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5 Raw Material Availability and Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast I. Randolph Daniel, Jr. Since the 1970s, increased attention has been devoted to investigating Early Archaic settlement in the Southeast, the band-macroband model being the most comprehensive formulation to date (Anderson and Hanson 1988). In this model, Early Archaic settlement along the South Atlantic Slope is characterized as a drainage-based band adaptation featuring a settlement organization with seasonal residential shifts between the Piedmont and Coastal Plain. While the model is noteworthy for its balanced treatment of both environmental and social variables, it is the presumed availability of food resources that primarily accounts for the proposed settlement organization and drainage-based settlement range (267-79). Largely ignored as a significant factor influencing settlement, however, is the limited regional occurrence of high-quality knappable stone. The purpose of this paper is to present an alternative view, which suggests that the limited occurrence of preferred tool stone played a significant role in Early Archaic adaptations. Two elements of the bandmacroband model-band range and settlement organization-are critically examined to demonstrate that the availability of stone raw materi-> als figured more prominently in EarlyArchaic settlement than previously considered. First, I explore the problem of identifying prehistoric settlement range using nonlocal stone frequencies in archaeological assemblages . In particular, I look at the significant presence of Allendale chert in South Carolina Early Archaic assemblages and explore what implications the use of this stone might have for documenting prehistoric settlement range. Next, I examine the effects of stone raw material availability on assemblage composition within the context of settlement organization . Again, stone tool assemblage data from South Carolina are used to examine the link between the level of tool curation and settlement organization . Taken together, the results of this examination indicate that the geologic occurrence of tool stone has been underestimated as an influential factor in Early Archaic adaptations. .. Raw Material Availability and Early Archaic Settlement 85 BAND RANGE AND RAW MATERIAL DISTRIBUTION Anderson and Hanson's (1988) attempts to document empirically the geographic extent of prehistoric settlement is one of the most significant contributions of their model. Using data collected from the Savannah River valley, they present two arguments in support of their assertion that Early Archaic settlement was largely isomorphic with the major watersheds of the SouthAtlantic Slope. Their first argument isbased upon a sample of Early Archaic points, which were predominantly made from chert and quartz and whose source areas have mutually exclusive natural occurrences in the Coastal Plain and Piedmont, respectively. Frequency distributions of these raw materials reveal a clinal decrease in their presence along the Savannah River valley as a function of distance from their respective sources. This pattern of "a gradual, rather than a dramatic or step-like falloff in the occurrence of lithic raw materials" is interpreted as evidence of "minimal social boundaries," implying direct access to stone sources via group mobility (280). Secondly, Anderson and Hanson state that "extralocal [chert] raw material use appears greatest along rather than across drainages, suggesting that most group activities (except for possibly seasonal or annual aggregation events) occurred within individual drainages"(280).Although no similar graphs for drainages adjacent to the Savannah River are presented to support this statement, they do cite an earlier study (Anderson and Schuldenrein 1983:201) comparing projectile point raw materials from portions of the Santee River with those from the Savannah River. As implied in the above statement, and noted elsewhere in their discussion (Anderson and Hanson 1988:280), the relatively smaller flow of raw materials between drainages is largely accounted for by indirect acquisition such as exchange during periods of macroband aggregation. Anderson and Hanson's argument notwithstanding, there exists no reason why the presence of lesser chert frequencies across drainages must be the result of exchange. This would be the case, for example, if, after visiting the chert sources and moving along a portion of the Savannah River, a group incorporated some cross-drainage movement in its settlement round. In this case, chert frequencies would reflect the temporal rather than the spatial distance of stone transport. The crux of the matter, as I see it, is the thorny problem of identifying the archaeological signatures of direct acquisition (i.e., stone acquired at its geological source by a group and carried by that group from source to site) versus indirect acquisition (i.e., stone acquired at its geological source by one group and then exchanged to another group). These distinctions follow Meltzer (1989...

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