Hardaway Revisited: Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast

1. Introduction

1 Introduction During the summer of 1948, test pits placed in two sites along the Yadkin River demonstrated for the ¤rst time that strati¤ed alluvial sites of some antiquity existed in the Carolina Piedmont (Coe 1964:8–9). There, at the Lowder’s Ferry and Doerschuk sites, Joffre Coe began to make temporal sense of a “hodgepodge of projectile point types” previously known in the Piedmont from surface collections and shallow plow-zone deposits. The stratigraphy at these sites allowed Coe to distinguish a sequence of Archaic complexes that was virtually unknown elsewhere in the Southeast . Although both sites were deeply strati¤ed, the earliest identi¤ed component was associated with the Middle Archaic period, which we know today dates to less than 8,000 years ago. At yet another site, also ¤rst tested during the same summer, a relatively undisturbed Early Archaic sequence was found. This was the Hardaway site, located just upstream from Doerschuk and Lowder’s Ferry, which, somewhat paradoxically, was neither as deeply strati¤ed nor located in the ®oodplain of the Yadkin (¤gure 1.1). Rather, it was on a hilltop high above the river. Nevertheless, the early sequence at Hardaway was eventually linked to Doerschuk and Lowder’s Ferry, so that the Archaic sequence of the Carolina Piedmont was completely de¤ned (Coe 1964:¤gure 117). This sequence was eventually adopted over much of the Southeast. In recent years increased attention has been focused on the identi¤cation of Early Archaic site function and settlement patterns in the Southeast . And yet the exact function of the Hardaway site, which has signi-¤cant implications for any settlement model in the region, has not ¤gured prominently in any such research. The data necessary to investigate this problem have been available for some years in an extant but unanalyzed collection of material from Hardaway curated by the Research Laboratories of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This collection forms the basis for a functional interpretation of the Hardaway site, set forth here. This study also includes a stone raw materials study with an extensive survey of projectile point collections. The raw materials study encompasses a quarry survey designed to identify petrologically the rhyolite sources so abundant around Hardaway and to assess the probability that any of these locations was the source of the rhyolite that is so plentiful in the assemblage itself. In addition, the presence of rhyolite and other raw materials is examined on more than 3,000 Figure 1.1. Site locations 2 Introduction Early Archaic points primarily distributed in private collections in North and South Carolina. The collections survey addresses the geographic range of Early Archaic adaptation in the Carolinas and, when combined with the site functional analysis, allows Hardaway to be viewed from a regional perspective. Both the site functional study and the collections survey have implications for current views of Early Archaic settlement in the Southeast . In particular, the results of these analyses suggest a much different view of Early Archaic adaptations than has previously been proposed. THE EARLY ARCHAIC PERIOD IN THE SOUTHEAST The Early Archaic period has traditionally been viewed as a time of cultural readaptation from Pleistocene to Holocene environments. By convention the start was set at 10,000 b.p. (e.g., Caldwell 1958; Cleland 1976; Dragoo 1976; Stoltman 1978). More recent palynological data, however, have indicated that climatic amelioration may have begun signi¤cantly earlier in the southeastern United States, where early Holocene climatic and vegetational conditions appeared as early as 12,500 b.p. (Delcourt and Delcourt 1985:19; Delcourt and Delcourt 1981:table 3). Similarly, rather than a marked change in cultural adaptions between the preceding PaleoIndian period and subsequent Early Archaic adaptations, some researchers are now stressing an “adaptive continuity” between Paleo-Indian and Early Archaic groups (Meltzer and Smith 1986). Consequently, the time range for the Early Archaic has been extended to as early as 10,500 b.p. and is believed to have continued until the onset of relatively modern biotic conditions at about 8,000 b.p. (e.g., Anderson and Hanson 1988, Anderson and Sassaman 1996; Goodyear 1982; Smith 1986; Steponaitis 1986). The Early Archaic in the Southeast is marked by a chronological sequence of distinctive point types. This sequence begins with the lanceolate Dalton forms (ca. 10,500–9,900 b.p.) and continues with the Hardaway Side-Notched and related points, such as Bolen and Taylor (ca. 10,000– 9,500 b.p...