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182 BULL BROOK AND PALEOINDIAN BACKGROUND The Bull Brook site is both the largest Paleoindian occupation site in North America and the most highly structured in terms of the number and spatial organization of discrete artifact clusters or activity loci. Excavated by a group of dedicated avocational archaeologists and reported in the 1950s (Byers 1954; Eldridge and Vaccaro 1952; Jordan 1960), the site has long been one of the premier candidates for a large Paleoindian aggregation (Curran 1999:6; Dincauze 1993; Grimes 1979; Spiess et al. 1998). Recent reanalysis supports the interpretation that the thirty-six activity loci arranged in a large circle represent a single organizational event (Robinson et al. 2009). New evidence indicates concentrically organized activities, with an inner circle of six to eight loci dominated by biface production, drills, and flakeshavers (limaces) and an outer ring of loci dominated by endscrapers and gravers among other processing tools. The circular camp and concentric patterning “emphasize the cohesiveness of the group camping together” (Whitelaw 1991:165) and the coherence of group activities. Large-scale organization provides an interpretative platform for a variety of inquiries, including the much-debated subsistence L arge Paleoindian sites in the Northeast have often been interpreted as camps associated with communal caribou drives (Ellis and Deller 2000:243; Gramly 1982; MacDonald 1968:147; Spiess 1979, 1984:282). Large sites in wooded areas, south of the tundra, raised questions about the appropriateness of the caribou-drive model for the woodland variety of caribou (Curran 1984:6; Dincauze 1993:48; Dincauze and Curran 1983; Dincauze and Jacobson 2001:122; Levine 1997). Greater emphasis on microenvironmental conditions could support both increased abundance of caribou (Newby et al. 2005; Spiess et al. 1998) and broader-based resource exploitation (Curran 1984:6; Curran and Grimes 1989:59), emphasizing potential variability associated with local environments. Here I develop a microenvironmental model for the Bull Brook Paleoindian site in Ipswich, Massachusetts, suggesting that a briefly exposed maritime island (now a submerged fishing bank called Jeffreys Ledge) may have supported an unusually large and predictable caribou migration (Pelletier and Robinson 2005; Robinson et al. 2009). Could a longvanished “Caribou Island” help to explain Bull Brook? Brian S. Robinson chapter ix The Bull Brook Paleoindian Site and Jeffreys Ledge A Gathering Place near Caribou Island? Bull Brook Paleoindian Site and Jeffreys Ledge 183 ern Paleoindian studies at the Debert site in Nova Scotia (figure 9.1), with caribou adaptation inferred near glacial ice (MacDonald 1968:147). Caribou foot bones were later identified among calcined bone recovered at Bull Brook, the Whipple site in New Hampshire (Curran 1984), and at Udora in Ontario (Spiess et al. 1985; Storck and Spiess 1994). Beaver (Castor canadensis) was also identified at Bull Brook (Spiess et al. 1998), and hare (Lepus sp.) and arctic fox (Alopex lagopus) at Udora (Storck and Spiess 1994:128). Mammoth and mastodon bones have been recovered on the sea floor just south of Cape Ann in the Gulf of Maine (Oldale et al. 1987) but are probably too early for the human occupation of Bull Brook. In the Great Lakes region “a restriction of larger sites over time to more northerly areas of southern Ontario, and specifically on the Algonquin strandline,” is consistent with communal hunting practices at some large sites, whereas smaller sites may represent more individualistic hunting practices (Ellis and Deller 1997:17). The importance to caribou of glacial ice patches during the summer provides further attraction to the north and clues to seasonality for upland or high-latitude regions (Hare et al. 2004:261; Pelletier and Robinson 2005). In the Northeast, the Debert site (MacDonald 1968), the Vail site in northern Maine (with its associated kill site, Gramly 1982, 1984), and the Jefferson sites in northern New Hampshire (Boisvert 1999) are among northern and upland sites that are close to tundra or alpine microenvironments (Borns et al. 2004; Davis and Jacobson 1985; Newby et al. 2005; Stea et al. 1998). The Bull Brook site on the coast and the DEDIC/Sugarloaf site on the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts (Chilton et al. 2005; Gramly 1998) are more clearly situated within lowland forested areas and thus may serve as stronger tests for the suitability of wooded environments for communal caribou hunting, or alternative subsistence practices. For both of these locations the presence of caribou is demonstrated by calcined faunal remains, directly associated with Bull Brook and at the Whipple site, 50 km northeast of...

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