20-year moving averages. Higher values reflect warmer conditions, and for clarity the DYE-3 record is not plotted. The Pleistocene–Holocene boundary is now formally charted at 11,650 ± 99 cal B.P. (Walker et al. 2009). During the Pleistocene glacial epoch, cold events known as stadials are recorded as "GS" and warm interstadial events are listed as "GI." Both are numbered back through time; finer subdivisions are noted with lowercase letters. The dates, duration, and general climatic conditions of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene events are listed in table 1.1.
The duration of the entire stadial (GS-2) that marks the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) is 8210 years (not shown in full on fig. 1.1 or table 1.1), the following interstadial (GI-1) is 1795 years, and the terminal stadial of the last glacial period (GS-1) spans 1195 years. GS-2 is divided into three subdivisions (a–c), with the most recent event, GS-2a, the only one of interest here, spanning 2260 years. The most recent interstadial, GI-1, is divided into five subdivisions (a–e) of alternating cold and warm intervals (see table 1.1 for dates), but the most recent stadial, GS-1, is not subdivided. Although generally viewed as a steadily increasing warm period, the Early Holocene has three short cool events (the Preboreal Oscillation, the 9.3 ka Event, and the 8.2 ka Event), with the latter two having very short durations. These isotope records show that significant climatic changes did occur within a single person's lifetime (Steffensen et al. 2008), although the affects may have been muted south of the ice sheets (Meltzer and Holliday 2010).
A number of well-known climatic events can be correlated to the Greenland Ice Core record. For example, the Younger Dryas correlates to the GS-1 Event (Lowe et al. 2008), and the Allerød-Bølling interstadials have been correlated to the GI-1e Event (Wolff et al. 2009); however, some terrestrial events, especially Holocene events (e.g., the Altithermal in the western US), do not register on this isotopic record. In spite of such exceptions, the Greenland isotopic record has revealed that many important and well-known terrestrial events are indeed supra-regional in scope, supporting its stratotype status.
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Excerpted from From the Pleistocene to the Holocene by C. Britt Bousman, Bradley J. Vierra. Copyright © 2012 Texas A&M University Press. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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