Prehistoric Native Americans and the Folsom Technology: Cultural Affiliation from the Late Pleistocene to the Prehistoric

North American archaeology has been going through major revisions and paradigm changes over the last two decades. No place has this been more evidence then in theories and long held beliefs concerning the peopling of the Americas: genetic evidence has pushed back the hypothetical initial peopling date; new archaeological sites such as the Gault Site in Texas have questioned the Clovis model; and ideas surrounding culture groups and technological affiliation have been revisited. New evidence from across the Plains and Rocky Mountain region has contributed to this overhauling of North American archaeological theories and our understanding of the peopling of the Americas. Work by Brian N. Andrews, Jason M. Labelle, and John D. Srebach (2008) has shed new light on the Folsom lithic technology and prehistoric Native American subsistence and migration patterns during the late Pleistocene/early Holocene transition.

Folsom is an archaeological complex of sites and isolated finds associated with prehistoric Native American hunter-gatherer groups inhabiting the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Southwest regions of North America. First defined at the Folsom type site in New Mexico and further refined at the Lindenmeier site, the complex contains a number of temporally diagnostic lithic artifacts (projectile points, channel flakes, ultrathin bifaces). Spanning 800 radiocarbon years, from approximately 10,900 to 10,100 radiocarbon years before present, documenting the longevity and regional success of the Folsom technological complex is clearly documented.

It is generally well accepted that Folsom adaptation was characterized by small groups of cyclically mobile, specialized bison hunters moving from kill to kill, often covering large areas of land in relatively short periods, with the efficiently designed Folsom toolkit seen as a key technological adaptation of this cyclical lifestyle.

The idea that Folsom groups practiced specialized bison hunting is based on the dominance of bison remains at many well-studied Folsom sites (e.g., Agate Basin, Carter Keer McGee, Cooper, Folsom, Lipscomb, Cattle Guard, Waugh).

In new research, Andrews, LaBelle, and Seebach (2008) use spatial and assemblage content data from a sample of 619 Folsom sites located throughout the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Southwest to evaluate whether the archaeological record actually reflects these characteristics. Three spatial scales of analysis were utilized in their research. First, site scale analysis of a subset of sites showed a great deal of variability in spatial and temporal characteristics. Sites could roughly be divided into small, single occupation locales and large, serially occupied sites. Second, day-to-day foraging is hypothesized to have occurred at what they term the foraging scale. This intermediate spatial scale is poorly understood for Folsom groups, though large sites such as Blackwater Draw and Lindenmeier provide clues that are supplemented by information from the ethnographic record. Third, the macro-regional scale analysis utilized the entire site sample and indicated that the Folsom archaeological record consists primarily of small locales scattered across the landscape punctuated by only a few large, serially occupied sites. Overall, their analysis suggests that Folsom adaptive systems were more variable than normally recognized, and, in certain settings, may have been characterized by reduced residential mobility. Furthermore, Andrews, LaBelle, and Seebach postulate that Folsom land use, rather than being conditioned primarily by mobile prey, may have been at least partly conditioned by more predictable resources such as wood, water, and toolstone.

In fact, evidence of substantial Folsom occupation in ecologically diverse non-Plains settings indicates that bison procurement was not necessarily the primary variable around which Folsom groups organized their mobility.

Furthermore, the small sample of seasonality data that currently exists suggests a seasonal pattern of bison hunting, with the majority of large (possible communal) kills taking place in late summer/early fall in the Southern Plains and in late fall to early spring in the northwestern Plains. Communal hunting and large kill events certainly took place on occasion, but for day-to-day life, monitoring and hunting bison is best left to small task groups given the relative unpredictability of mobile bison resources during most of the year.

As this new evidence indicates, prehistoric Native American groups utilizing the Folsom technology did not simply migrate aimlessly throughout North America in their search for food. Rather, this data suggests that these prehistoric groups practiced a lifeway very similar to that of historic Native American peoples from the same area: movement within a known range of environments based on seasonal availability and a cyclical lifeway. The potential of this new data is encouraging, for it builds on many of the conclusions reached in Respect for the Ancestors (2005); that contemporary Native American peoples are affiliated with the prehistoric users of the Folsom technology. Only further studies and research will clarify this affiliation.

References

Brian N. Andrews, Jason M. LaBelle, and John D. Seebach. 2008. Spatial Variability in the Folsom Archaeological Record: A Multi-Scalar Approach. American Antiquity, 73(3):464-490.

Jones, Peter N. 2005. Respect for the Ancestors: American Indian Cultural Affiliation in the American West. Boulder, CO: Bauu Press.

Further Reading

Kay, Marvin. 2007. Plains Village Archaeology: Bison Hunting Farmers in the Central and Northern PlainsSalt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press.  

Meltzer, David J. 2006. Folsom: New Archaeological Investigations of a Classic Paleoindian Bison KillBerkeley, CA: University of California Press.  

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