Despite the advances made in archaeology over the past generation, the Northeast remains the most misunderstood of all the archaeological regions of North America. With a complex environmental history shaped by ice sheets from the last glaciation, and highly acidic soils characteristic of the area, the kinds of organic artifacts found in other areas have been destroyed in the Northeast. The result is a sometimes evasive, particularly complicated, and always fragmentary archaeological record. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Northeast is a region that inspires the development of innovative research designs and thoughtful and relevant questions. Each author has been a graduate student of Dena Dincauze, who has done much to foster understanding of the prehistory of Northeastern North America.

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence-an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.

The remains of hunter-gatherer groups are the most commonly discovered archaeological resources in the world, and their study constitutes much of the archaeological research done in North America. In spite of paradigm-shifting discoveries elsewhere in the world that may indicate that hunter-gatherer societies were more complex than simple remnants of a prehistoric past, North American archaeology by and large hasn't embraced these theories, instead maintaining its general neoevolutionary track. This book will change that.
Combining the latest empirical studies of archaeological practice with the latest conceptual tools of anthropological and historical theory, this volume seeks to set a new course for hunter-gatherer archaeology by organizing the chapters around three themes. The first section offers diverse views of the role of human agency, challenging the premise that hunter-gatherer societies were bound by their interactions with the natural world. The second section considers how society and culture are constituted. Chapters in the final section take the long view of the historical process, examining how cultural diversity arises out of interaction and the continuity of ritual practices.
A closing commentary by H. Martin Wobst underscores the promise of an archaeology of foragers that does not associate foraging with any particular ideology or social structure but instead invites inquiry into counterintuitive alternatives. "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process" seeks to blur the divisions between prehistory and history, between primitive and modern, and between hunter-gatherers and people in other societies. Because it offers alternatives to the dominant discourse and contributes to the agenda of hunter-gatherer research, this book will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of foraging peoples.

This volume surveys the archaeology of Native North Americans from their arrival on the continent 15,000 years ago up to contact with European colonizers. Offering rich descriptions of monumental structures, domestic architecture, vibrant objects, and spiritual forces, Timothy R. Pauketat and Kenneth E. Sassaman show how indigenous people shaped both their history and North America's many varied environments. They place the student in the past as they trace how Native Americans dealt with challenges such as climate change, the rise of social hierarchies and political power, and ethnic conflict. Written in a clear and engaging style with a compelling narrative, The Archaeology of Ancient North America presents the grand historical themes and intimate stories of ancient Americans in full, living color.

The southeastern United States has one of the richest records of early human settlement of any area of North America. This book provides the first state-by-state summary of Paleoindian and Early Archaic research from the region, together with an appraisal of models developed to interpret the data. It summarizes what we know of the peoples who lived in the Southeast more than 8,000 years ago--when giant ice sheets covered the northern part of the continent, and such mammals as elephants, saber-toothed tigers, and ground sloths roamed the landscape. Extensively illustrated, this benchmark collection of essays on the state of Paleoindian and Early Archaic research in the Southeast will guide future studies on the subject of the region's first inhabitants for years to come.

Divided in three parts, the volume includes:

Part I: Modeling Paleoindian and Early Archaic Lifeways in the Southeast

Environmental and Chronological Considerations, David G. Anderson, Lisa D. O'Steen, and Kenneth E. Sassaman
Modeling Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast: A Historical Perspective, David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman

Models of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement in the Lower Southeast, David G. Anderson
Early Archaic Settlement in the South Carolina Coastal Plain, Kenneth E. Sassaman
Raw Material Availability and Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast, I. Randolph Daniel Jr.
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement along the Oconee Drainage, Lisa D. O'Steen
Haw River Revisited: Implications for Modeling Terminal Late Glacial and Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems in the Southeast, John S. Cable
Early Archiac Settlement and Technology: Lessons from Tellico, Larry R. Kimball
Paleoindians Near the Edge: A Virginia Perspective, Michael F. Johnson

Part II: The Regional Record

The Need for a Regional Perspective, Kenneth E. Sassaman and David G. Anderson
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in the South Carolina Area, David G. Anderson and Kenneth E. Sassaman
The Taylor Site: An Early Occupation in Central South Carolina, James L. Michie
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in Tennessee, John B. Boster and Mark R. Norton
A Synopsis of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Research in Alabama, Eugene M. Futato
Statified Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Deposits at Dust Cave, Northwestern Alabama, Boyce N. Driskell
Bone and Ivory Tools from Submerged Paleoindian Sites in Florida, James S. Dunbar and S. David Webb
Paleoindian and Early Archaic Data from Mississippi, Samuel O. McGahey
Early and Middle Paleoindian Sites in the Northeastern Arkansas Region, J. Christopher Gillam

Part III: Commentary

A Framework for the Paleoindian/Early Archaic Transition, Joel Gunn
Modeling Communities and Other Thankless Tasks, Dena F. Dincauze
An Arkansas View, Dan F. Morse
Comments, Henry T. Wright

This volume surveys the archaeology of Native North Americans from their arrival on the continent 15,000 years ago up to contact with European colonizers. Offering rich descriptions of monumental structures, domestic architecture, vibrant objects, and spiritual forces, Timothy R. Pauketat and Kenneth E. Sassaman show how indigenous people shaped both their history and North America's many varied environments. They place the student in the past as they trace how Native Americans dealt with challenges such as climate change, the rise of social hierarchies and political power, and ethnic conflict. Written in a clear and engaging style with a compelling narrative, The Archaeology of Ancient North America presents the grand historical themes and intimate stories of ancient Americans in full, living color.

Despite the advances made in archaeology over the past generation, the Northeast remains the most misunderstood of all the archaeological regions of North America. With a complex environmental history shaped by ice sheets from the last glaciation, and highly acidic soils characteristic of the area, the kinds of organic artifacts found in other areas have been destroyed in the Northeast. The result is a sometimes evasive, particularly complicated, and always fragmentary archaeological record. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Northeast is a region that inspires the development of innovative research designs and thoughtful and relevant questions. Each author has been a graduate student of Dena Dincauze, who has done much to foster understanding of the prehistory of Northeastern North America.

From the foreword:
"With this important volume, the editors serve notice that old characterizations of the cultures of the Archaic period have been buried under the back dirt of new excavations and new interpretations. . . . It places the Archaic cultures squarely at the forefront of archaeological theory."

This volume summarizes our archaeological knowledge of natives who inhabited the American Southeast from 8,000 to 3,000 years ago and examines evidence of many of the native cultural expressions observed by early European explorers, including long-distance exchange, plant domestication, mound building, social ranking, and warfare.

Contents
Section I. Mid-Holocene Environments

1. Geoarchaeology and the Mid-Holocene Landscape History of the Greater Southeast, by Joseph Schuldenrein

2. Mid-Holocene Forest History of Florida and the Coastal Plain of Georgia and South Carolina, by William A. Watts, Eric C. Grimm, and T. C. Hussey

Section II. Technology

3. Changing Strategies of Lithic Technological Organization, by Daniel S. Amick and Philip J. Carr

4. Technological Innovations in Economic and Social Contexts, by Kenneth E. Sassaman

5. Middle and Late Archaic Architecture, by Kenneth E. Sassaman and R. Jerald Ledbetter

Section III. Subsistence and Health

6. The Paleoethnobotanical Record for the Mid-Holocene Southeast, by Kristen J. Gremillion

7. Mid-Holocene Faunal Exploitation in the Southeastern United States, by Bonnie W. Styles and Walter E. Klippel

8. Biocultural Inquiry into Archaic Period Populations of the Southeast: Trauma and Occupational Stress, by Maria O. Smith

Section IV. Regional Settlement Variation

9. Approaches to Modeling Regional Settlement in the Archaic Period Southeast, by David G. Anderson

10. Southeastern Mid-Holocene Coastal Settlements, by Michael Russo

11. Accounting for Submerged Mid-Holocene Archaeological Sites in the Southeast: A Case Study from the Chesapeake Bay Estuary, Virginia, by Dennis B. Blanton

Section V. Regional Integration and Organization

12. The Emergence of Long-Distance Exchange Networks in the Southeastern United States, by Richard W. Jefferies

13. A Consideration of the Social Organization of the Shell Mound Archaic, by Cheryl P. Claassen

14. Southeastern Archaic Mounds, by Michael Russo

15. Poverty Point and Greater Southeastern Prehistory: The Culture That Did Not Fit, by Jon L. Gibson

Kenneth E. Sassaman is archaeologist with the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, and instructor in the Department of History and Anthropology at Augusta College, Augusta, Georgia. He is the author of "Early Pottery in the Southeast: Tradition and Innovation in Cooking Technology." David G. Anderson is archaeologist with the Southeast Archaeological Center, National Park Service, Tallahassee, Florida. He is the author of "The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast." They are coeditors of "The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast."

The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence-an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.