INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

lately indicating more corn or other grasses were eaten than we would think, given the record of
animal bone at the site. Meanwhile, the people were still moving around the landscape, not
settling down at all as they domesticated corn, in fact not until thousands of years later. So in this
case sedentism comes after food production, whereas elsewhere, such as southeast Asia or south
Florida, it comes before.
The sites of Guilá Naquitz cave in Mexico and
Guitarrero Cave in the Peruvian Andes also document
Archaic foraging lifestyles on the verge of
domesticating plants and have produced, among other
things, notable examples of fiber artifacts such as nets
and basketry.
What is the evidence for elaborate ceremonialism and
more complex society during the Archaic? The
Poverty Point site in northeastern Louisiana was once
considered an anomaly, a bunch of mounds and
parallel earthworks that would have needed great
coordination and leadership to construct, but dating to 1200 B.C., too early for food production.
Can mobile hunter-gatherers settle in one place and build such monuments? Possibly the
dependable resources of the Mississippi River floodplain allowed permanent, long-term
settlement. Evidence for long-distance trade is seen in the distribution of other artifacts
manufactured in this region of Louisiana. A complex lapidary industry produced fancy polished
stone beads in the shape of owls and other birds. Some of these have been found as far away as
north Florida, as have other associated items, such as weirdly shaped clay balls and microlithic
tools. The clay balls may have been for cooking, since this was before the time of widespread
pottery use.
Now even earlier large-scale constructions have
become known in the Southeast. I already mentioned
the large shell middens in south Florida. In northeast
Louisiana a complex of 11 mounds and connecting
earthworks known as Watson Brake has been dated to
earlier than 3000 B.C. This is far earlier than anything
so complex in Mesoamerica. Does it mean complex
society? Can you design and build such monuments
without hierarchy or central leadership? I think so, but
many do not.
How can we characterize North America after the
Archaic period? In many parts of Canada and the
western U.S., California, and northern Mexico, an
essentially Archaic adaptation meant that foragers
were still moving across the landscape when
Europeans and other outsiders arrived to change
history. But in the eastern U.S., the Southwest, and