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Part Two

• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5

The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Period

Today, it seems increasingly likely that small bands of mobile foragers who drifted into or by Alaska from Asia between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago were the first human beings to enter the Americas (Fiedel 2002; Haynes 2002). Like all people who have lived in the Americas, they were physically modern Homo sapiens (Steele and Powell 1992, 1994). Archaeologists call the time span within which most of these remains radiocarbon date the Paleoindian period, a period that extends (roughly) from 11,200 to 7500 B.C..

Archaeologists now recognize up to a dozen Paleoindian phases and group them together into either an Early Paleoindian or a Late Paleoindian sub-period. The Early Paleoindian portion of the period dates between 11,200 and 10,500 B.C. and the Late Paleoindian portion between 10,500 and 7500 B.C. (Fiedel 1999, 2002; Taylor et al. 1996). Besides a difference in age, Early and Late Paleoindian peoples lived in different, rapidly changing Late Glacial and Early Holocene environments, respectively, and made technologically and stylistically distinct kinds of stone weapon points. Each group of traditions may also have shared a similar socioeconomic orientation, though the orientations were manifest in different ways throughout North America. The reasons for these differing manifestations were adaptations to dissimilar regional environments and possibly differences among emerging regional cultural traditions. In this review we often refer to these sub-periods (and to later sub-periods as well) as periods when we focus on a specific sub-period (as in Chapter 4, The Early Paleoindian Period).

Unlike many other areas in North America, such as the Southeast and Southwest, where the transition between Paleoindian and Archaic traditions is relatively brief, there is a long temporal overlap between Late Paleoindian traditions and the early portion of the Archaic tradition (the Early Archaic) in Minnesota. We recognize that overlap in the title of Part 2, The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Period. The three chapters in Part 2 focus in sequence on the Late Glacial and Early Holocene environments of the state (Chapter 3), the Early Paleoindian period (Chapter 4), and the Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic period (Chapter 5).

Although no artifacts are known in the state that archaeologists agree date earlier than the earliest Paleoindian tradition, a few archaeologists have made that claim. These claims are briefly summarized in Chapter 4.