Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Lower Ohio River Valley

3. Hunter-Gatherer Archaeological Research in the Lower Ohio Valley

3 / Hunter-Gatherer Archaeological Research in the Lower Ohio Valley The Archaic Concept Recognition and study of Lower Ohio Valley hunter-gatherer societies has been closely linked to the development of the Archaic Concept (Ritchie 1932). Although earlier Paleoindian groups were present, until very recently little was known about their way of life. Therefore, this chapter focuses on that portion of the Lower Ohio Valley’s archaeological record associated with Archaic period hunter-gatherers. As early as 1917, archaeologists working in the Lower Ohio Valley recognized that the region had once been inhabited by groups of people that did not make pottery or practice agriculture, and that lived there prior to the betterknown agriculturally based groups that were commonly referred to as Mound Builders (Nelson 1917:68–69). Nevertheless, there was no widely accepted name for them or their way of life. This all began to change in 1932 with the publication of William Ritchie’s (1932) report on the results of his archaeological investigations at the Lamoka Lake site in New York State. For the first time, Ritchie used the term Archaic when referring to the way of life he documented at Lamoka Lake—one based on hunting and gathering and lacking agriculture and pottery. A short time later, Ritchie (1936) proposed the Archaic as the third pattern in the recently devised Midwestern Taxonomic System. Initially, James B. Griffin rejected Ritchie’s proposal, but eventually he relented because many archaeologists were already using the term when referring to the aceramic cul- Hunter-Gatherer Archaeological Research / 35 tures in eastern North America (Griffin 1952a; Stoltman 1978:708). In the late 1930s, William Webb and David DeJarnette (1942) applied the term Archaic to sites and artifacts associated with preceramic hunter-gatherers in Kentucky and northern Alabama, expanding its use to most of the Eastern Woodlands (Stoltman 1993:4). By the early 1940s, James A. Ford and Gordon R. Willey (1941:332) were referring to the earliest known cultures in eastern North America as Archaic. They regarded these early societies as lacking pottery and agriculture, and as producing an artifact inventory that was inferior to those of later cultures. Archaeological sites assigned to their Archaic category included one of the now famous Green River shell middens known as Chiggerville (150h1) (Figure 3.1). Diagnostic Archaic artifacts included full-grooved axes, bannerstones or atlatl weights, expanded base chert drills, leaf-shaped and stemless flaked stone knives, and expanded-head engraved bone pins. Ford and Willey (1941:332– 333) maintained that while the eastern United States was thinly populated by small groups of Archaic hunter-gatherers, sites like Chiggerville represented places where conditions permitted them to aggregate. The temporal and cultural parameters of the Archaic continued to be topics of discussion for much of the twentieth century (Caldwell 1958; Griffin 1946, 1952a, 1967; Stoltman 1978, 1993; Willey 1966; Willey and Phillips 1958). Archaeologists had initially used Archaic to label eastern North American hunter-gatherer societies (Webb and DeJarnette 1942:319), but as regional archaeologists gradually refined their culture chronologies, they redefined the Archaic as a period. Perhaps the “coming of age” for the Archaic was its being included as one of five pan-eastern periods in Griffin’s (1952a) “Green Bible.” At the same time, archaeologists continued to use it to designate a cultural stage (Stoltman 1978:708). In 1966, Willey (1966:247) included the Archaic as one of his four cultural traditions of the Eastern Woodlands. According to Willey, the Archaic tradition, which followed the Big-Game Hunting tradition, evolved locally in the early post-Pleistocene. It was characterized by a hunting-fishing-plantcollecting economy, large and broad-bladed dart points, and ground- and polished-stone tools and ornaments. Despite all the confusion about how they used the term, eastern North American archaeologists quickly adopted it and continue to use it today (see Emerson et al. 2009). The advent of radiocarbon dating in the late 1940s, combined with the excavation of deeply stratified sites (Broyles 1971; Coe 1964; Fowler 1959), helped archaeologists to refine their estimates for the length of the Archaic pe- OHIO BUTLER MUHLENBERG McLEAN G r e e n R i ver 0 10 20 Km 0 100 200 kilometers 1 2 3 4 7 8 5 6 9 10 11 12 15 13 14 18 16 17 1 Kirkland 2 Hollis 3 Barrett 4 Wilson-Seymour 5 Butterfield 6 Jimtown Hill 7 Ward 8 Reynerson 9 Smith...