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1 intRoDuCtion the tools of the trade Awidely shared image of an archaeologist is someone who digs sites and studies artifacts—and I do dig sites and study artifacts. However, that image is only half true, for we are equally and in many ways more importantly involved in reconstructing the social, economic, and political systems—the lifeways—of past peoples. Said another way, archaeologists work in two worlds: the present world with its surviving archaeological record, and the past world of the people whose remains form that record. As archaeologists, we adopt different methods when studying each of these two quite different worlds. Since confusion between these two sets of methods can cause confusion when building pictures of life in the past, I begin my review of Minnesota archaeology with a discussion of several key tools I use in each of these worlds in this book. tooLs FoR oRGAniZinG tHe ARCHAeoLoGiCAL ReCoRD Minnesota’s precontact archaeological record consists of the material remains of the many people who lived within the present boundaries of the state before European contact . Since that period spanned 13,000 years, the state’s precontact archaeological record is made up of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of artifacts (portable objects used, modified, or manufactured by human beings), features (nonportable evidence of past human activities, such as a house basin or garbage pit), animal and plants remains, and other items that are present in the ground, in private collections, and in the storage facilities of museums and universities. The arrowheads and pieces of pottery that farmers pick up in their fields and that collectors find eroding out of riverbanks are part of this record too. To make sense of these items, archaeologists need tools to group them together in meaningful space-time units for study. Each unit should coincide with the past community or group of interrelated communities that made the artifacts and features that archaeologists recover. That is 2 introduction the ideal. However, in archaeology, as in life, ideals are just that, ideals. As we will see, there are many reasons why it is more often than not difficult to associate a group of artifacts , even from the same field or riverbank, with a particular community in the past. Three approaches to grouping portions of the archaeological record together in space and time have been used by Minnesota archaeologists: a method proposed in the 1930s by W. C. McKern, an archaeologist who became director of the Milwaukee Public Museum; a system proposed in the 1950s by Harvard archaeologists Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips; and a system introduced in the 1970s by Leigh Syms, a Canadian archaeologist, for use in the Northeastern Plains and northern Lake Superior basin. Like many grouping systems in science, these approaches use nested categories based on evermore inclusive degrees of similarity of artifacts and other traits to organize the archaeological record. In biology, for example, life-forms are grouped together within a species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and on upward to a kingdom. Grouping systems in archaeology are constructed as well to show evermore inclusive relationships . Since all three approaches—McKern’s, Willey and Phillips’s, and Syms’s—have been used to classify Minnesota’s archaeological record, it is helpful to have a passing familiarity with each of them, for they are used as organizing devices in this book and in the articles, reports, and books included in the bibliography at the end of this book. McKern’s Midwestern Taxonomic Method groups archaeological traits (characteristics of the archaeological record, such as a type of pottery or the presence or absence of a type of grinding stone) by degree of formal similarity (that is, by how similar they look) into five evermore inclusive classes: foci, aspects, phases, patterns, and bases.1 The smallest unit is the focus, which is composed of a mostly recurring set of traits, such as a particular type of pottery, projectile point, house form, and economic pursuit, like wild rice harvesting. Increasingly higher-level classes—the aspect, phase, pattern, and base—contain ever fewer traits in common, but the traits are sufficiently distinctive to distinguish archaeological units on like levels from one another, just as groups of plants or animals can be distinguished as similar at the order, class, and phylum level in the classification of life-forms. The mix of traits defining each class is ultimately determined by an archaeologist’s subjective judgment of the degree of similarity between components—and differences in subjective judgments...

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