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203 ConCLusion long-term Pattern in the Past The search for cross-cultural patterns in human organization is a central and distinguished aim of an anthropological approach to social theory. —Severin Fowles, “From Social Type to Social Process: Placing ‘Tribe’ in a Historical Framework” in this final chapter I summarize the long-term historical trajectories identified in chapters 2 through 8. I then place these long-term historical trajectories in the context of the history of human societies throughout the world and argue that the identification of historical trajectories like these should be of interest to all of us. The chapter is intentionally brief, for I am attempting to make, but not belabor, three points beyond the content of earlier chapters. First, the identification of long-term pattern in lifeways provides a narrative that makes the prehistory of a state like Minnesota easier to understand . Besides giving a narrative framework to readers, this emphasis is of primary importance in archaeological research today, because the details of lifeways at various scales can be more informatively filled in once this background is better understood. Second, the pattern of lifeway change in any region of the world is more fully illuminated by seeing that pattern within the context of pattern in human lifeways in world history. Third, if present-day crises such as poverty and environmental degradation are not unanticipated but rather predictable outcomes of the unfolding of trends in human lifeways through time, then the study of long-term trends in the history of human societies becomes a more urgent concern than it is today. LonG-teRM PAtteRn in PReHistoRiC MinnesotA LiFeWAys: A suMMARy In chapters 2 through 8 I identify two major kinds of pattern in Minnesota prehistory: pattern in the environment, and pattern in change in lifeways through time. Before I began writing this book, I was unaware of the presence of either pattern, though I had been actively engaged in Minnesota archaeology for thirty years. This section provides a brief summary of these two patterns, beginning with pattern in the environment. For at least the past 5,000 years, Minnesota has been bordered by two latitudinal 204 conclusion transitions in biotic community that are a result of a gradual reduction in solar radiation as one moves northward on the globe. The lower boundary (at about 42.6° latitude in northern Iowa) once separated terrestrial plant harvesters in warmer, moister, more southern environments from terrestrial game hunters in Minnesota, who in turn were separated in the north (at about 49.5° latitude in northwestern Ontario) from huntergatherers in boreal forests poor in terrestrial game animals. Within the boundaries of these two latitudinal transitions are Minnesota’s “10,000” lakes (a heritage of the Wisconsin glaciation), three plant biomes that trisect the state (open deciduous forest, northern mixed-hardwood forest, and prairie parkland), and a cool temperate climate, with cold, snowy winters and warm, humid summers. Earlier, following the retreat of the last continental glacier, the region experienced extreme climatic and vegetational dislocations, including an eastward expansion of prairie parkland. The pattern in lifeway development, described below, was in large part an adaptation to pattern in this environment and its change through time. In chapters 2 through 8, Lewis Binford’s “frames of reference” approach was used to interpret Minnesota’s precontact archaeological record. The result was the identification of nine types of human adaptation that I arranged in a four-phase sequence. The nine types and their place in the sequence are: (1) Pioneer Foragers; (2) Coniferous Forest Game Hunters, Deciduous Forest Game Hunters, and Early Pedestrian Bison Hunters; (3) Proto-Wild Rice Harvesters, Proto-Horticulturalists, and Late Pedestrian Bison Hunters; and (4) Horticulturalists and Intensive Wild Rice Harvesters. The sequence evolved from the presence of free-wandering family bands who moved from one food patch to another in pursuit of large- and medium-sized terrestrial game animals in Phase 1, to the presence of family hunting bands that now lived within socially circumscribed food resource territories in which demographic packing was not yet a problem in Phase 2, to the presence of still mobile family hunting bands experiencing resource intensification pressures in smaller demographically packed territories in Phase 3, to the sudden emergence of more settled, larger tribal-level societies dependent on either maize horticulture or intensive wild rice harvesting in Phase 4. As reconstructed in this book, the pioneer foraging phase lasted 700 years, the phase of circumscribed but wide-ranging foraging 7,500 years, the phase of...

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