A New Understanding of the Archaic Period in the Southeast of North America: A Reappraisal of the Archaeological Evidence

The Archaic period has been a working concept within archaeology, and even other social sciences, for well over half a century. Long thought of as the stage between the initial peopling of the Americas (sometime in the late Pleistocene) and that of large-scale societies (a few hundred to a thousand years ago), the Archaic has long been a period of simplistic understanding and characterization. One of the most influential characterizations of this period was developed by archaeologists Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips in their now classic Method and Theory in American Archaeology (Classics Southeast Archaeology). Defined “as the stage of migratory hunting and gathering cultures continuing into environmental conditions approximately those of the present” (Willey and Phillips 1958:107), it is only recently that this characterization has been challenged by new archaeological evidence. In a recent issue of the SAA Archaeological Review, Kenneth E. Sassaman introduces several papers that discuss new archaeological evidence that is shifting our understanding of the period, particularly for the Southeast of North America. Key points of these papers, as articulated by Sassaman include:

1) Although the concept of a pan-continental Archaic period in North America has fallen into disfavor, there still exists a tendancy among American archaeologists to gloss the enormous diversity of things Archaic within the broader tropes of “hunter-gatherer” and “primitive” that have shaped anthropological inquiry since the late nineteenth century.

2) The concept of the Archaic period conveys no generalizable knowledge about the sociality, politics, or ideology of people whose archaeological residues are encapsulated within this rubric.

3) The Southeast boasts the most varied, dispersed, and ancient record of monument construction in North America, some dating back as early as 7,000 years ago, and archaeologists are just now beginning to understand the Archaic period in the Southeast in a holistic, diachronic, and multi-regional framework.

4) Recent work on monuments in the Southeast is converging on the theme that many of these monuments often entailed large-scale demographic and cultural changes, including migrations, coalescence, and ethnogenesis.

5) No matter the terminology, the emphasis within American archaeology these days is on documenting and explaining regional or subregional sequences of hunter-gatherer prehistory, with increasing emphasis on interconnections among groups that shaped local adaptations. What archaeologists have found is a range of variation in material culture across the Archaic period, and that arguably this variation spans all stages of Willey and Phillips’ scheme.

In essence, it is only now that we are beginning to understand the Archaic period in North America. The old understanding, characterized by Willey and Phillips, is no longer tenable. As the papers in the SAA Archaeological Record articulate, the period was more complex, more varied, and more regionally intertwined then previously understood.

Further Reading

Otto, Martha P.; and Redmond, Brian G.; eds. 2009. Transitions: Archaic and Early Woodland Research in the Ohio Country. Ohio University Press.

Sassaman, Kenneth E.; and Anderson, David G.; eds. 1996. Archaeology of the Mid-Holocene Southeast (Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen). University Press of Florida.

Walker, Renee B.; and Driskell, Boyce N., eds. 2007. Foragers of the Terminal Pleistocene in North America. University of Nebraska Press.