In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

191 see also Crock and Robinson, this volume). Nevertheless, although a few important synthetic treatments have appeared (e.g., Curran 1999; Gramly and Funk 1990; Meltzer 1988; Petersen 2004; Spiess et al. 1998), a new suite of environmental research (e.g., Newby et al. 2005), refined and ongoing lithic identification research (e.g., Burke 2002, 2006a, 2006b; Pollock 1987; Pollock et al. 1999; Pollock et al. 2008; Robinson et al. 2009), and better chronometric correlations, among other avenues, provide new opportunities for addressing older but still salient questions as well as enabling synthesis in potentially important ways. It is my intention to address several of these issues here, focusing on the eastern side of the Champlain Basin. This chapter begins with a brief summary of my recent reanalysis of the Reagen site (more detailed treatments are presented in Robinson [2008, 2009, 2011]). After this summary I examine the Champlain Sea and its potential importance to Paleoindian groups. The chapter concludes with a brief look at ethnographically documented subarctic and boreal forest Native groups in order to explore analogies with which to assess the movements, subsistence strategies, and lifeways of Native American groups over the course of the Paleoindian period. R esearchers have made many notable gains in understanding northeastern Paleoindian lifeways over roughly the past quarter century, or since the publication of the last compilation volumes dealing largely or specifically with northeastern Paleoindians (Eastern States Archeological Federation 1984; Ellis and Lothrop 1989; see also Newman and Salwen 1977). Many of these gains have come in the form of increasingly refined culture-historical frameworks (Spiess et al. 1998:220–222), the most elegant of which was recently explicated by Bradley et al. (2008). Indeed, even as late as the mid-1980s many still doubted the existence of a distinct Late Paleoindian period in the Northeast (Doyle et al. 1985; Petersen et al. 2000) east of the Great Lakes region, and theories asserting an interregnum in the human occupations of the Northeast after the Paleoindian period still had some currency, though they began to be refuted widely around that time (Doyle et al. 1985; Petersen and Putnam 1992; Robinson and Petersen 1992). The documentation and reporting of sites have also increased fairly rapidly, as have reanalyses of older sites, including reanalyses conducted by me and my colleagues (e.g., Robinson 2008, 2009; Robinson and Crock 2008; Francis W. Robinson IV chapter x Between the Mountains and the Sea An Exploration of the Champlain Sea and Paleoindian Land Use in the Champlain Basin 192 Francis W. Robinson IV recognized that Reagen actually appeared to be a multicomponent site, and they tentatively attributed some of the artifacts to then-poorly understood Late Paleoindian period manifestations (Funk 1976, 1978, 1996). Unfortunately, by that time the Reagen site assemblage was scattered among several institutions and private collections and was largely unavailable for direct study. Ritchie (1953, 1957, 1965) had also proposed that the Reagen site and the Champlain Sea were coeval and could be directly correlated. After several less than successful quanti fications of the available data, however, he eventually appears to have abandoned the effort. Thus, the potential of a direct connection between Reagen and the Champlain Sea was yet one more aspect of the site that was left enigmatic. Following on from the work begun by the late James Petersen of the University of Vermont, I conducted a complete reanalysis of the extant Reagen assemblage as well as a recontextualization of the site in light of the plethora of environmental and archaeological data that has emerged since Ritchie’s time. Using identifiable diagnostic artifacts, I was able to place the Reagen site into a broad but demonstrable northeastern Paleoindian synchronic and diachronic framework, in most instances closely following the work of Bradley et al. (2008). These diagnostic artifacts indicate that people attributable to three (and, more tentative, four) recognized subperiods of the broader Paleoindian period visited the Reagen site (Robinson 2008, 2009). These occupations cumulatively spanned approximately 1,700 calendar years, clustering toward the end of the taxonomic sequence defined by Bradley et al. (2008) at the end of the Pleistocene epoch and the beginning of the Holocene epoch. Archival, petrographic, and other research suggests that the Reagen site or a location very near the Reagen site was a quarry source for the enigmatic “Reagen chert” so prominently represented in the Reagen assemblage (Robinson 2008). The research into this important aspect of the Reagen site is ongoing...

Share