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Adapting to Change: The Early Archaic Period on the Great Plains - Ep 08
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In this episode of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast, host Carlton Shield Chief Gover examines the Early Archaic period, a transformative era in the history of the Great Plains. Marked by significant climatic shifts following the end of the Ice Age, this period saw dramatic adaptations in human lifeways. Carlton delves into how these environmental changes influenced hunting strategies, as communities shifted from targeting megafauna to a broader range of game and plant resources. The episode also explores the intensification of space modification, with evidence of advanced land-use strategies emerging during this time. Join us as we uncover how early peoples navigated the evolving landscapes of the Plains and developed innovative solutions to sustain their communities. Whether you're intrigued by climate history, early human ingenuity, or the archaeology of adaptation, this episode sheds light on a pivotal chapter in the Plains’ deep past.
Links:
- The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains by Douglas B. Bamforth (2021)
- Archaeology on the Great Plains Edited by W. Raymond Wood (1998)
- Carlton's KU Anthropology Faculty Bio
Transcripts
- For a transcript of this episode, tap the Zencastr icon on in the upper left corner of the Podcast image.
Contact:
- Instagram: @pawnee_archaeologist
- Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. Join me as we uncover the rich histories of North America's Great Plains, exploring the latest archaeological discoveries and past cultures that shaped this storied region. Welcome to the podcast.
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 8 of the Great Plains
Transition from Paleo-Indian to Archaic Periods
00:00:25
Speaker
Archaeology Podcast. I am your host, Professor Carlton Shill, Chief Gover, and I am thrilled to have you join me on this exciting journey to the rich and fascinating histories of North America's Great Plains.
00:00:47
Speaker
really looking at that transition from the late Paleo-Indian to early archaic. So kind of going back to one of our earlier episodes about time and how archaeologists in the Great Plains divide chronological periods,
00:01:04
Speaker
And depending on where you are in the Great Plains, what region you're at, there are differences in when the paleo-Indian period ends and when archaic begins. And so if you go to chapter five of Dr. Bamforth's book, and The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains, he talks about this to some extent, both at the end of chapter four, how the paleo-Indian period ends, as well as the beginning of chapter five when he's starting to dive into the archaic period. Now, if you wanted to take a gander at what I am talking about.
00:01:37
Speaker
And like late Paleo-Indian, we're really looking at Paleo-Indian period being really defined, one by the Ice Age, but the Ice Age has ended by late Paleo-Indian. But looking at the stone tool typologies, Paleo-Indian folks are known for well-made lancelet points that are you know large and ovular. The archaic period is really known for points that are decreasing in size.
Environmental Changes and Hunting Practices
00:02:04
Speaker
and they are losing their lancelet shape in favor of more like side notch points and corner notch points. Part of this is also the environment is radically changing. and And the time period that we're talking about, if you go to Doug's book, Doug talks about archaic being this period from about 6900 BC to 600 BC. Now you can look at a broader chronology, like the one that I used for my class,
00:02:31
Speaker
by and large, archaic start, slate paleoindian ends around 7,200 BC and goes until about 500 BC. But it depends on where you are on the plains, whether you're in Canada, whether you're in Texas, whether you're in the Rocky Mountain Front Range or in the Missouri River Basin to see when these changes take effect. So what Doug talks about in chapter five of his book, looking at the archaic period, this is a time period, 6,900 BC, that these changes have taken place across the plains.
00:03:01
Speaker
and we're seeing this this time period where The archaic, the Great Plains are actually expanding during this time. So though the prairie maximum happens within the Great Plains, like grasslands are growing and it is a great time to be a bison. And we are still talking about like not modern bison bison, but extinct species before that. And bison become the dominant animal hunted in the archaeological record on the Great Plains based on archaeological evidence, right? Maybe there is a whole industry of bunny rabbit butchering and hurting and killing.
00:03:42
Speaker
But those bunny rabbit bones are so small, they don't last in the record, we just will never find them. But we do see a lot of bison. Not only do we see bison being the predominant animal in assemblages most most times, but we're also beginning to see in the archaic period, intensification of land use. So a paleo-Indian period, ice age, archeology, ice age, individuals, peopling of the Americas,
00:04:07
Speaker
Folks who spread out the landscape, we do see evidence of people right through through um kills of many different kinds of Pleistocene megafauna. We're seeing people interact with the landscape, change the landscape to increase success rates of hunting bison.
Significance of Immovable Artifacts
00:04:26
Speaker
and so how do we How do we see this, Carlton? Well, this is what we call features in archaeology. A feature is an immovable artifact. Artifacts are movable objects within the archaeological record. Features in the archaeological record and are non-movable. So think like a whole house. That's a feature, right? The hearth, the fireplace. That is a feature.
00:04:43
Speaker
And so what we see if we look at sites in Texas, like Lubbock Lake, or what's another good one, or Gore Pit. Well, let's talk about Gore Pit first. Gore Pit, Oklahoma, the Gore Pit site in Oklahoma. We're starting to see roasting features. We're seeing modification to the landscape.
00:05:01
Speaker
to trying to think of the words here to basically process bison at at an expedited rate within the landscape, which shows like habitual, habitual use to like roasting stones or creating these pits in which you what we believe, because we can look at the record lining these pits.
00:05:19
Speaker
with skins, with with skin side out, filling them with water and then buo and then taking heated rocks, heated stones, putting them in these boiling pits and it's just flash frying the water, creating getting it really incredibly hot and then putting bison bones in particular in these roasting features or these roasting pits. And then that is melting, essentially breaking down and melting the bison marrow making a float to the top so it can be removed from the pit and then used in cooking and in preservation. So like bicentallo, bison marrow is a key ingredient of pemmican, which is this. And not saying that they're making pemmican at this time, we don't have evidence for domestication and use of maize here yet, but just kind of showing like there's a processing of bison bones in which the which in which the landscape is being modified like with these feature pits. And like, as I said,
00:06:15
Speaker
You know, it's it's not necessarily just bison. Bison is generally the predominant animal that we found, but we do find deer, rabbits, fish, turtles, and waterfowl. But we're also seeing plants, you know, gathered plants such as goose foot, hackberry, and ah multiple occupations at a site. And we can start seeing more seasonality between the sites. So like at the coffee site, we can see multiple occupations where people are occupying this site, you know,
00:06:41
Speaker
pretty often from summer to winter. Like it is a later half of the year kind of camp. So we're seeing habitual use and reuse of certain spaces. And we're seeing people investing time into the environment.
00:06:56
Speaker
So people are becoming settled, not settled in the sense of either building houses, but they're creating boundaries or they have their paths across the landscape that are definitely being reinforced by the seasonality of available food resources.
00:07:12
Speaker
people are moving across the landscape, so they've accessed different resources. We talked about right in some of the first episodes of this podcast, the differences between the east part of the plains, the west part of the plains, between late the availability of late forage for um animals, more agricultural output. We're starting to see people in the archaic period very much in tandem with the ah seasonality and the environment and using that to their advantage. So of course, like we know people have been in the Great Plains for a couple thousand years at this point. The archaic is ah especially the early archaic and moving on to the later archaic.
00:07:45
Speaker
period, people are very, very, very much in sync with their environment and their behaviors, not saying there's environmental determinism, that the environment is determining their behavior. These folks are adapting their behavior to to environmental conditions, right? So it's it's giving indigenous people that that agency. And we can see differences in in the Great Plains between how not only bison are being harvested,
00:08:15
Speaker
but also where we
Strategies in Bison Hunting
00:08:16
Speaker
see roasting pits. So if you look at a map of the Great Plains, it includes the southern part of Saskatchewan up to Texas, generally you're going to find roasting features in the archaic in the south. We're thinking Texas, Oklahoma, and eastern Kansas. You see bison dominated small kills. There's like one in New Mexico that we can talk about, um the Lubbock Lake site, but there is also Wait, I thought Lubbock Lake. Lubbock, I might have to double check, that might be Texas, but also eastern Kansas or North Dakota. but We're seeing large kills that are bison dominated in the western part of the plains. Think of like Head Smashed In, um the Hawkins site.
00:08:54
Speaker
Possibly Spring Creek. Well, yeah, my map is messed up. Anywho, Lubbock Lake is definitely in Texas. My apologies. And so right conditions in the eastern part of the plains don't have much positive topography as the western part of the plains where there's large bison kill dominated sites are basically bison are being herded off of cliffs. the The bison drives the bison jumps. This is very much a practice that begins in the archaic period. And it's not just running bison off a cliff. We also see like in Rocky Mountain National Park.
00:09:24
Speaker
We can see right off the highway in some places drive lanes being created and hunting blinds and These sites these drive lanes. We're not talking about like a couple hundred yards like length of a football field We're talking about substantial lengths of of time the amount of time and energy and resources taken to create these drive lanes to make these these hunting blinds in order to drive bison into corrals and kill areas takes a long time. And we see multiple uses of these drive lanes. People are coming back, fixing up these drive lanes, fixing up these blinds and forcing bison down these these drive lanes to be to be harvested.
Diversification of Stone Tool Technologies
00:10:08
Speaker
and these And these drive lines, we can see evidence of them because there's all these
00:10:15
Speaker
culturally modified or culturally moved rocks, stones that are being used to create bases for blinds and and probably you know short walls. Bison can't see very well, so you can create and manipulate the environment to keep them corralled in. and You look at these drive lanes in the Rocky Mountains and they're basically funneling bison from across these Rocky Mountain plateaus into areas where bison are being herded off cliffs or brought into natural corrals to be
00:10:48
Speaker
hunted this takes an incredible amount of time and investment and It's not something that you do On a whim and you just hope and pray. Oh, well, we're gonna spend all this time and energy developing these drive lanes Creating these and just hope bison come in people are aware They're they're in sync. They know when bison in the western plains conglomerate in those um rut herds right that we talked about They're counting on it. They know the bison or the area has been scouted out. They know bison are coming, and then they go there often, so they're modifying the landscape in order to force folks through. That's the big theme of the early archaic, and the archaic in general. Bison-dominated kills, for the most part. The points are changing, and intensification of the landscape.
00:11:42
Speaker
And I believe there's another thing I wanted to chat with you guys. We might chat about it in the second segment of this, and we're starting to see that we talked about in the paleo-Indian, right? We need, there's Clovis points, then there's Folsom points. And then we start seeing more of a divergence of of projectile point industries. Those don't equate to culture. This,
00:12:03
Speaker
increase in diversification of projectile points that are generally found within particular geographic regions that do overlap continues into the archaic. We're seeing a much more diversification of of stone tool technologies. Once again, points don't equal people, so let's not think of these these stone tool typologies as equating to a particular people. right We don't refer to people by the kind of phone they own in their pocket. right That is a technology, you have Android users generally, and you have iPhone users.
00:12:31
Speaker
You can have people belonging to different cultures and backgrounds owning those devices, right? And this is a very loose example, but one that you might be able to resonate with you. So I want you to think about that during this commercial break. We'll be right back with segment two to not only talk about how to move further than just, this is what people hunted and how they hunted. We're going to talk about some, some good stuff here in a second. So we'll be right back with episode eight of the Great Plains Archaeology podcast.
00:12:58
Speaker
And welcome back to episode eight. So I was about to talk about some cool stuff that happened that actually doesn't happen until the middle archaic. And we'll leave that for the next episode and some really cool stuff happens. But having to switch gears for a second, even though we're seeing intensification of bison hunting, you know, it's not. And as I mentioned, there's one site that showed other animals being produced.
00:13:20
Speaker
Things have changed. It's mostly the climate,
Impact of Climate on Archaic Life
00:13:22
Speaker
right? So we're looking at the ultra-thermal climate. it's It's hot and dry. Remember, the paleo-ended period was cold. The grasslands are getting drier. So we do kind of see, at least in the archaeological record, populations, human populations being thinned out in the southwest, right? As things are getting hotter, it's becoming drier. We're seeing roasting pits probably in the southern parts of the plains because of as an impact of this.
00:13:47
Speaker
which also impacts the bison, right? So bison also need grasses to to sustain themselves on. But overall, the lithics are changing, the climate's changing, but such especially in the western part of the plains. There's very little difference in the activities between paleoindians and archaic folks. And this is this is really a theme in the Great Plains in general. Most of the change that we see in terms of human behavior happens in the eastern part of the plains.
00:14:18
Speaker
whereas the western part of the plains is is predominantly the place where you go hunt bison. and so those changes so when There's not much change to that through thousands of years. right People are habitually using the same areas for bison harvesting, using very similar methods, using these continuous changes like the the drive lanes, the kill sites, right? They use these over thousands of years because the western part of the plains is where you go to hunt bison, where you go to hunt harvest game. The eastern plains, which has much more dense vegetation, has a higher agricultural yield. That becomes important in the woodland period later. And and as next episode, as we get more into the middle archaic, when we start seeing changes that go beyond hunting and gathering.
00:15:06
Speaker
And so when it comes to early archaic, I'm like, I think I blew through like ah a lot of what I wanted to chat about. and And a lot of this, for me personally, the archaic period, and this is what I tell my class, this is a part of Great Plains history that I am not super familiar with. It is out of my training and out of my education, both personal and taken, um the archaic period is just not something that I'm super great at. so I very much rely on others, which is why I've mentioned Doug's book a couple of times because of this. and Heading on those same points, you know we can look at looking at seasonality of sites. If we go to Spring Creek in southwest Nebraska, um
00:15:50
Speaker
Here, we can see 22 animals, MNI, minimum number of individuals of 22 animals. We can see that this kill took place in late summer, early fall, based on the age and seasonality of the animals themselves. so like Especially if there are more juvenile animals present at a kill site based on how old they are and what period of growth they are in, we can determine seasonality that way. Through zoarchological analysis of these materials, we can say, oh, look, this part of a bone, the sutures are fused, and this only happens when
00:16:29
Speaker
This you know animal is eight months old, and we know these animals calf in the springtime. Therefore, we can use these lines of evidence to ah to estimate when ah when these animals were harvested.
00:16:45
Speaker
right And here at spring Spring Creek, not only do we see the kill site, but we see a secondary processing area with marrow extraction. But they're not bone crushing the bones to get to the marrow, which is something that you see at Casper and the Clary Ranch sites.
Human Innovation and Adaptation
00:17:01
Speaker
At the Hawkins site, we have three different kill events with a total of over 100 animals and they're all winter kills.
00:17:11
Speaker
And they were hunted in an arroyo. So they were driven into arroyo, and they were hunted using a corral method. And it's a bachelor herd, right? So remember when we talked about bison behaviors and in the first two episodes? This is just a bachelor herd, right? And the the bones have been broken into there to extract marrow, right? Bone marrow is an incredibly calorically rich part of an animal.
00:17:34
Speaker
head smashed in, right? This is an incredible site in Alberta, Canada. We can see bison being driven off of cliffs. We see the side notch points that are typical for archaic, the archaic, right? They're not the paleo Indian Lancelot points and we can see butchery tools.
00:17:50
Speaker
So we can, we can just see differences in how, how bison, we can see when people are hunting and where people are being hunted at. And so I wanted to get into sites and I kind of blew through some of the, some of the cool stuff already, but as the environment is getting warmer, people and animals are adapting or adapting to this, you know, basically being in the Holocene no longer in the Pleistocene. And so this, when we're starting to see these changes, once again,
00:18:20
Speaker
still no agriculture. When I get to agriculture, we'll I'll be stuck there for for a while because your boy likes some corn and for a lot of different reasons. and We can really see, you know this is a prime example of adaptations to climate change in the archaeological record. There's other instances like some of the medieval global warming period, we can see There's some radical shifts to human behavior because of this. But that transition from late paleoindian to early archaic is an incredible case study in how innovative indigenous people are. Right. Like this, you have to put your yourself in these folks shoes. All of a sudden these.
00:19:03
Speaker
animals like the the hairy elephants, mammoths and mastodons are no longer on the landscape. These large animals that were hunted no longer exist. The wet and cold environment is disappearing. The grasslands are expanding. The forests are shrinking.
00:19:22
Speaker
you know, people have to adapt and change. And we see not only people change, transform their behaviors and across the entirety of the planes, but they do so to their advantage. And really this like these drive lanes in the Rocky Mountains at the Rocky Mountain Front Range, the use of arroyos as corrals to hunt bison in the eastern part of the plains, right, are really showing these very innovative methods for increasing the amount of calories. Well, you know, basically increasing the amount of meat that you're able to harvest and changes in the point types, right?
00:20:02
Speaker
Why are points going from these large landslide points that, you know, the first couple of Clovis, Folsom, Folsom in particular is fluted to the points are getting smaller. They're no longer as
00:20:17
Speaker
intensively produced and they're side notched. You know, part of that is games getting smaller. Maybe you just don't need these massive points in order to get kill shots on these large animals that no longer exist, right? The the animals are adapting themselves to a warmer environments through the process of natural selection and evolution. And you don't need to make as sophisticated points and therefore like the the amount of usable tools And the number of tools you're able to get out of a resource, similar, I feel like the same cobble, you know, smaller points, smaller tools equals more of them from the same raw material that you'd use to make a smaller number of landslide points.
00:20:58
Speaker
I hope um I don't sound absolutely crazy.
Prelude to Complex Cultural Developments
00:21:00
Speaker
and But it's really this this investment that I keep hitting on on and um and repeating myself over of place. And this is setting the stage for moving beyond time and energy for the procurement of food, but then for more human culture that satiates different needs that go beyond caloric return rates.
00:21:27
Speaker
And that's what we're going to talk about next episode or some of these sites we're seeing. The landscape being modified for use that can lead up to a lot more interpretations. And why does it exist? Because if we think of animals or humans as animals that exist to maintain calories until they're able to reproduce and be successfully reproducing organisms to have viable offspring,
00:21:55
Speaker
what does that look like? And that's where we start seeing in the middle archaic or these different structures being created, different investment of of space use that speaks more to identity, that speaks more to ritual, to an afterlife. You don't get that unless you have what we start seeing in the early archaic, which is people are starting to be more bounded by space. They have a routine, they have a landscape, they have their boundaries.
00:22:23
Speaker
so That's what's setting the stage. This is what the early archaic is for. The environment's changing. People are getting their their paths. They have their rounds, which then leads to some of
Conclusion and Future Topics
00:22:35
Speaker
these next bigger steps. right so That's why the early archaic is is important. We're seeing changes in typologies. We're seeing changes in in climate.
00:22:42
Speaker
and people reacting to it differently and harvesting bison differently based on where they are in the plains, which is also you know what's available in these environments. so This is a shorter episode than normal. I apologize. We need to get this episode out a little bit quicker ah just because I hope um you know this episode comes out on Thanksgiving. Happy, happy holiday to everyone that celebrates this in some way, shape, or form, whether it's the Holiday Thanksgiving themselves or if your family does something very different. I hope you guys are enjoying the break regardless. um I really hope you're able to tune into Sunday's live stream and you got to see me with a live show with the Life in Ruins, boys, in Life in Ruins lands. So I really appreciate those that are supporting this show that and also supported a Life in Ruins.
00:23:25
Speaker
So we're going to end this episode a little bit earlier today. We're going to hit on the middle archaic next next episode, and we're going to start talking really intensely about a couple of sites where some really cool stuff is happening. So thank you all so much for listening today. I look forward to being with you guys next time we talk about the middle archaic. I hope you guys are having a happy holiday. See you next time.
00:23:47
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the Great Plains archaeology podcast. You can follow me on Instagram at Pawnee underscore archaeologist. And you can also email me at Great Plains Ark podcast at gmail dot.com. And remember, anybody can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie. American author Willa Cather.
00:24:13
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.