John P Hart

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 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 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."

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania is best known for its pre-Clovis occupation. Potentially important for later times is the recovery of maize macrobotanical remains from higher strata dating as early as the 4th century BC based on radiometric radiocarbon (14 C) dates on wood charcoal. These remains have been considered to be potentially as old as the earliest microbotanical evidence for maize in Michigan, New York and Québec recovered from directly dated charred cooking residues adhering to pottery. The results of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating 17 samples from maize specimens from all Meadowcroft strata producing maize, indicate that the specimens originated from historical use of the shelter, most likely after AD 1800. These results further emphasize the need to obtain direct dates on maize macrobotanical remains recovered from early contexts prior to the development and common use of AMS dating.

The area between the Montezuma marshes and Oneida Lake has one of the densest concentrations of Indigenous sites in New York. Many of these are located in the northern portion of Onondaga County between the well-known locales of Jacks Reef and Brewerton. Several of these sites, excavated by William Ritchie, James Tuck, and others, have provided the basis for much of our understanding of the Indigenous presence on and uses of these riverine lowlands during the Holocene. These Seneca River sites provide a different perspective on patterns of settlement and resource use in this portion of the Lake Ontario Plain between approximately AD 1000 and 1600. They also serve as a counterpoint to the better-known Onondaga-related Iroquoian sites located in the southern portion of Onondaga County, especially in the Pompey Hills.

Bean (Phaseolus L. spp.) is one of three crops along with maize (Zea mays L. ssp. mays) and squash (Cucurbita L. spp.) that dominated Native American agricultural systems throughout the Western Hemisphere. Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) was the species present in northeastern North America and was the last of the three crops to be adopted there. Common bean macrobotanical remains become archaeologically visible as charred whole seeds and more typically cotyledons around cal. CE 1250. After that time, common bean is scare in the archaeological record, especially when compared to charred maize kernels. This has led paleoethnobotanists to suggest charred common bean seeds do not preserve well because of physical changes during charring. The results of charring experiments presented here indicate that cotyledons of charred dried common bean seeds heated at temperatures between 220 • C and 260 • C maintain strength, identifying characteristics, are little changed in size, and so are likely to survive and be identified. Common bean seeds carbonized at higher temperatures lose substantial mass, exhibit surficial fissures, and consequently lose strength, suggesting they are unlikely to survive intact if at all in the archaeological record. Rehydrated seeds lose considerable strength at all temperatures and are less likely than carbonize dried beans to survive in the archaeological record.

Emerson and colleagues (2020) provide new isotopic evidence on directly dated human bone from the Greater Cahokia region. They conclude that maize was not adopted in the region prior to AD 900. Placing this result within the larger context of maize histories in northeastern North America, they suggest that evidence from the lower Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River valley for earlier maize is “enigmatic” and “perplexing.” Here, we review that evidence, accumulated over the course of several decades, and question why Emerson and colleagues felt the need to offer opinions on that evidence without providing any new contradictory empirical evidence for the region.

We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations in adjacent drainages as opposed to within drainage-specific sequences, providing evidence for west-to-east population movement, especially as conflict between Wendat and Haudenosaunee populations escalated in the sixteenth century. These results suggest that although coalescence may have initially involved the incorporation of peoples from microscale (local) networks, populations originating among wider mesoscale (subregional) networks contributed to later coalescent communities. These findings challenge previous models of village relocation and settlement aggregation that oversimplified these processes.

All archaeologists use suppositions in their narratives to bridge gaps in empirical knowledge. If these suppositions are reasonable, they often become parts of regional archaeological traditions. However, such suppositions must be testable as new methods and techniques create new empirical evidence. In ancestral Mohawk Iroquoian archaeology, three village sites in the Caroga Creek drainage, thought to date to the sixteenth-century AD, have been accepted as a chronological sequence of villages occupied by the same community over the course of several generations. As reported here, however, social network analysis based on pottery collar design motifs demonstrates it is unlikely the sites represent such a sequence. Free access through 12/26/2020 at: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bzsh-JVboiuJ

Native Americans developed agronomic practices throughout the Western Hemisphere adapted to regional climate, edaphic conditions, and the extent of dependence on agriculture for subsistence. These included the mounding or "corn hill" system in northeastern North America. Iroquoian language speakers of present-day New York, USA, and Ontario and Qué bec, Canada were among those who used this system. While well-known, there has been little archaeological documentation of the system. As a result, there is scant archaeological evidence on how Iroquoian farmers maintained soil fertility in their often-extensive agricultural fields. Using δ 15 N values obtained on fifteenth-and sixteenth-century AD maize kernels from archaeological sites in New York and Ontario, adjusted to take into account changes that result from charring as determined through experiments, we demonstrate that Iroquoian farmers were successful at maintaining nitrogen in their agricultural fields. These results add to our archaeological knowledge of Iroquoian agronomic practices. Our results also indicate the potential value of obtaining δ 15 N values on archaeological maize in the investigation of Native American agronomic practices.

European metal artifacts in assemblages from sites predating the physical presence of Europeans in Northern Iroquoia in present-day New York, USA and southern Ontario, Can-ada have been used as chronological markers for the mid-sixteenth century AD. In the Mohawk River Valley of New York, European metal artifacts at sites pre-dating the physical presence of Europeans have been used by archaeologists as a terminus post quem (TPQ) of 1525 to 1550 in regional chronologies. This has been done under the assumption that these metals did not begin to circulate until after sustained European presence on the northern Atlantic coast beginning in 1517. Here we use Bayesian chronological modeling of a large set of radiocarbon dates to refine our understanding of early European metal circulation in the Mohawk River Valley. Our results indicate that European iron and cuprous metals arrived earlier than previously thought, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, and cannot be used as TPQs. Together with recent Bayesian chronological analyses of radiocarbon dates from several sites in southern Ontario, these results add to our evolving understanding of intra-regional variation in Northern Iroquoia of sixteenth-century AD circulation and adoption of European goods.

Freshwater reservoir offsets (FROs) occur when AMS dates on charred, encrusted food residues on pottery predate a pot's chronological context because of the presence of ancient carbon from aquatic resources such as fish. Research over the past two decades has demonstrated that FROs vary widely within and between water bodies and between fish in those water bodies. Lipid analyses have identified aquatic biomarkers that can be extracted from cooking residues as potential evidence for FROs. However, lacking has been efforts to determine empirically how much fish with FROs needs to be cooked in a pot with other resources to result in significant FRO on encrusted cooking residue and what percentage of fish C in a residue is needed to result in the recovery of aquatic biomarkers. Here we provide preliminary assessments of both issues. Our results indicate that in historically-contingent, high alkalinity environments <20% C from fish may result in a statistically significant FRO, but that biomarkers for aquatic resources may be present in the absence of a significant FRO.

The freshwater reservoir effect (FRE) hypothesis suggests that ancient carbon from aquatic organisms incorporated into AMS-dated charred, encrusted, cooking residues on interior pottery walls produces old apparent 14C ages. This hypothesis has been used primarily in northern European final Mesolithic contexts to explain 14C ages on cooking residues that are thought to be too old relative to 14C ages obtained on terrestrial samples, resulting in so-called freshwater reservoir offsets (FRO). More recently the hypothesis has been cited in interpretations of 14C ages from residues in the North American Plains and elsewhere. Here I present a model in an Excel spreadsheet that allows calculation of FROs with varying inputs of dead carbon and aquatic and terrestrial resources.

The earliest widespread pottery in northeastern North America is known as Vinette 1, a designation made by Ritchie and MacNeish (1949) over 60 years ago. While variation exists within this type (Taché 2005), external and internal cordmarked surfaces, thick walls, and large crushed-rock temper generally characterize this pottery. The history of this pottery, including its inception, geographical spread, temporal overlap with steatite vessels, and eventual replacement by other pottery technologies, is far from clear. In this article, we examine the existing database of radiocarbon assays associated with Vinette 1 pottery and steatite vessels, perform a chronometric hygiene of those age estimates, and introduce 21 new AMS assays on charred cooking residues adhering to Vinette 1 sherd interiors. The results suggest a much more temporally restricted history for Vinette 1 pottery technology and a long period of coexistence with steatite vessels. However, the small number of reliable age estimates available for both  technologies prevents a detailed assessment of their respective histories.

The histories of maize in northeastern North America are not well understood at the subregional level. The complexity of formation processes for various lines of evidence for maize use requires the application of many analytical methods and techniques to produce data on subregional maize histories. The present analysis uses bulk δ13C values on directly dated charred encrusted cooking residues to provide the first direct correlation of water-based maize cooking to trends in pottery wall thinning. The results add to the growing body of evidence for the history of maize use in central New York.

A basic premise of archaeology is that the more frequently two human populations interacted with one another the more similar was their material culture. A corollary of this is that the closer two human populations are to one another geographically, the more frequently they will interact. This corollary has been expressed in the archaeological study of northern Iroquoia since the 1950s on the basis of historical ethnic territories. The expectation has been that after ca. A.D. 1000 to 1300 there was more interaction between village populations within these historical territories than between village populations located in different historical territories. Here I test this corollary with pottery decoration data from 114 northern Iroquoian village sites dating from c. A.D. 1350 to 1640. Results indicate that geographic distance has little effect on pottery assemblage similarity.

Molecular DNA analyses of the New World grass (Poaceae) genus Zea, comprising five species, has resolved taxonomic issues including the most likely teosinte progenitor (Zea mays ssp. parviglumis) of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays). However, archaeologically, little is known about the use of teosinte by humans both prior to and after the domestication of maize. One potential line of evidence to explore these relationships is opaline phytoliths produced in teosinte fruit cases. Here we use multidimensional scaling and multiple discriminant analyses to determine if rondel phytolith assemblages from teosinte fruitcases reflect teosinte taxonomy. Our results indicate that rondel phytolith assemblages from the various taxa, including subspecies, can be statistically discriminated. This indicates that it will be possible to investigate the archaeological histories of teosinte use pending the recovery of appropriate samples.

Pots as tools is a concept that has been widely accepted and developed since Braun’s classic 1983 publication. However, in northeastern North America archaeologists continue to use pottery primarily as an aid to culture history and research problems based thereon. In central New York State it has been postulated that a change in pottery forming technique heralds the onset of Iroquoian pottery traditions at around AD 1000. Empirical data on pottery forming and two other pottery traits do not support this postulation. Rather the trends in these traits are consistent with social learning theory and changes in mobility and population aggregation. Following Engelbrecht (1999, 2003) we suggest that a more fruitful approach to understanding the evolution of northern Iroquoian groups is to be found in ethnogenesis theory as described by Moore (1994, 2001).

In the investigation of the dispersal of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) from south-central Mexico to the northern and southern limits of agriculture in the Western Hemisphere archaeologists and paleoethnobotanists are increasingly turning to the microbotanical record. Recent analysis of phytolith assemblages from charred cooking residues on pottery sherds in central New York recovered using 209 rondel phytolith variables has identified maize as early as 2270 ± 35 B.P. In this article we use discriminant analysis to re-classify these rondel phytolith assemblages resulting in only seven variables. The results are consistent with those achieved earlier using many more variables and a less formal statistical approach in terms of classification and in similarity of the original and reduced data matrix as seen by the Mantel test and cluster analyses.

The Memorial Park site (36CN164) is a deeply stratified, multicomponent prehistoric site on a Holocene terrace of the West Branch Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania. Archaeological excavations and geoarchaeological analyses revealed silt loam to loam overbank sediments, punctuated by seven buried soils spanning a time interval of 7090-1480 yrs B.P. Changes in the buried surficial environments and soils were the result of the late Pleistocene to Holocene channel dynamics of the West Branch and the formation three landforms: the evolving Port Huron terrace, an abandoned channel remnant, and a natural levee. The eastward migration of the West Branch meander channel resulted in lateral and vertical variability in the distinctness of the buried soils. Older, more stable geomorphic surfaces prevailed on the western portion of the site, defining the Port Huron terrace, a pedocomplex of a fragipan Btx horizon superimposed over one or more weakly developed soils. The Port Huron terrace was the primary focus of occupation during the mid-Holocene. Younger, less stable geomorphic surfaces characterize the eastern portions of the site and define the abandoned channel remnant and the natural levee. These landforms are characterized with thin, diffuse Ab horizons associated with weak B horizons and C horizons. The natural levee and channel remnant were not intensively used until ca. 4500-5000 B.P. when these landforms first afforded elevated, stable loci for human activity. The upper two buried soils extend across the entire site and contain evidence of site-wide late Holocene occupations. These uppermost soils formed in sediments that blanketed the terrace-channel-levee topography.

A primary focus of research on plant use by Native Americans in temperate north-eastern North America has been on the adoption of agricultural crops domesticated elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. The adoption of the triad maize, common bean, and squash, particularly, has been seen as transformative—changing mobile hunter-gatherers into sedentary or semi-sedentary agriculturists. Based on a decade and a half of research, focused on central New York, it is now established that the three crops have separate histories and that their respective adoptions did not lead to major changes in subsistence systems. Much of this shift is based on microbotanical research. Intensive sampling and analysis of macrobotanical remains have similarly extended our knowledge of wild plant use in the North-east. There is a distinct need to build multiple lines of evidence across the North-east in order to build more comprehensive understandings of crop histories.

"The adoptions of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) and common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) in the American Midwest remain critical lines of inquiry as the articles in this volume of Midwest Archaeologial Conference Inc. Occasional Papers amply demonstrate. Here I provide a critical assessment of current lines of investigation of crop adoptions and agricultural evolution. I argue that three changes are needed in order to build clearer understandings of these important issues: (1) the fuller integration of biological and social theories, (2) the adoption of probabilistic methods, and (3) the use of multiple lines of evidence."

Owasco is a culture-historic taxon originally defined by Arthur C. Parker and later refined by William A. Ritchie in the first half of the twentieth century. This taxon was at the heart of a debate on northern Iroquoian origins in the 1990s and early 2000s. In a 2003 article Brumbach and I announced "The Death of Owasco" based on an analysis of the histories of the traits used to establish the boundary between Owasco culture and the earlier Point Peninsula culture. Here I review the research on these traits since that publication that indicate an even more extended and complex set of independent histories. I reiterate the need for archaeologists to move away from culture-historic taxa as units of analysis, interpretation, and summary.

Evidence for the histories of maize, bean, and squash in New York and the greater northeastern North America has changed dramatically over the past decade. Here I review the new lines of evidence and three models that can lead to better understandings of that new evidence.

At European Contact, eastern North American Indian agriculture featured the New World cosmopolitan “three sisters:” maize, beans, and squash. Maize and beans had diffused from the tropics as domesticates, as did some squashes. The dominance of this triad in temperate eastern North America was recent. Maize became an important crop only about 1000 years ago, and beans entered the region at 850 b.p. But before maize became preeminent—as early as 3500 b.p.—there was an “Eastern Agricultural Complex” (EAC), which consisted of several indigenous crops. EAC was largely an indigeneous development; its origins can be traced back at least 7300 years.

The Late Prehistoric Period in the upper Ohio River Basin is characterized by nucleated farming communities. Historically, these villages, whether found in Ohio, northern West Virginia, or southwestern Pennsylvania, have been uncritically classified as components of the Monongahela Tradition, ca. A.D. 1000-1630. The present paper examines the utility of the Monongahela concept given the existing data base and outlines a more objective approach for understanding settlement responses to both localized and regional environmental and social risks.

The Roundtop Site located in the Upper Susquehanna River valley of New York, has long been famous for producing maize, bean, and squash remains dated to A.D. 1000. Here I present new AMS dates on the crop remains that indicate they actually date to ca. A.D. 1300.

Evaluation of individual soil horizons and sequences of soil horizons in archaeological studies is critical to the correct and meaningful interpretation of archaeological context. We focus on the evaluation of soils in the stratigraphic framework of an archaeological site and offer a guide to assist in the interpretation of context of cultural materials in specific master horizons. In the North American Stratigraphic Code, the formal pedostratigraphic unit, the geosol, by definition requires being overlain by a formally defined lithostratigraphic  or similar material unit. This criterion can rarely be met in shallow, mid-to-late Holocene settings. In addition, no subdivision of the geosol are recognized, a problem at the scale of archaeological excavation. Chronostratigraphic and pedostratigraphic units are often confused in concept. The main distinction between these two, critical to archaeology, is in their boundaries and in the subdivision into smaller units. Boundaries of chronostratigraphic units are synchronous and form isochrons, whereas boundaries of pedostratigraphic units are time-transgressive. Subdivision of chronostratigraphic units results in subunits that represent shorter periods of time than the larger unit and that lie in temporal succession with each other (i.e., they follow the Law of Superposition). When a pedostratigraphic unit is subdivided, logically into soil horizons, the individual horizons are not separate from the whole soil, or from each other in temporal framework. Each soil horizon has a unique set of properties and processes, and is separated in space, but not in time from adjacent horizons. The distinction between subdivision of chronostratigraphic and pedostratigraphic units is a fundamental difference between soil and sediments. The guide we present is based on pedogenic and geomorphic processes, both past and contemporaneous, occurring in specific master horizons.

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 isotopes of their tissues (bone collagen and apatite, tooth enamel and dentine collagen) will be close to the humans with whom they cohabited. Therefore, in the absence of human tissue, dog tissue isotopes can be used to reconstruct past human diets. Here d13C and d15N 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 dog stable isotope ratios are good proxies for human diets. The modeling results indicate that human and dogs had different diets. Human dietary protein came primarily from maize and high trophic level sh and dogs from maize, terrestrial animals, low trophic level sh, and human feces. This indicates that CSA is likely not a valid approach for the reconstruction of ancestral Iroquoian diets.

The adaptive-type concept has had a considerable affect on the modeling of late prehistoric subsistence-settlement systems in the Eastern Woodlands. Under this concept, broad economic adaptations are seen as coterminous with the boundaries of cultural types defined under the culture-historical paradigm. Only variation between these types is considered of explanatory interest; variation within the types is ignored. This normative, essentialistic view of adaptation is counter to a  processual, materialistic  view under which all variation is considered to be of explanatory interest.

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.