Reduce, reuse... rebury?

Have you ever wondered what Clovis-age tools were used for? That's an interesting question, given the high-level of skill that went into producing many of the finely worked bifaces that are associated with that industry. Studies of blood proteins recovered from the edges of points collected during excavation of some Clovis sites were used to process or hunt an range of animals. At Wally's Beach (Alberta), for instance, such analyses revelaed evidence that they were used on equids, musk oxen and/or bison (Kooyman et al. 2001). In more recent Paleoindian assemblages, such studies have shown that points were associated with the processing of large mammals including, among others, mammoth (Loy and Dixon 1998), as well as both large and -very interestingly - small game at Noble's Pond (Seeman et al. 2008).

One thing that's always fascinated me about Clovis industries, however, is the fact that it is associated with 'caches' of artifacts, the nature of which has been debated over the years. Some interpret them as deposits of tools Clovis foragers would stockpile at given points on the landscape, so as to be able to depend on them in landscapes with which they were unfamiliar or that were devoid of dependable sources of good lithic raw materials. Others have preferred to attribute to caches a ritual or symbolic function, although exactly what that function would have been is rarely discussed. Although largely unproven (and unprovable?), this notion of caches of symbolically-loaded, very well-made bifacial Clovis artifacts has occasionally been picked up on by scholars to infer similar functions to other well-made bifacial artifacts, for instance some MSA points. Villa et al. (2009), however, have shown that even thin, very well-made Paleoindian points were likely used in hunting/processing activities.

Well, we now have news that a cache of 83 Clovis artifacts recovered in the great state of Colorado, in Boulder to be precise, and protein analysis has shown that at least some of them were employed in processing now extinct camelids and equids. This comes as a surprise since the investigators "initially suspected that the Mahaffy Cache might be ritualistic rather than a utilitarian." That said, they also emphasize that "There are so few Clovis-age tool caches that have been discovered that we really don't know very much about them."



Now, this being a press release, the details are scant, but we know that the cache included "salad plate-sized, elegantly crafted bifacial knives and a unique tool resembling a double-bitted axe to small blades and flint scraps." So there is no telling yet exactly which implements were associated with these residues, or whether they are also associated with a wider range of exploited genera. What is clear, however, is that this discovery provides important new data about Paleoindian artifact caches, and strongly suggests that at least some of them were not necessarily only ritual in nature. Of course, nothing precludes the disposal of used artifacts in a ritualistic way, but it does disprove the notion that people of the Paleoindian manufactured and discarded their best, most spectacular tools only in ritualistic contexts.

One odd thing about the news report, however: "Mahaffy said the artifacts will likely wind up in a museum except for a few of the smaller pieces, which will be reburied at the cache site." That's odd - what's the point of this? It's not like we're dealing with human remains. Whatever... I guess it goes to shows how lithics can be reduced, reused... and reburied!

References:

Kooyman, B., M.E. Newman, C. Cluney, M. Lobb, S. Tolman, P. McNeil, and L.V. Hills. 2001. Identification of horse exploitation by Clovis hunters based on protein analysis. American Antiquity 66: 686-691.

Loy, T.H., and E.J. Dixon. 1998. Blood residues on fluted points from eastern Beringia. American Antiquity 63:21–46.

Seeman, M.F., Nilsson, N.E., G.L. Summers, L.L. Morris, P.J. Barans, E.Dowd, and M.E. Newman. 2008. Evaluating protein residues on Gainey phase Paleoindian stone tools. Journal of Archaeological Science 35: 2742-2750.

Villa, P., M. Soressi, C.S. Henshilwood, and V. Mourre. The Still Bay points of Blombos Cave (South Africa). Journal of Archaeological Science 36:441-460.

Moving as a way of living

Hot on the heels of last week's discussion about mobility and intersite variability, here's a news report on some research done by Claudio Aporta (Carleton University) on how moving and mobility strategies form integral parts of Inuit cultural identity (Aporta 2009). Based on his analysis, it seems that that moving about is not only a utiliatarian strategy to best procure resources for the Inuit. That is, the Inuit don't simply use mobility as a way of bringing people to resources or resources to people. Rather, it seems like their mobility strategies and all of the knowledge it entails are a defining feature of who they are, how they relate to other social groups and how it structures their social organization. To put it in terms we recently discussed, Inuit mobility may be more 'informational' and 'network' (sensu Whallon (2006)) than simply logistical or residential in nature. That being the case, it is perhaps not surprising that many high latitude groups did not conform to the expectations of Binford's (1980) model.

Here's a blurb from the Science Daily report:

Using a combination of historical documents, ethnographic research, geographic tools including GPS, GIS and Google Earth, as well as a recent journey following Inuit along a traditional trail, Dr. Aporta shows the geographic extent of the Inuit’s sophisticated network of routes. He describes how the Inuit have made use of the Arctic environment and how their trails represent significant channels of communication and exchange across the territory. To the Inuit, the Arctic is a network of trails, connecting communities to their distant neighbors, and to fishing lakes and hunting grounds in between.

What is remarkable is that although the trails are not permanent features of the landscape, their locations are remembered and transmitted orally and through the experience of travel. They do not use maps to travel or to represent geographic information. Rather the journey along the trail, or the story of the journey, becomes one of the main instruments for transmitting the information.

It's very interesting that the story of the journey becomes the longest-term important cultural artifact rather than whatever was procured as part of a given instance of travel. In a way, this is reminiscent of a thought-provoking paper by Caroline Funk (2004) who had argue that simple behavioral ecological models were insufficient to understand how Arctic groups structured their land-use strategies in prehistory. Which makes me wonder how Aporta's results and perspective fit in with a recent paper on human wayfinding in some highly mobile human groups in high latitudes (i.e., in Finland reindeer pastoralists) published by Istomin and Dwyer (2009:29) who argue that "humans rely on mental maps but also memorize vistas while navigating, and an individual's navigation method, ability, and the form of the mental map is likely to depend on a situation as well as on factors such as age, sex, familiarity with the environment, and life history."

References:

Aporta, C. 2009. The Trail as Home: Inuit and Their Pan-Arctic Network of Routes. Human Ecology doi: 10.1007/s10745-009-9213-x.

Binford, L.R. 1980. Willow smoke and dogs' tails: hunter-gatherer settlement systems and archaeological site formation. American Antiquity 45:4-20.

Funk, C. 2004. Optimal foraging theory and cognitive archaeology: Cup'ik cultural perception in southwestern Alaska. In Hunters and gatherers in theory and archaeology (ed. G. Crothers), pp. 279–98. Southern Illinois University Center for Archaeological Investigations Occasional Paper 31. SIUC, Carbondale, IL.

Istomin, K.V., and M.J. Dwyer. 2009. Finding the Way: A Critical Discussion of Anthropological Theories of Human Spatial Orientation with Reference to Reindeer Herders of Northeastern Europe and Western Siberia. Current Anthropology 50:29-50.

Whallon, R. Social networks and information: Non-"utilitarian" mobility among hunter-gatherers. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 25:259-270.

Mink hunting on the NW Coast, and archaeology helping ethnography

Reposted from A Very Remote Period Indeed.


In a short paper, R. Lee Lyman (U Missouri) shows how archaeological data can help flesh out ethnographic observations. I make a big deal about this because archaeologists dealing with prehistoric hunter-gatherers have often been accused of being interpretively 'railroaded' (not to say tyrannized) by the ethnographic record of extant hunter-gatherers (Wobst 1978).

What Lyman does in this paper is actually pretty straightforward, methodologically speaking. Briefly, having shown that the size of lower first molars can be used to distinguish males from female mink, he looks at the sex ratio seen in Mustela vison remains from the Cathlapote and Meier sites, both of which are late-prehistoric(ca. 1400-1800 AD) sites located in the Wapato Valley (in Oregon and Washington). Citing Buskirk and Lindstedt (1989), Lyman argues that "linear trap sets produce a more even sex ratio[i.e., between 1:1 and 2:1, for males], whereas traps placed in a grid catch more large-bodied individuals, typically males" (2007:92). This pattern is the result of sex-specific behavioral patterns. In his archaeological sample, the male:female ratio is at least 3.67:1 and at most 8.33:1, depending on how stringent one is with their sex-id stats. This suggests, then, that late-prehistoric foragers probably disposed traps in a grid rather than linear pattern.

This is where it gets especially neat. Since Franz Boas long ago wondered "How far can archaeological methods supplement ethnological information?" (1902:4), Lyman concludes:

Locations of traps used to take small mammals have, so far as I am aware, not been reported in the ethnographic literature for the Pacific Northwest. The archaeological data for mink recovered from sites in the Wapato Valley suggest that indeed archaeological data may supplement ethnographic data, because mink demography suggests traps were distributed in a grid-like pattern. (Lyman 2007:94)

In other words, rather than place them, say, only along waterways, late-prehistoric hunters of the Wapato Valley most likely set their traps all over the region's marshy lowlands. Given that the sites in question can be linked to the "Northwest Coast Culture Area" and given that ethnographic information available for groups derived from this culture area indicates that they trapped small mammals without specifying how that was done, this study provides a good instance of archaeological data (albeit informed by mammalogy) informing ethnographic observation. This is elegant corroboration of what Guenther (2007:374) terms "an ongoing, mutually strengthening partnership between the two disciplines [archaeology and ethnology], in their study of foraging societies."

References:

Buskirk, S. W., and S. L. Lindstedt. 1989. Sex ratio biases in trapped samples of mustelids. Journal of Mammalogy 70:88-97.

Guenther, M. 2007. Current issues and future directions in hunter-gatherer studies. Anthropos 102:371-388.

Lyman, R. L. 2007. Prehistoric mink (Mustela vison) trapping on the Northwest Coast. Journal of Field Archaeology 32:91-95.

Wobst, H. M. 1978. The archaeo-ethnology of hunter-gatherers or the tyranny of the ethnographic record in archaeology. American Antiquity 43:303-309.