While always retaining an essential "Indianness," Native American cultures adapted over many centuries to regional extremes of temperature and climate, to the mountains, the deserts, the woodlands, and the prairies of the North American continent. Native Americans would eventually occupy one-quarter of the world's habitable surface, spreading to every terrestrial habitat in the Americas. As time passed, the increasingly varied Indian cultures would presage the extraordinary diversity that was to become America. Archaeologists use the term Archaic to refer to the nonagricultural human adaptations that once flourished across large parts of native North America. Although the Archaic adaptations spanned ten thousand years and an entire continent, certain key characteristics tie them all together.
The term Archaic was initially employed by archaeologists during the 1930s to designate a preceramic, preagricultural culture discovered in New York State. The absence of pottery was considered the hallmark of this cultural period. Over the years, as archaeologists expanded their excavations, they came to realize that similar "Archaic" materials could be found throughout North America. Today, Archaic has taken on two rather different meanings.
In eastern North America, Archaic defines a specific period of time between the earlier Paleo-Indian cultures and the later Woodland cultures (generally distinguished by ceramics, mound building, and agriculture). But through much of western North America, where the subsequent Woodland adaptations did not develop, Archaic refers to a more generalized, nonagricultural way of life. In ancient California, the Northwest Coast, and the intermountain West, such lifeways lasted perhaps ten thousand years—well into the period of initial European contact—and never represented a reliance on agriculture in any meaningful way.
There is every reason to believe that Indians of the Archaic period descended directly from Paleo-Indian ancestors. But the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna and the spread of the modern deciduous forest produced such significant environmental changes that Archaic people were required to adopt lifestyles rather different from those of their Paleo-Indian predecessors.
As Archaic people spread, they learned to live off the land, and they prospered. Some Archaic groups, particularly those living in high latitudes, depended heavily on hunting for their livelihood. Others, such as the Northwest Coast groups, became experts at fishing. Some, like the Native Americans in the eastern woodlands, would eventually discard their Archaic lifeway in favor of farming. Each tradition of the Archaic is adapted to its particular corner of America.
As the post-Pleistocene climate turned warmer and the vast desert lakes began to dry out in the American West, people of the Desert Archaic tradition began using the emergent marshes to their advantage, collecting bulrushes, cattails, and insect larvae, and fishing the rivers during rich spawning runs.
Other Desert Archaic people quit the disappearing lakes altogether, moving into upland mountain valleys. Here they hunted bighorn sheep and collected plants in the ever-changing post-Ice Age landscape. These Archaic uplanders survived by pursuing a scheduled seasonal round, commonly moving several times each year.
Survival in these harsh desert conditions required an extraordinary degree of cooperation. The Desert Archaic lifeway must have revolved around the nuclear family, the basic and irreducible unit of survival, which was characterized by a simple division of labor according to gender.
Unlike their Paleo-Indian forebears, who tended to focus most subsistence efforts on a few select species, Archaic people in California exploited an immense array of environments. This broad-based lifestyle served them well because no single resource held the key to their survival. The resulting lifeway survived for millennia, shifting with changing conditions but always maintaining the balance between people and the land.
Californians found plentiful sources of protein-rich seeds in the chaparral, where they also hunted deer and smaller mammals. Along the Pacific coastline they harvested countless species of fish, shellfish, seals, and even whales that periodically became beached. The mountains provided deer, bear, and elk, plus the plant foods that became available by midsummer. The major rivers served up huge quantities of spawning salmon, trout, and eel.
Archaic Californians managed their homeland with a gentle hand. Lightning fires have always been a threat to the indispensable acorn harvest, and Archaic people clearly understood the principles of fire ecology. They knew that the chaparral became ecologically unstable when it was overly mature. When fire finally did erupt, it could be catastrophic. They took preventive action by deliberately setting brushfires to burn off older growth, litter, and seedlings. Periodic torching of the underbrush eliminated the danger of the destructive crown fires that all too often darken today's California summer sky.
Californian Archaic people also understood that a managed burn of chaparral vegetation promoted new growth. Tender new sprouts appeared within a month of a spring burn, providing attractive browse for deer; fall burning was certain to provide springtime fare for the Indian people. Judicious burning also increased the available grazing lands for deer, elk, and antelope and facilitated the gathering of acorns, which ripened after the burning took place. Fires were sometimes deliberately set in oak groves to clear the ground for easier acorn gathering, to decrease the effects of pests such as the acorn weevil, and to kill other kinds of tree seedlings that could eventually crowd out the valuable oaks.
On the Great Plains—a flat land of cold winters and hot summers, of sparse and unpredictable precipitation—the Paleo-Indian ancestors had hunted mammoths and other now-extinct Ice Age game. Then at the end of the Pleistocene the primeval northern conifer forest was gradually replaced by deciduous woodland. Sometime between 8000 and 6000 b.c. these woodlands were in turn replaced by a postglacial vegetation cover of perennial grasses. Threes occur today only in stream valleys, scarp lands, and hilly localities.
Plains Archaic people prospered here for hundreds of generations by following their natural cycle of hunting game of all kinds and gathering seeds, tubers, nuts, and berries. While the Plains Archaic lifeway emphasized variety and broad-based subsistence, bison hunting was always critical for survival.
Long before European horses came to the Great Plains, Archaic hunters developed highly successful ways of harvesting buffalo. Although they sometimes hunted these huge beasts individually, they learned the hard way that driving a stone-tipped arrow or spear through the tough buffalo hide was no easy task. Many arrows were lost before one struck home. This is why the Plains Archaic hunters developed the art of "buffalo jumping," a cleverly successful way to take large numbers of buffalo without the dangers and uncertainties of individual stalking. Buffalo jumps employ a highly sophisticated hunting technique, and archaeologists are only beginning to understand their complexity.
Perhaps the most spectacular expression of the eastern Archaic lifeway can be seen at Poverty Point, an archaeological site in Louisiana constructed between about 1800 and 500 b.c. Poverty Point is best known for the striking earthworks still visible there: one large mound and three smaller ones, interrelated to six concentric low ridges arranged in the shape of a partial octagon. The largest mound looks like a bird with wings outspread; it measures 710 by 640 feet and stands 70 feet high. Although the smaller, conical mounds superficially resemble the burial mounds of the subsequent Woodland cultures, no human burials have been found in the Poverty Point mounds.
Millions of cubic feet of earth were required to construct the six concentric ridges, the outermost having an exterior diameter of two-thirds of a mile. So extensive are these earthworks that, when they were first reported in 1873, investigators thought they were natural levee formations. Only when archaeologists took to the air, in the 1950s, was it discovered that these embankments were man-made artificial ridges. Some of the embankments had houses built on top of them, while others seem to have served only to connect the mounds or perhaps to mark alignments of some sort.
The artifacts from Poverty Point not only demonstrate a high degree of craftsmanship, but also establish a pattern of long-distance trade: copper from the Great Lakes, lead ore (galena) from Missouri, soapstone (steatite) from Alabama and Georgia, and various tool stones (used for dart points and knives) from Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio.
Poverty Point has long posed a problem for American archaeologists. In the traditional view, Native Americans during this time period are believed to have been nomadic hunters and gatherers, living in small bands or rudimentary tribes. Such "unsophisticated" people were thought to have been incapable of joining together for large-scale community projects such as the huge earthworks at Poverty Point. According to this conventional wisdom, such monumental construction efforts would be possible only after relatively large human populations had started living in permanent villages, which would in turn have been supported by a food-producing, fully agricultural economic base. Because Poverty Point appears to satisfy neither condition, it has become "enigmatic."
Many archaeologists now question this view. Some think that the distinctive Poverty Point lifeway might have arisen without any agricultural base. Others think that the Poverty Point people did farm, but that they farmed in a different manner from most American Indian groups. Instead of producing maize (an import from Mexico), perhaps the fields supporting Poverty Point contained plants native to the Southeast, like sunflowers, sumpweed (marsh elder), and goosefoot. Some evidence also suggests that Poverty Point groups might have cultivated small garden plots of bottle gourd and squash, both for use as containers and for their edible seeds.
Poverty Point was until recently viewed as a cultural isolate. But today more than one hundred Poverty Point sites are known in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi; so-called Poverty Point influences can be traced as far as Florida, Tennessee, and Missouri. Clearly the Poverty Point phenomenon existed over a huge region, encompassing many people and multiple sites. Granted, the Poverty Point site itself remains unusual, but it is no longer the archaeological mystery it was three decades ago.
Poverty Point people were by no means homogeneous; rather, they were divided into a number of politically, socially, ethnically, and linguistically distinct groups, sharing a set of distinctive artifacts: Poverty Point objects, clay figurines, micro-flints, plummets, and extraordinarily well crafted stone beads and pendants. These objects' common denominators include a preponderance of exotic materials and, especially in the case of ornaments and other emblems of status, of ground and polished stone.
Poverty Point was eventually abandoned, and a thousand years would pass before eastern North America again saw such elaborate ceremonial spaces. But Poverty Point remains important because it shows the degree to which Native American creativity of later periods was anchored in the long-standing lifeway of the Archaic people, from the desert foragers of the West to the forest dwellers of the Southeast, from the acorn harvesters of California to the buffalo hunters of the Great Plains, from the whale hunters of the Olympic Peninsula to the precocious mound builders at Poverty Point.
Some would dismiss these Archaic people as simply "primitive," irrelevant to modern concerns because they did not become farmers and live in cities. Today, some think that to be "primitive" is to be backward, shabby, ailing, and famished.
Western civilization has constructed its own past, a perception of history based on platitudes projected backward in time. Nineteenth-century scholars wrote of the three major stages of human culture: a progression from "savagery" to "barbarism" and finally to "civilization." Later social historians characterized the technological innovations of the past as somehow "rescuing" human beings from the "pressures" of simpler lifestyles and "permitting" new, more progressive customs to unfold. This view assumes that people must always attempt to get ahead, to wrest an edge. It assumes that people must invent agriculture as a natural culmination of human evolution. But does this "civilized" lifestyle necessarily bring with it improvements in health and well-being? Does this really imply "progress"?
The Native American Archaic past tells us that the answer is no. Today's shortsighted view of "progress" ignores the fact that specialization can itself be destabilizing. How many people realize that farmers often must work much harder than hunters, gatherers, and fishing people? Typical preindustrial farmers spent four to six days per week working the fields. The California foragers may have needed to work only two days a week to feed their families. Farming people usually require that their children help out in the fields. Children in foraging societies have not typically been part of the labor force.
Native people of California achieved the highest aboriginal population density in North America without an agricultural base. The nonagricultural people of the Great Plains crafted ecologically viable alliances capable of weathering the long-term storm. Desert Archaic people maintained a virtually unchanged adaptation to the harshest of environments for ten thousand years.
We have much to learn from nonagricultural foraging people. These nonspecialized economies have a demonstrated longevity and a degree of long-term cultural stability and survival unknown in today's world.
See also
Mound Builders;
Paleo-Indians;
Woodland Phase Indians.
George C. Frison, Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains 2d ed. (San Diego: Academic Press, 1991); Ruth Kirk and Richard D. Daughterty, Hunters of the Whale: An Adventure in Northwest Coast Archaeology (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1974); David Hurst Thomas, Exploring Ancient Native America: An Archaeological Guide "Spreading across America," (New York: Macmillan, 1994).
David Hurst Thomas
American Museum of Natural History
