The Archaeology of Native North America

Dean Snow, Nancy Gonlin, Peter Siegel

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351588249
• Édition: 2
• Sujet: Sciences sociales
• Sous-sujet: Archéologie

The Archaeology of Native North America presents the ideas, evidence, and debates regarding the initial peopling of the continent by mobile bands of hunters and gatherers and the cultural evolution of their many lines of descent over the ensuing millennia. The emergence of farming, urban centers, and complex political organization paralleled similar developments in other world areas. With the arrival of Europeans to North America and the inevitable clashes of culture, colonizers and colonists were forever changed, which is also represented in the archaeological heritage of the continent. Unlike others, this book includes Mesoamerica and the Caribbean, thus addressing broad regional interactions and the circulation of people, things, and ideas.

This edition incorporates results of new archaeological research since the publication of the first edition a decade earlier. Fifty-four new box features highlight selected archaeological sites, which are publicly accessible gateways into the study of North American archaeology. The features were authored by specialists with direct knowledge of the sites and their broad importance. Glossaries are provided at the end of every chapter to clarify specialized terminology.

The book is directed to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students taking survey courses in American archaeology, as well as other advanced readers. It is extensively illustrated and includes citations to sources with their own robust bibliographies, leading diligent readers deeper into the professional literature. The Archaeology of Native North America is the ideal text for courses in North American archaeology.

1

Introduction

It was bitterly cold on the continent, snow fell heavily, and wooly mammoths roamed the landscape. Yet, a trickle of humans was able to successfully navigate this dangerous terrain over 14,500 years ago to reach what we now call the North American continent (Figure 1.1). They pushed southward from Beringia, the land bridge that connected Siberia on the Asian continent and Alaska. Biologically modern humans have roamed the earth for tens of thousands of years. Small groups expanded, slowly multiplied, and eventually spread to all corners of the American continents. Like people everywhere at the time, these earliest Americans were hunter-gatherers, but from that time forward their histories developed separately from the rest of humanity. Their descendants lived in almost complete isolation from the rest of the world until a mere five centuries ago, yet the trajectory of their independent cultural evolution in the Americas paralleled those of other peoples on other continents. This similarity should be reassuring to all of us, for it means that human potential is universally shared on this planet.

Figure 1.1A full-scale diorama at the New York State Museum depicts a band of hunter-gatherers as they might have looked 14,500 years ago. Courtesy of the New York State Museum

This book is about the archaeological past of the native peoples of North America (Figure 1.2). Archaeology is the scientific study of historic or prehistoric peoples by analysis of their material remains. Our goal is to provide a concise introduction to the generally accepted framework of the archaeology of native America. It has thus been important to restrict discussion to topics in which certainty is most strongly established and professional agreement is most abundant. This approach consequently emphasizes the findings of archaeological science as the foundation for further discussion. Partly because of advances in the natural and physical sciences, we are able to address with some certainty topics related to chronology, architecture, artifacts, human evolution, and human ecology. Advances and insights from cultural anthropology and other social sciences allow for observations approaching the same level of certainty, although frequently accompanied by rational alternatives. When they encounter multiple possibilities, archaeologists seek data and new methods to test alternative explanations for patterns identified in the archaeological record.

Figure 1.2The major modern nations of North America

Books on North American archaeology have traditionally covered the United States and Canada, extending southward into Mexico to roughly the Tropic of Cancer. Here, coverage also includes Greenland in the Far North and Mesoamerica and the Caribbean Islands to the south. The archaeology of North America cannot be fully understood in truncated form. Mesoamerica especially was a cornucopia, the fruits of which nourished the majority of people living in all of North America in 1492 and earlier. Including Mexico and the Caribbean allows coverage of regions that were origins of crops and other influences that profoundly affected the peoples of more northern regions of the continent. Their inclusion too allows examination of influential nation states and empires that would otherwise be excluded from consideration in the historical trajectory of most native North Americans.

The long preliterate history of the American Indians and its remarkable parallels with developments elsewhere in the world have seized the imaginations of many people over the years. But it takes more than imagination and anecdotes to explore this saga. It takes careful application of archaeological science and related natural and social sciences. In the following pages, we introduce the ways in which native North American cultures evolved and adapted to environmental changes and to shifting opportunities afforded by their own technological and social innovations. Further, we explore the ways in which archaeology reveals those ancient developments. Other topics build upon this foundation and serve as major subheadings in the chapters that follow:

• Environment and Adaptation
• Demography and Conflict
• Subsistence and Economy
• Architecture and Technology
• Culture, Language, and Identity
• Art and Symbolism
• Resilience and Collapse

This textbook offers a scientific perspective on the archaeology of North America by exploring the environment of this vast continent and how ancient peoples adapted to the wide variety of ecosystems. The changes in their populations (demography) left their mark on the landscape. The opportunities and challenges of exploiting the environment manifested themselves in the diversity of how people made a living and fed themselves and how they conducted economic transactions with others. There were numerous technological inventions, including innovative architecture, some of which has survived until today. Aspects of social organization and other cultural characteristics can be envisioned through material remains. For some peoples, language and identity persist into the modern world. The rich record of art and symbolism permeates the artifacts produced by ancient peoples. Like groups the world over, games were part of one’s culture and tied in with symbolism, politics, and society. While some ancient cultures disappeared entirely, others persisted, and modern descendants attest to their resiliency.

The archaeology of North America matters to those who live on the continent today because it is embedded in the landscape we all share. It is part of our common heritage simply because we are all residents on the land. Like the forests, grasslands, birds, mountains, and streams all around us, the evidence of the past gives context to our lives. The growing popularity of public archaeological sites as tourist destinations is clear evidence of public appreciation for the past. Over 500 Native American archaeological sites are open to the public. A companion website for this book includes an electronic map and detailed directions.

The material remains of the human past have special importance in North America to people of Native American descent because such remains tie in more directly with their past and heritage. The resurgence of American Indian cultures during the twentieth century revived broader appreciation for their role in the history of the continent and underscored the connection between the distant past and living cultures.

In addition to the significance of the North American past for all of us, it is important because it provides an independent perspective on the study of the evolution of human societies from simple bands of hunter-gatherers to large urbanized state societies with all the trappings we have come to think of as defining civilization. Without the evidence from the Americas, we might never have been sure that the explosive growth in the size and complexity of human society was not a single unique phenomenon, a combination of singular lucky happenstance followed by wholesale imitation. But the appearance of cities, literacy, technological traditions, organized religion, and state polities in North America occurred with little if any influence from South America and virtually none from the rest of the world. American archaeology reveals that all of these traits were latent in the biologically modern but thinly scattered hunter-gatherers that made up the world’s entire human population 15 millennia ago. An American Indian gift to the world is the assurance that complex human societies arose independently in the past in all populated areas of the world and that even after some future global catastrophe they would do so again so long as modern humans survived as a species.

Archaeological Science

While acknowledging multiple different meanings that American archaeology may have for us as individuals, this book is grounded on archaeological science. At the foundation of scientific thought lies the certainty that there is a correct answer to any question, even though the available evidence might allow for only the uncertainty of multiple possibilities. This approach requires a researcher to be comfortable with uncertainty and revision and also driven to find ways to exclude possibilities, thus increasing the probabilities for the alternative explanations that remain. Opinion tends to converge over time as the collective effort disposes of alternatives.

Archaeological science involves the development of principles and procedures for the systematic development of theory, which involves the recognition and formulation of problems, the systematic collection of data through observation and experience, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. Theory is indispensable, a...