Part One
Background
Cultural traditions are a result of the intermingling of many influences. Examples are the flow through time of traditional lifeways, interactions with neighbors, technological and spiritual innovations, and the nature of the natural environment that is a tradition’s external context. Although all of these and still other influences helped mold the cultural traditions of precontact native Minnesotans, we begin our review of the first 13,000 years of Minnesota archaeology in Chapter 1 with a description of the state’s late precontact environment (Late Holocene: ca. 2500 B.C. to mid-1800s) for several reasons. First, Minnesota has a remarkably diverse environment with multiple resource zones. Since these resource zones offered different food energy opportunities for hunters, foragers, wild plant harvesters, and part-time farmers, different ways of life –and different landscapes – developed in precontact Minnesota. Said another way, to understand the different ways of life present in precontact Minnesota, it is necessary (but not sufficient) to have some understanding of their environmental context. And second, we use these natural resource zones as a framework for comparing precontact cultural developments throughout the state during the late precontact (Late Holocene) period, the period with which most of the chapters in this book are concerned.
It is important at this early point in the book to be aware, too, that Minnesota did not always have the natural resource zones that we describe in Chapter 1. The state’s topography, and plant and animal communities, were very different in the Late Glacial (15,000 – 10,500 B.C.), Early Holocene (10,500 – 7500 B.C.), and Middle Holocene (7500 – 2500 B.C.) periods, so different in fact that we would not recognize Minnesota if we landed here during time travel.1 These paleoenvironments are described in Chapters 3 and 6.
Minnesota’s prehistoric archaeological record is composed of the remnants of the material culture of all of the many human communities that inhabited the state before European contact. Although these communities were located in various regions of the state at various times during the last 13,000 years, the remnants of their material culture – the archaeological record – is a jumble of artifacts, features, animal and plant remains, and other items that are present today in the ground, in private collections, and in the storage facilities of museums and universities. The weapon points and pieces of pottery that we pick up in farmers’ fields and find eroding out of riverbanks are part of this record. A necessary task of archaeology is to bring order to this jumble by grouping like materials together in space and time, a task archaeologists call space-time systematics. Chapter 2 describes the three taxonomic systems that have been used in Minnesota to carry out this task. It also describes our approach to interpreting the pattern that archaeologists have found in the state’s archaeological record.
We believe that the background information provided in Part One will help you better understand how archaeologists reconstruct past lifeways from the present archaeological record. Be prepared to return to these chapters again and again as you read through the remaining parts of this book.
Contributors to this section: Guy Gibbon
Date of last contribution: December 2008