Books by John P Hart
This book is the thesis I wrote as part of my master’s degree program in geosciences at Northeast... more This book is the thesis I wrote as part of my master’s degree program in geosciences at Northeast Louisiana University (NLU, now the University of Louisiana at Monroe) from which I graduated in May of 1982. My thesis committee consisted of Drs. Glen S. Greene, James E. Corbin, and Mervin Kontrovitz. By the fall of 1981 I had participated in three Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) Archaeological Field School seasons directed by Dr. Corbin at the Washington Square Mound Site in Nacogdoches, Texas—in 1979 as an SFASU undergraduate student and in 1980 and 1981 as Corbin’s teaching assistant. In 1979 and 1981 the field school included the excavation of burials, features 32 and 95, located within the Reavely-House Mound. I participated in the excavation of both, assisting with the shallow burial, feature 32 excavations in 1979, and with Corbin, excavated the deep shaft burial, feature 95, in 1981. These excavations took place prior to the enactment of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and before the growth in appreciation by archaeologists of Native Americans’ sensitivities to disinterment of their ancestors’ remains. Included in the grave furniture of the two burials were 15 and 32 complete pottery vessels, respectively. Among the latter were bottles with engraved snake and sun-like designs that captured my imagination and persist there to this day. The 47 whole vessels from burial contexts, two other vessels, and over 6,000 sherds from non-burial contexts comprised the artifact assemblage I analyzed for my thesis. In the thesis I described three new tentative pottery types based primarily on the vessels recovered from the burials. I also provided summary statistics on the sherd collection and attempted to delineate temporal changes in the pottery at the site and place the Washington Square pottery within broader trends in Caddo pottery decoration.
This thesis was the first publication on Washington Square. In 1998 Corbin and I published an article in the Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society that summarized excavations by the SFASU field school from 1979 through 1982 and the Texas Archaeological Annual Field School in 1985. By that time, Corbin had done research that expanded our knowledge about the site and impacts to it during the development of the City of Nacogdoches. In 2009 Perttula published an analysis of artifacts recovered from the site during the 1985 Texas Archaeological Society Field School in the Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society. In 2010, Perttula and colleagues published their documentation of the grave goods from Washington Square done as part of SFASU’s compliance with the NAGPRA. In that volume, published by SFASU Press, Perttula et al. provided detailed descriptions and color photographs of each pottery vessel and other items recovered from the graves including shell beads, shell pendent fragments, and a lithic cache. Selden’s 2010 master’s thesis provided a GIS-based analysis of Washington Square, which was summarized in a 2011 Caddo Archeology Journal article. Also in 2010 Pertulla and I published an article in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology that identified a Southeast Ceremonial Complex style zone in Northeast Texas based largely on Washington Square and the pottery vessels from Feature 95.
What this thesis represents is a reflection of my training and thinking to that time. Those who know my body of work over the intervening 30-plus years may be surprised that I contextualized the thesis within a standard culture historic framework and that a large part of it is devoted to the formal description of new tentative pottery types. Much of my work over the past two decades has sought to highlight how such constructs are detrimental to explorations of the past. At this early stage of my career, however, I believed that the description of new types was the best way to communicate the uniqueness of the Washington Square pottery. Also at that time I was beginning to explore anthropological and archaeological theory and was quite taken by Marvin Harris’ (1979) book Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. I attempted to integrate some of Harris’s concepts with those of Krieger (1944) and Rouse (1960) on types and modes, respectively, to which Corbin had introduced me. Whether I succeeded or not is open to debate, but what strikes me is that even at this early stage in my career I was concerned with variation in artifact form and its implications for understanding past human behaviors.
What I remember most about the research and writing process is the firm yet gentle guiding hand of Jim Corbin. He was always willing to sit and discuss issues that were puzzling me, and I always walked away from those discussions with a better understanding of the issues at hand. I also remember how gracious Jim was in allowing me to transport from SFASU portions of the pottery collection at any given time to work on at NLU. Jim and I always planned to write a comprehensive publication on the Washington Square pottery, incorporating my work with analyses of collections made during later excavations. Various factors prevented us from doing so, and our plans to collaborate on such a publication ended with Jim’s untimely death in 2004. My own responsibilities at the New York State Museum have prevented me from pursuing our goal alone. What this volume does, then, is make available to a wider audience information on the pottery collection unearthed during the first three field seasons at the site. Washington Square is a critical site within the southwestern distribution of the pre-Contact Caddo sites and their distinctive material culture. Symbols on the fine-ware pottery vessels excavated from the two burials are key to understanding how fourteenth century A.D. Caddo people in Northeast Texas participated in broader Southeastern socio-religious traditions while maintaining their own distinctive identities (Hart and Perttula 2010). This thesis constituted a first step toward that understanding.
I am grateful to Dr. Jerry Williams for suggesting and making possible the publication of this volume through SFASU Press. I am also grateful to Dr. Tim Perttula for sparking a renewed interest in me for Washington Square specifically and Caddo archaeology generally. Finally, I am forever in debt to Dr. Jim Corbin, who set me on the path to a lifetime of archaeological research.
John P. Hart
Albany, New York
May 2013
References Cited
Corbin, James A., and John P. Hart
1998 The Washington Square Mound Site: A Middle Caddo Mound Complex in South Central East Texas. Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 69: 47–78.
Harris, Marvin
1979 Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. Random House, New York.
Hart, John P.
1982 An Analysis of the Aboriginal Ceramics from the Washington Square Mound Site. Unpublished M.S. thesis, Northeast Louisiana University, Monroe.
Hart, John P., and Timothy K. Perttula.
2010 The Washington Square Mound Site and a Southeastern Ceremonial Complex Style Zone among the Caddo of Northeastern Texas. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 35(2):199–228.
Krieger, Alex D.
1944 The Typological Concept. American Antiquity 9:271–286.
Perutula, Timothy K.
2009 Analysis of the Caddo Archeological Materials from the 1985 Texas Archeological Society Field School at the Washington Square Mound Site, Nacogdoches County, Texas. Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 80:145–193.
Perttula, Timothy K., Mark Walters, Bo Nelson, and Robert Cast
2010 Documentation of Associated and Unassociated Caddo Funerary Objects in the Stephen F. Austin State University Collections, Nacogdoches, Texas. Stephen F. Austin State University Press, Nacogdoches, Texas.
Rouse, Irving
1960 The Classification of Artifacts in Archaeology. American Antiquity 25:313–323.
Selden, Robert Z., Jr.
2010 Toward a Unique Understanding of Washington Square: Digitization and Spatial Representation of a Caddo Mound Site in East Texas. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas.
2011 Digital Preservation and Spatial Representation at the Washington Square Mound Site (41NA49), Nacogdoches County, Texas. Caddo Archeology Journal 21:129–145.
"This volume is based on a symposium that we organized for the New York State Archaeological Asso... more "This volume is based on a symposium that we organized for the New York State Archaeological Association’s 94th annual meeting in Ellenville, New York, on April 24, 2010. Our intention for the symposium was to highlight the wide range of current archaeological research in New York during the period of time we have referred to as the early Late Prehistoric period (A.D. 700–1300). As anyone following New York archaeology realizes, this is an arbitrary slice of time within the dynamic history of Native Americans in the state, but one that has been quite contentious over the past few decades. This contentiousness has centered on the origins of the ethnic landscape that was recorded by early European missionaries, settlers, and explorers. Was that landscape the result of migrations and displacements, or was it part of a long-evolving, in situ pattern? Can these two alternatives really capture the dynamics of the past, or are they too simplistic in their conceptualizations? There is a wide range of ongoing scholarship on these questions. What we wanted from the symposium and ultimately this volume was to show that while these questions are important, they are far from the only topics of research being addressed by archaeologists working on the early Late Prehistoric period.
The symposium comprised nine papers, the abstracts of which follow this preface. Also included in the symposium was a discussion of the papers by James Bradley. The papers included reports on excavations at specific sites, regional settlement pattern analyses, lithic sourcing, ceramic analysis, and a summary of results from an ongoing research program involving a variety of analyses. The symposium certainly captured a wide range of research that demonstrated the dynamic state of archaeological investigations within New York. The present volume comprises updates of six of those papers, an introduction, and an eighth paper that was not presented in the symposium. As such, the volume provides a strong sense of the state of archaeological research on the early Late Prehistoric period in New York at the beginning of the 2010s."
On Saturday, December 1, 2007, the New York State Museum served as the venue for a colloquium Pen... more On Saturday, December 1, 2007, the New York State Museum served as the venue for a colloquium Penelope Drooker, Elizabeth Peña, and I had organized to honor and commemorate the professional life of Dr. Charles L. (Chuck) Fisher who died on February 8 of the same year. As the following colloquium program indicates, we had no problem soliciting enough contributions to fill the day. In fact, the response to our call for papers was overwhelming. Twenty-six papers by 34 authors were contributed, reflecting Chuck’s broad interests in archaeology and the esteem in which he was held by the professional archaeological communities in cultural resource management, academia, and government.
With so many contributions, we decided to organize the colloquium so that the presentations were grouped according to coherent themes. While sorting through the titles and abstracts, it became clear that there were three natural, although not mutually exclusive, groups that reflected recurring themes in Chuck’s research: soldiers, cities, and landscapes. This organization worked well and we decided to maintain it in the present volume.
This volume comprises chapters based on 16 of the colloquium presentations. Also included are a remembrance of Chuck’s career by Karen Hartgen, Chuck’s wife; a bibliography of Chuck’s publications; and a foreword by Charles Orser, Chuck’s successor as Curator of Historical Archaeology at the State Museum.
This is the second volume I have edited on paleoethnobotanical research in the Northeast. The fir... more This is the second volume I have edited on paleoethnobotanical research in the Northeast. The first, published as Current Northeast Paleoethnobotany, New York State Museum Bulletin 494 in 1999, was based on a symposium held at the New York State Museum in Albany as part of the New York Natural History Conference IV in April 1996. This current volume is based on a symposium held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the 71st annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in April 2006. As I relate in the introductory chapter of this volume, a lot had changed in paleoethnobotany in the Northeast during the 10 years between the symposia. Suffice it to say here that the Northeast is more visible than ever in the paleoethnobotanical literature and that the methods, techniques, and theories used by the discipline are much broader than in 1996.
The symposium brought together many of the same participants in the original symposiumand volume.Most of the symposium participants were able to contribute chapters to the present volume. These include Nancy Asch Sidell, John P. Hart, Mark A. McConaughy, Katy R. Serpa, Elizabeth S. Chilton, Jeffrey Bendremer and Elaine Thomas, Tonya Largy and E. Pierre Morenon, Michael Deal and SaraHalwas, and Jack Rossen. In addition, Iwas able to solicit papers from a number of individuals who had not participated in the symposium, but are doing important paleoethnobotanical research in the Northeast. These are Eleanore A. Reber; Ninian Stein; Tim Messner, Ruth Dickau, and Jeff Harbison; William A. Lovis and G. William Monaghan; and Robert H. Pihl, Stephen G. Monckton, DavidA. Robertson, and Robert F.Williamson. Finally, John Edward Terrell contributed a commentary on the volume that places the practice of paleoethnobotany in the Northeast in a broader perspective. Collectively, the contributions by these authors provide a sense for the breadth of paleoethnobotanical research being carried out in the Northeast. They also provide a benchmark, as did the 1999 volume, by which progress in the field can be measured in the decades to come.
The early Late Prehistoric period is an important time in Northeastern prehistory because it was ... more The early Late Prehistoric period is an important time in Northeastern prehistory because it was then that many of the subsistence and settlement traits of Native populations recorded during the early Historic period first become evident in the archeological record. The chapters in this book provide regional summaries, analyses of specific sites and site categories, analyses of pottery and paleoethnobotanical data, and models for the adoption of maize-based agriculture. While it would have been possible to organize the chapters on topical grounds, we felt that a geographical organization would provide a better sense of the range of variation in subsistence and settlement traits across the region. We also thought that such an organization would provide a sense for current controversies in the various subregions covered by the book. To those ends, the chapters are organized in a transect from west-to-east and south-to-north, sandwiched between an introduction by Christina Rieth and a concluding chapter by me and Bernard Means.We hope that this book will not only provide a sense of current research on the early Late Prehistoric period in the Northeast, but will spur additional research on this critical period of time.
"The present volume is based on a symposium that I organized with coeditor David Cremeens for the... more "The present volume is based on a symposium that I organized with coeditor David Cremeens for the New York Natural History Conference VI, which was held at the New York State Museum in April 2000. Formerly glaciated terrains of northeastern North America present a wide variety of landscapes that affected the location, formation, and preservation of prehistoric archaeological sites. Many of these landscapes, such as simple till-covered uplands, are little altered since the terminal stages of the Pleistocene. Other landscapes are more complex, for example, glaciofluvial and glaciolacustrine valley floor environments that have undergone significant modification through Holocene alluvial and colluvial processes. The symposium was organized to address current geoarchaeological work in these glaciated landscapes. The papers presented at the symposium covered a wide geographical area including New England, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and southern Ontario and addressed the development of the archaeological record on various post-glacial landforms.
Following an introductory chapter by David Cremeens and me, the twelve substantive chapters in this volume provide summaries of current knowledge of the deglaciation of the Northeast and geoarchaeological case studies in upland and alluvial settings. The geographical coverage of the chapters includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England. By themselves, the chapters show how detailed geoarchaeological investigations are critical to our understanding of the archaeological record in formerly glaciated landscapes. The volume as a whole fills an important gap in the geoarchaeological literature: until now, there have been no edited volumes devoted exclusively to the geoarchaeology of the Northeast. By filling this gap, I hope that the volume will encourage additional geoarchaeological investigations in the region."
"The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed strongly growing interest in evolutionary ap... more "The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed strongly growing interest in evolutionary approaches to the human past. Even now, however, there is little real agreement on what evolutionary archaeology is all about. A major obstacle is the lack of consensus on how to define the basic principles of Darwinian thought in ways that are genuinely relevant to the archaeological sciences. Each chapter in this new collection of specially invited essays focuses on a single major concept and its associated key words, summarizes its historic and current uses, and then reviews case studies illustrating that concept's present and probable future role in research. What these authors say shows the richness and current diversity of thought among those today who insist that Darwinism has a key role to play in archaeology.
Each chapter includes definitions of related key words. Because the same key words may have the same or different meanings in different conceptual contexts, many of these key words are addressed in more than one chapter. In addition to exploring key concepts, collectively the book's chapters show the broad range of ideas and opinions in this intellectual arena today. This volume reflectsand clarifiesdebate today on the role of Darwinism in modern archaeology, and by doing so, may help shape the directions that future work in archaeology will take.""
This is the first edited volume to address the potential of archaeology to shed light on the dail... more This is the first edited volume to address the potential of archaeology to shed light on the daily lives of nineteenth and early twentieth century New Yorkers. Chapters provide overviews of the current status of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeology in New York, make suggestions for future research directions, and present recent case studies on specific aspects of the archaeological record (sheet middens, landscape modifications, family cemeteries, and architecture) and classes of sites (farmsteads, boarding houses, early freed black settlements). This volume demonstrates the potential of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century domestic archaeology to shed light on the life of New Yorkers during a time of rapid change that set the stage for later developments in twentieth century New York and our own lives.
This volume presents the results of current paleoethnobotanical research in northeastern North Am... more This volume presents the results of current paleoethnobotanical research in northeastern North America, defined here as New England, New York, and Pennsylvania (Figure 1.1). Paleoethnobotany encompasses all aspects of the investigation of prehistoric human-plant relationships from the identification and dating of plant remains to modeling the evolution of prehistoric plant communities and agriculture. The Northeast has been almost invisible as paleoethnobotany has grown to be an important discipline in Eastern Woodlands archaeology. This volume is presented as an attempt to raise the visibiity of paleoethnobotanical research being carried out in the Northeast. As such, although most of the chapters are concerned in one way or another with prehistoric agriculture, there is no single paleoethnobotanical theme guiding the volume's content.
Journal Articles by John P Hart
Quaternary Science Reiews, 2024
Northern Flint maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) is a distinct landrace that was common throughout early... more Northern Flint maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) is a distinct landrace that was common throughout early historical northeastern North America. It is likely represented archaeologically as Eastern 8-row maize, the dominant form there after 1200 CE. Genetic analyses indicate that Northern Flint is most likely derived from maize in the American Southwest. Evidence for maize in the form of phytoliths and starch recovered from directly radiocarbon dated cooking residues occurs in the Northeast by 290 BCE. Until recently there has been no substantiated evidence for maize of similar or older age in the Great Plains, through which maize is likely to have dispersed from the Southwest. A recent report of early microbotanical evidence for maize from the central Plains allows Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon dates to estimate the amount of time that elapsed before maize spread from the Plains to the Northeast. Results indicate only a short amount of time elapsed, from a few to less than 170 years.
Archaeology of Eastern North America, 2024
The Roundtop site was reported by William A. Ritchie in a chapter of his 1973 volume with Robert ... more The Roundtop site was reported by William A. Ritchie in a chapter of his 1973 volume with Robert E. Funk, Aboriginal Settlement Patterns of the Northeast. Ritchie interpreted the site as an eleventh-century AD village with two overlapping longhouse patterns and macrobotanical remains of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), and squash (Cucurbita pepo). Based on that report the site became established in the literature as having the earliest evidence for longhouses and maize-bean-squash agriculture in the Northeast. Ritchie’s dating of the site was based on a single radiocarbon date on a large sample of wood charcoal and the potteryassemblage, which he associated primarily with the Carpenter Brook phase (AD 1000-1100) of his Owasco culture (AD 1000-1300). He considered other late pre-contact occupations of the site as transitory. New radiocarbon dates reported in 1999 and 2000 and recent Bayesian modeling of those radiocarbon dates suggest that the later occupations were more substantial than Ritchie suggested. Here I report four additional radiocarbon dates, new Bayesian modeling of all available Roundtop dates, and an analysis of the site’s complete pottery assemblage. The results further clarify the site’s history and substantiate the importance of post-1100 AD occupations at the site.
Radiocarbon, 2024
Five sites in present-day New York have played important roles in archaeological narratives surro... more Five sites in present-day New York have played important roles in archaeological narratives surrounding the development of settled village life in northeastern North America. Excavated in the mid-twentieth century, the Roundtop, Maxon-Derby, Sackett or Canandaigua, Bates, and Kelso sites include evidence related to the transition from semisedentary settlement-subsistence patterns during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries AD to those associated with fifteenth century and later settled Iroquoian villagers. Radiocarbon dates for each site were obtained early in the development of the method and again following the transition to AMS dating. Here, we present new or recently-published dates for these sites, combined with reliable existing dates in Bayesian models, including in some cases short tree-ring sequenced wiggle-matches on wood charcoal. Our results clarify the timing of each site's occupation(s), revealing both continuity and discontinuity in the development of longhouse dwellings, sedentism, and the repeated re-use of some site locations over hundreds of years.
Journal of Historical Network Research, Dec 21, 2023
Relatively little is known from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century AD ethnohistorical record ... more Relatively little is known from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century AD ethnohistorical record about Iroquoian societies in the St Lawrence River Valley compared to the Huron-Wendat in southern Ontario and Haudenosaunee in New York. This is because Iroquoian villagers dispersed from the valley over the course of the sixteenth century. Here we use formal social network analysis to build on understandings of St. Lawrence Iroquoians’ socio-political interactions within and outside of the valley from AD 1400 to 1600. This analysis is based on pottery vessel decorations as signals of female membership in socio-political networks. Results indicate valley-long coalitional networks that became looser at the end of the sixteenth century as St. Lawrence Iroquoians dispersed from the valley.
American Antiquity, 2023
Archaeologists working in eastern North America typically refer to precontact and early postconta... more Archaeologists working in eastern North America typically refer to precontact and early postcontact Native American maize-based agriculture as shifting or swidden. Based on a comparison with European agriculture, it is generally posited that the lack of plows, draft animals, and animal manure fertilization resulted in the rapid depletion of soil nitrogen. This required Indigenous farmers to move their fields frequently. In Northern Iroquoia, depletion of soil fertility is frequently cited as one reason why villages were moved to new locations every 20 to 40 years. Recent analysis of δ 15 N ratios of maize macrobotanical remains from Northern Iroquoia, however, suggests that Iroquoian farmers were able to maintain soil nitrogen in their maize fields. An expanded analysis of maize kernel δ 15 N ratios from three ancestral Mohawk villages indicates that farmers from those villages maintained soil nitrogen throughout the occupational spans of their villages. It further suggests that precontact Iroquoian agronomy was consistent with contemporary conservation agriculture practices.
Resumen Les archéologues travaillant dans l'est de l'Amérique du Nord qualifient généralement l'agriculture à base de maïs pratiquée par les Autochtones avant et après le contact avec les Européens d'agriculture itinérante ou de culture sur brûlis. Sur la base d'une comparaison avec l'agriculture européenne, il est généralement admis que l'absence de charrue, d'animaux de trait et de fumier animal a entraîné un épuisement rapide de l'azote du sol. Les agriculteurs autochtones devaient donc déplacer fréquemment leurs champs. Dans l'Iroquoianie nordique, l'épuisement de la fertilité du sol est souvent cité comme l'une des raisons pour lesquelles les villages étaient déplacés tous les 20 à 40 ans. Une analyse récente des rapports de δ 15 N dans les restes macrobotaniques de maïs de l'Iroquoianie nordique suggère toutefois que les agriculteurs iroquoiens étaient en mesure de maintenir l'azote du sol dans leurs champs de maïs. Une analyse poussée des rapports de δ 15 N des grains de maïs provenant de trois villages mohawks ancestraux, présentée ici, indique que les agriculteurs de ces villages ont maintenu l'azote du sol tout au long de la période d'occupation de leurs villages. Elle suggère en outre que l'agronomie iroquoienne pré-contact était compatible avec les pratiques contemporaines de l'agriculture de conservation.
Radiocarbon, 2023
The Lamoka Lake and Scaccia sites in present-day New York have played important roles in the deve... more The Lamoka Lake and Scaccia sites in present-day New York have played important roles in the development of archaeology in New York, and in the case of Lamoka Lake, in eastern North America. Lamoka Lake is the type site for the "Archaic" period in eastern North American culture history and the "Late Archaic" "Lamoka phase" in New York culture history. The Scaccia site is the largest "Early Woodland" "Meadowood phase" site in New York and has the earliest evidence for pottery and agriculture crop use in the state. Lamoka Lake has been dated to 2500 BC based on a series of solid carbon and gas-proportional counting radiometric dates on bulk wood charcoal obtained in the 1950s and 1960s. Scaccia has been dated to 870 BC based on a single uncalibrated radiometric date obtained on bulk charcoal in the early 1970s. As a result, the ages of these important sites need to be refined. New AMS dates and Bayesian analyses presented here place Lamoka Lake at 2962-2902 BC (68.3% highest posterior density [hpd])) and Scaccia at 1049-838 BC (68.3% hpd).
Scientific Reports, 2023
Under the archaeological canine surrogacy approach (CSA) it is assumed that because dogs were rel... more Under the archaeological canine surrogacy approach (CSA) it is assumed that because dogs were reliant on humans for food, they had similar diets to the people with whom they lived. As a result, the stable isotope ratios of their tissues (bone collagen and apatite, tooth enamel and dentine collagen) will be close to those of the humans with whom they cohabited. Therefore, in the absence of human tissue, dog tissue isotopes can be used to help reconstruct past human diets. Here δ 13 C and δ 15 N ratios on previously published dog and human bone collagen from fourteenth-seventeenth century AD ancestral Iroquoian village archaeological sites and ossuaries in southern Ontario are used with MixSIAR, a Bayesian dietary mixing model, to determine if the dog stable isotope ratios are good proxies for human isotope ratios in dietary modeling for this context. The modeling results indicate that human dietary protein came primarily from maize and high trophic level fish and dogs from maize, terrestrial animals, low trophic level fish, and human feces. While isotopes from dog tissues can be used as general analogs for human tissue isotopes under CSA, greater insights into dog diets can be achieved with Bayesian dietary mixing models.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2023
The primary crops of Indigenous agricultural systems in North America in the centuries prior to a... more The primary crops of Indigenous agricultural systems in North America in the centuries prior to and following European colonization were maize (Zea mays ssp. mays), bean (Phaseolus spp.), and squash (Cucurbta spp.). Of these, charred maize is the best represented in macrobotanical assemblages from open-air sites in northeastern North America; macrobotanical assemblages in this region consist primarily of charred plant remains. Charred bean seeds generally occur in much lower quantities and charred squash seeds in lower quantities than charred bean seeds. Heating taphonomy experiments have been performed on maize kernels and bean seeds to determine the most likely temperature range for preservation in the archaeological record. Such studies have been lacking for squash seeds. A series of heating experiments with seeds harvested from fruits of three squash species indicate that unlike maize kernels and bean seeds, charring does not enhance squash seed preservation. The recovery of one or a few charred squash seeds from a site likely represents a high degree of use.
PLoS ONE, Oct 26, 2022
Despite advances in techniques, methods, and theory, northeastern North American archaeologists c... more Despite advances in techniques, methods, and theory, northeastern North American archaeologists continue to use early to mid-twentieth century culture historical taxa as units of analysis and narrative. There is a distinct need to move away from this archaeological practice to enable fuller understandings of past human lives. One tool that enables such a move is Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates, which provides a means of constructing continuous chronologies. A large dataset of radiocarbon dates for late prehistoric (ca AD 900/1000-1650) sites in the lower upper Ohio River basin in southwestern Pennsylvania and adjacent portions of Maryland, Ohio, and West Virginia is used here as an example. The results allow a preliminary assessment of how the settlement plans of contemporaneous villages varied considerably, reflecting decisions of the village occupants how to structure built environments to meet their needs.
Ethnobiology Letters, Oct 24, 2022
The ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and contemporary literatures all suggest that common bean (Pha... more The ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and contemporary literatures all suggest that common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) was an important component of Northern Iroquoian agronomic systems and diets. Seemingly at odds with this is the sparse occurrence of whole and partial common bean seeds on fourteenth through seventeenth century AD village sites. The recovery of a large quantity of whole and partial bean seeds from the ancestral Oneida Diable site, dated here to between AD 1583 and 1626 with a Bayesian model using seven new AMS radiocarbon dates, provides clues as to when large quantities of rehydrated/cooked common bean seeds may occur in the archaeological record.
Open Archaeology, Aug 16, 2022
The evolution of maize as an organism, its spread as an agricultural crop, and the evolution of N... more The evolution of maize as an organism, its spread as an agricultural crop, and the evolution of Native American maize-based agricultural systems are topics of research throughout the Western Hemisphere. Maize was adopted in Northern Iroquoia, comprising portions of present-day New York, Ontario, and Québec by 300 BC. By the fourteenth-century AD, maize accounted for >50 to >70% of ancestral Iroquoian diets. Was this major commitment to maize agriculture a gradual incremental evolution, or was there a rapid increase in commitment to maize-based agriculture around AD 1000 as traditional archaeological narratives suggest? Summed probability distributions of direct radiocarbon dates on maize macrobotanical remains and cooking residues containing maize phytoliths combined with maize macrobotanical maize densities at sites and previously published stable isotope values on human bone collagen used with Bayesian dietary mixing models and cooking residues show an initial increase in maize use at AD 1200-1250 and a subsequent increase at AD 1400-1450. These results indicate maize history in Northern Iroquoia followed an exponential growth curve, consistent with Rindos' (1984) model of agricultural evolution.
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Books by John P Hart
This thesis was the first publication on Washington Square. In 1998 Corbin and I published an article in the Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society that summarized excavations by the SFASU field school from 1979 through 1982 and the Texas Archaeological Annual Field School in 1985. By that time, Corbin had done research that expanded our knowledge about the site and impacts to it during the development of the City of Nacogdoches. In 2009 Perttula published an analysis of artifacts recovered from the site during the 1985 Texas Archaeological Society Field School in the Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society. In 2010, Perttula and colleagues published their documentation of the grave goods from Washington Square done as part of SFASU’s compliance with the NAGPRA. In that volume, published by SFASU Press, Perttula et al. provided detailed descriptions and color photographs of each pottery vessel and other items recovered from the graves including shell beads, shell pendent fragments, and a lithic cache. Selden’s 2010 master’s thesis provided a GIS-based analysis of Washington Square, which was summarized in a 2011 Caddo Archeology Journal article. Also in 2010 Pertulla and I published an article in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology that identified a Southeast Ceremonial Complex style zone in Northeast Texas based largely on Washington Square and the pottery vessels from Feature 95.
What this thesis represents is a reflection of my training and thinking to that time. Those who know my body of work over the intervening 30-plus years may be surprised that I contextualized the thesis within a standard culture historic framework and that a large part of it is devoted to the formal description of new tentative pottery types. Much of my work over the past two decades has sought to highlight how such constructs are detrimental to explorations of the past. At this early stage of my career, however, I believed that the description of new types was the best way to communicate the uniqueness of the Washington Square pottery. Also at that time I was beginning to explore anthropological and archaeological theory and was quite taken by Marvin Harris’ (1979) book Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. I attempted to integrate some of Harris’s concepts with those of Krieger (1944) and Rouse (1960) on types and modes, respectively, to which Corbin had introduced me. Whether I succeeded or not is open to debate, but what strikes me is that even at this early stage in my career I was concerned with variation in artifact form and its implications for understanding past human behaviors.
What I remember most about the research and writing process is the firm yet gentle guiding hand of Jim Corbin. He was always willing to sit and discuss issues that were puzzling me, and I always walked away from those discussions with a better understanding of the issues at hand. I also remember how gracious Jim was in allowing me to transport from SFASU portions of the pottery collection at any given time to work on at NLU. Jim and I always planned to write a comprehensive publication on the Washington Square pottery, incorporating my work with analyses of collections made during later excavations. Various factors prevented us from doing so, and our plans to collaborate on such a publication ended with Jim’s untimely death in 2004. My own responsibilities at the New York State Museum have prevented me from pursuing our goal alone. What this volume does, then, is make available to a wider audience information on the pottery collection unearthed during the first three field seasons at the site. Washington Square is a critical site within the southwestern distribution of the pre-Contact Caddo sites and their distinctive material culture. Symbols on the fine-ware pottery vessels excavated from the two burials are key to understanding how fourteenth century A.D. Caddo people in Northeast Texas participated in broader Southeastern socio-religious traditions while maintaining their own distinctive identities (Hart and Perttula 2010). This thesis constituted a first step toward that understanding.
I am grateful to Dr. Jerry Williams for suggesting and making possible the publication of this volume through SFASU Press. I am also grateful to Dr. Tim Perttula for sparking a renewed interest in me for Washington Square specifically and Caddo archaeology generally. Finally, I am forever in debt to Dr. Jim Corbin, who set me on the path to a lifetime of archaeological research.
John P. Hart
Albany, New York
May 2013
References Cited
Corbin, James A., and John P. Hart
1998 The Washington Square Mound Site: A Middle Caddo Mound Complex in South Central East Texas. Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 69: 47–78.
Harris, Marvin
1979 Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. Random House, New York.
Hart, John P.
1982 An Analysis of the Aboriginal Ceramics from the Washington Square Mound Site. Unpublished M.S. thesis, Northeast Louisiana University, Monroe.
Hart, John P., and Timothy K. Perttula.
2010 The Washington Square Mound Site and a Southeastern Ceremonial Complex Style Zone among the Caddo of Northeastern Texas. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 35(2):199–228.
Krieger, Alex D.
1944 The Typological Concept. American Antiquity 9:271–286.
Perutula, Timothy K.
2009 Analysis of the Caddo Archeological Materials from the 1985 Texas Archeological Society Field School at the Washington Square Mound Site, Nacogdoches County, Texas. Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 80:145–193.
Perttula, Timothy K., Mark Walters, Bo Nelson, and Robert Cast
2010 Documentation of Associated and Unassociated Caddo Funerary Objects in the Stephen F. Austin State University Collections, Nacogdoches, Texas. Stephen F. Austin State University Press, Nacogdoches, Texas.
Rouse, Irving
1960 The Classification of Artifacts in Archaeology. American Antiquity 25:313–323.
Selden, Robert Z., Jr.
2010 Toward a Unique Understanding of Washington Square: Digitization and Spatial Representation of a Caddo Mound Site in East Texas. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas.
2011 Digital Preservation and Spatial Representation at the Washington Square Mound Site (41NA49), Nacogdoches County, Texas. Caddo Archeology Journal 21:129–145.
The symposium comprised nine papers, the abstracts of which follow this preface. Also included in the symposium was a discussion of the papers by James Bradley. The papers included reports on excavations at specific sites, regional settlement pattern analyses, lithic sourcing, ceramic analysis, and a summary of results from an ongoing research program involving a variety of analyses. The symposium certainly captured a wide range of research that demonstrated the dynamic state of archaeological investigations within New York. The present volume comprises updates of six of those papers, an introduction, and an eighth paper that was not presented in the symposium. As such, the volume provides a strong sense of the state of archaeological research on the early Late Prehistoric period in New York at the beginning of the 2010s."
With so many contributions, we decided to organize the colloquium so that the presentations were grouped according to coherent themes. While sorting through the titles and abstracts, it became clear that there were three natural, although not mutually exclusive, groups that reflected recurring themes in Chuck’s research: soldiers, cities, and landscapes. This organization worked well and we decided to maintain it in the present volume.
This volume comprises chapters based on 16 of the colloquium presentations. Also included are a remembrance of Chuck’s career by Karen Hartgen, Chuck’s wife; a bibliography of Chuck’s publications; and a foreword by Charles Orser, Chuck’s successor as Curator of Historical Archaeology at the State Museum.
The symposium brought together many of the same participants in the original symposiumand volume.Most of the symposium participants were able to contribute chapters to the present volume. These include Nancy Asch Sidell, John P. Hart, Mark A. McConaughy, Katy R. Serpa, Elizabeth S. Chilton, Jeffrey Bendremer and Elaine Thomas, Tonya Largy and E. Pierre Morenon, Michael Deal and SaraHalwas, and Jack Rossen. In addition, Iwas able to solicit papers from a number of individuals who had not participated in the symposium, but are doing important paleoethnobotanical research in the Northeast. These are Eleanore A. Reber; Ninian Stein; Tim Messner, Ruth Dickau, and Jeff Harbison; William A. Lovis and G. William Monaghan; and Robert H. Pihl, Stephen G. Monckton, DavidA. Robertson, and Robert F.Williamson. Finally, John Edward Terrell contributed a commentary on the volume that places the practice of paleoethnobotany in the Northeast in a broader perspective. Collectively, the contributions by these authors provide a sense for the breadth of paleoethnobotanical research being carried out in the Northeast. They also provide a benchmark, as did the 1999 volume, by which progress in the field can be measured in the decades to come.
Following an introductory chapter by David Cremeens and me, the twelve substantive chapters in this volume provide summaries of current knowledge of the deglaciation of the Northeast and geoarchaeological case studies in upland and alluvial settings. The geographical coverage of the chapters includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England. By themselves, the chapters show how detailed geoarchaeological investigations are critical to our understanding of the archaeological record in formerly glaciated landscapes. The volume as a whole fills an important gap in the geoarchaeological literature: until now, there have been no edited volumes devoted exclusively to the geoarchaeology of the Northeast. By filling this gap, I hope that the volume will encourage additional geoarchaeological investigations in the region."
Each chapter includes definitions of related key words. Because the same key words may have the same or different meanings in different conceptual contexts, many of these key words are addressed in more than one chapter. In addition to exploring key concepts, collectively the book's chapters show the broad range of ideas and opinions in this intellectual arena today. This volume reflectsand clarifiesdebate today on the role of Darwinism in modern archaeology, and by doing so, may help shape the directions that future work in archaeology will take.""
Journal Articles by John P Hart
Resumen Les archéologues travaillant dans l'est de l'Amérique du Nord qualifient généralement l'agriculture à base de maïs pratiquée par les Autochtones avant et après le contact avec les Européens d'agriculture itinérante ou de culture sur brûlis. Sur la base d'une comparaison avec l'agriculture européenne, il est généralement admis que l'absence de charrue, d'animaux de trait et de fumier animal a entraîné un épuisement rapide de l'azote du sol. Les agriculteurs autochtones devaient donc déplacer fréquemment leurs champs. Dans l'Iroquoianie nordique, l'épuisement de la fertilité du sol est souvent cité comme l'une des raisons pour lesquelles les villages étaient déplacés tous les 20 à 40 ans. Une analyse récente des rapports de δ 15 N dans les restes macrobotaniques de maïs de l'Iroquoianie nordique suggère toutefois que les agriculteurs iroquoiens étaient en mesure de maintenir l'azote du sol dans leurs champs de maïs. Une analyse poussée des rapports de δ 15 N des grains de maïs provenant de trois villages mohawks ancestraux, présentée ici, indique que les agriculteurs de ces villages ont maintenu l'azote du sol tout au long de la période d'occupation de leurs villages. Elle suggère en outre que l'agronomie iroquoienne pré-contact était compatible avec les pratiques contemporaines de l'agriculture de conservation.
This thesis was the first publication on Washington Square. In 1998 Corbin and I published an article in the Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society that summarized excavations by the SFASU field school from 1979 through 1982 and the Texas Archaeological Annual Field School in 1985. By that time, Corbin had done research that expanded our knowledge about the site and impacts to it during the development of the City of Nacogdoches. In 2009 Perttula published an analysis of artifacts recovered from the site during the 1985 Texas Archaeological Society Field School in the Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society. In 2010, Perttula and colleagues published their documentation of the grave goods from Washington Square done as part of SFASU’s compliance with the NAGPRA. In that volume, published by SFASU Press, Perttula et al. provided detailed descriptions and color photographs of each pottery vessel and other items recovered from the graves including shell beads, shell pendent fragments, and a lithic cache. Selden’s 2010 master’s thesis provided a GIS-based analysis of Washington Square, which was summarized in a 2011 Caddo Archeology Journal article. Also in 2010 Pertulla and I published an article in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology that identified a Southeast Ceremonial Complex style zone in Northeast Texas based largely on Washington Square and the pottery vessels from Feature 95.
What this thesis represents is a reflection of my training and thinking to that time. Those who know my body of work over the intervening 30-plus years may be surprised that I contextualized the thesis within a standard culture historic framework and that a large part of it is devoted to the formal description of new tentative pottery types. Much of my work over the past two decades has sought to highlight how such constructs are detrimental to explorations of the past. At this early stage of my career, however, I believed that the description of new types was the best way to communicate the uniqueness of the Washington Square pottery. Also at that time I was beginning to explore anthropological and archaeological theory and was quite taken by Marvin Harris’ (1979) book Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. I attempted to integrate some of Harris’s concepts with those of Krieger (1944) and Rouse (1960) on types and modes, respectively, to which Corbin had introduced me. Whether I succeeded or not is open to debate, but what strikes me is that even at this early stage in my career I was concerned with variation in artifact form and its implications for understanding past human behaviors.
What I remember most about the research and writing process is the firm yet gentle guiding hand of Jim Corbin. He was always willing to sit and discuss issues that were puzzling me, and I always walked away from those discussions with a better understanding of the issues at hand. I also remember how gracious Jim was in allowing me to transport from SFASU portions of the pottery collection at any given time to work on at NLU. Jim and I always planned to write a comprehensive publication on the Washington Square pottery, incorporating my work with analyses of collections made during later excavations. Various factors prevented us from doing so, and our plans to collaborate on such a publication ended with Jim’s untimely death in 2004. My own responsibilities at the New York State Museum have prevented me from pursuing our goal alone. What this volume does, then, is make available to a wider audience information on the pottery collection unearthed during the first three field seasons at the site. Washington Square is a critical site within the southwestern distribution of the pre-Contact Caddo sites and their distinctive material culture. Symbols on the fine-ware pottery vessels excavated from the two burials are key to understanding how fourteenth century A.D. Caddo people in Northeast Texas participated in broader Southeastern socio-religious traditions while maintaining their own distinctive identities (Hart and Perttula 2010). This thesis constituted a first step toward that understanding.
I am grateful to Dr. Jerry Williams for suggesting and making possible the publication of this volume through SFASU Press. I am also grateful to Dr. Tim Perttula for sparking a renewed interest in me for Washington Square specifically and Caddo archaeology generally. Finally, I am forever in debt to Dr. Jim Corbin, who set me on the path to a lifetime of archaeological research.
John P. Hart
Albany, New York
May 2013
References Cited
Corbin, James A., and John P. Hart
1998 The Washington Square Mound Site: A Middle Caddo Mound Complex in South Central East Texas. Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 69: 47–78.
Harris, Marvin
1979 Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. Random House, New York.
Hart, John P.
1982 An Analysis of the Aboriginal Ceramics from the Washington Square Mound Site. Unpublished M.S. thesis, Northeast Louisiana University, Monroe.
Hart, John P., and Timothy K. Perttula.
2010 The Washington Square Mound Site and a Southeastern Ceremonial Complex Style Zone among the Caddo of Northeastern Texas. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 35(2):199–228.
Krieger, Alex D.
1944 The Typological Concept. American Antiquity 9:271–286.
Perutula, Timothy K.
2009 Analysis of the Caddo Archeological Materials from the 1985 Texas Archeological Society Field School at the Washington Square Mound Site, Nacogdoches County, Texas. Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 80:145–193.
Perttula, Timothy K., Mark Walters, Bo Nelson, and Robert Cast
2010 Documentation of Associated and Unassociated Caddo Funerary Objects in the Stephen F. Austin State University Collections, Nacogdoches, Texas. Stephen F. Austin State University Press, Nacogdoches, Texas.
Rouse, Irving
1960 The Classification of Artifacts in Archaeology. American Antiquity 25:313–323.
Selden, Robert Z., Jr.
2010 Toward a Unique Understanding of Washington Square: Digitization and Spatial Representation of a Caddo Mound Site in East Texas. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas.
2011 Digital Preservation and Spatial Representation at the Washington Square Mound Site (41NA49), Nacogdoches County, Texas. Caddo Archeology Journal 21:129–145.
The symposium comprised nine papers, the abstracts of which follow this preface. Also included in the symposium was a discussion of the papers by James Bradley. The papers included reports on excavations at specific sites, regional settlement pattern analyses, lithic sourcing, ceramic analysis, and a summary of results from an ongoing research program involving a variety of analyses. The symposium certainly captured a wide range of research that demonstrated the dynamic state of archaeological investigations within New York. The present volume comprises updates of six of those papers, an introduction, and an eighth paper that was not presented in the symposium. As such, the volume provides a strong sense of the state of archaeological research on the early Late Prehistoric period in New York at the beginning of the 2010s."
With so many contributions, we decided to organize the colloquium so that the presentations were grouped according to coherent themes. While sorting through the titles and abstracts, it became clear that there were three natural, although not mutually exclusive, groups that reflected recurring themes in Chuck’s research: soldiers, cities, and landscapes. This organization worked well and we decided to maintain it in the present volume.
This volume comprises chapters based on 16 of the colloquium presentations. Also included are a remembrance of Chuck’s career by Karen Hartgen, Chuck’s wife; a bibliography of Chuck’s publications; and a foreword by Charles Orser, Chuck’s successor as Curator of Historical Archaeology at the State Museum.
The symposium brought together many of the same participants in the original symposiumand volume.Most of the symposium participants were able to contribute chapters to the present volume. These include Nancy Asch Sidell, John P. Hart, Mark A. McConaughy, Katy R. Serpa, Elizabeth S. Chilton, Jeffrey Bendremer and Elaine Thomas, Tonya Largy and E. Pierre Morenon, Michael Deal and SaraHalwas, and Jack Rossen. In addition, Iwas able to solicit papers from a number of individuals who had not participated in the symposium, but are doing important paleoethnobotanical research in the Northeast. These are Eleanore A. Reber; Ninian Stein; Tim Messner, Ruth Dickau, and Jeff Harbison; William A. Lovis and G. William Monaghan; and Robert H. Pihl, Stephen G. Monckton, DavidA. Robertson, and Robert F.Williamson. Finally, John Edward Terrell contributed a commentary on the volume that places the practice of paleoethnobotany in the Northeast in a broader perspective. Collectively, the contributions by these authors provide a sense for the breadth of paleoethnobotanical research being carried out in the Northeast. They also provide a benchmark, as did the 1999 volume, by which progress in the field can be measured in the decades to come.
Following an introductory chapter by David Cremeens and me, the twelve substantive chapters in this volume provide summaries of current knowledge of the deglaciation of the Northeast and geoarchaeological case studies in upland and alluvial settings. The geographical coverage of the chapters includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England. By themselves, the chapters show how detailed geoarchaeological investigations are critical to our understanding of the archaeological record in formerly glaciated landscapes. The volume as a whole fills an important gap in the geoarchaeological literature: until now, there have been no edited volumes devoted exclusively to the geoarchaeology of the Northeast. By filling this gap, I hope that the volume will encourage additional geoarchaeological investigations in the region."
Each chapter includes definitions of related key words. Because the same key words may have the same or different meanings in different conceptual contexts, many of these key words are addressed in more than one chapter. In addition to exploring key concepts, collectively the book's chapters show the broad range of ideas and opinions in this intellectual arena today. This volume reflectsand clarifiesdebate today on the role of Darwinism in modern archaeology, and by doing so, may help shape the directions that future work in archaeology will take.""
Resumen Les archéologues travaillant dans l'est de l'Amérique du Nord qualifient généralement l'agriculture à base de maïs pratiquée par les Autochtones avant et après le contact avec les Européens d'agriculture itinérante ou de culture sur brûlis. Sur la base d'une comparaison avec l'agriculture européenne, il est généralement admis que l'absence de charrue, d'animaux de trait et de fumier animal a entraîné un épuisement rapide de l'azote du sol. Les agriculteurs autochtones devaient donc déplacer fréquemment leurs champs. Dans l'Iroquoianie nordique, l'épuisement de la fertilité du sol est souvent cité comme l'une des raisons pour lesquelles les villages étaient déplacés tous les 20 à 40 ans. Une analyse récente des rapports de δ 15 N dans les restes macrobotaniques de maïs de l'Iroquoianie nordique suggère toutefois que les agriculteurs iroquoiens étaient en mesure de maintenir l'azote du sol dans leurs champs de maïs. Une analyse poussée des rapports de δ 15 N des grains de maïs provenant de trois villages mohawks ancestraux, présentée ici, indique que les agriculteurs de ces villages ont maintenu l'azote du sol tout au long de la période d'occupation de leurs villages. Elle suggère en outre que l'agronomie iroquoienne pré-contact était compatible avec les pratiques contemporaines de l'agriculture de conservation.
However, archaeological evidence from strata pre-dating the Fort’s construction and Bayesian analysis of a series of radiocarbon dates from these strata establish a probable location of Dutch activities. These results suggest that the Fort was sited at a place of established Dutch-Native American interactions, a location utilized by Native Americans for centuries prior to the arrival of
the Dutch.
All late prehistoric subsistence-settlement systems in the Eastern Woodlands should be explainable under a single model. The distribution of material-culture traits used to define culture types should have no bearing on how subsistence-settlement systems are modeled. To this end, a model is developed based on microeconomic theory, under which subsistence-settlement systems adjust to local environmental and social risks and occur on gradients of intensification that cross-cut culture-type boundaries. Prevailing models of Middle Mississippian and Upper Mississippian adaptive types can be subsumed under this general model Subsistence-settlement systems in these areas relied upon varying levels of maize-based agricultural production and various locally-obtainable wild resources depending upon local environmental and social factors. Rather than distinct types, variation within and between these areas occurred on gradients in response to local conditions.
To further demonstrate the utility of this approach, the late prehistoric subsistence-settlement systems of the lower Upper Ohio Riven basin are examined. The Monongahela adaptive type has been defined for this area based upon an apparent focus upon upland villages and intensive maize agriculture. A series of hypotheses derived from the general model are tested with excavation data from this area. Results indicate that rather than a distinctive adaptive type, the subsistence-settlement systems varied both spatially and temporally as a result of local environmental and social factors.
The change in paradigms during the 1960s was not accompanied with a change in systematics. In effect, the new paradigm was imposed upon categories established under a paradigm with a very different conceptualization of culture. A revision of these systematics is required in order to reflect the variation evident in prehistoric subsistence-settlement systems at the local and regional levels.
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https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0226334
the analysis of charred cooking residues encrusted on pottery. A multifaceted research strategy of bulk 13C assays coupled
with accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon data and microbotanical evidence can yield coherent regional maize use
histories. Bulk 13C assay interpretation complications include (1) variations among vessels by site, (2) a potential for false
negatives, and (3) a wide range of variation potentially present for any given time period. Regional histories using this
approach can be quite variable without appropriate use of multiple lines of evidence.
supported by their disappearance in the mid-sixteenth century. In this paper, Social Network Analysis of
Iroquoian ceramic collar motifs and two characteristic St. Lawrence ceramic types repositions this group, most
fundamentally the Jefferson County Iroquoians, as a central and integral constituent of a highly fluid panIroquoian
ceramic social signalling system that, we argue, reflects changing socio-political relationships.
Specifically, we suggest that the strong social ties of the late fifteenth century may be reflected in subsequent
distinct movements and integrations of St. Lawrence Iroquoian peoples with Ancestral Wendat and
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) communities.
supported by their disappearance in the mid-sixteenth century. In this paper, Social Network Analysis of
Iroquoian ceramic collar motifs and two characteristic St. Lawrence ceramic types repositions this group, most
fundamentally the Jefferson County Iroquoians, as a central and integral constituent of a highly fluid pan-
Iroquoian ceramic social signalling system that, we argue, reflects changing socio-political relationships.
Specifically, we suggest that the strong social ties of the late fifteenth century may be reflected in subsequent
distinct movements and integrations of St. Lawrence Iroquoian peoples with Ancestral Wendat and
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) communities.