Part Three
The Middle and Early Late Holocene
7500 – 500 B.C.
Archaic societies replaced Paleoindian societies and were followed by pottery-making Woodland peoples. This is a minimal definition of the term Archaic, for the content and size of these societies varied widely across the continent, and archaeologists define the concept according to different sets of criteria. For some, the term refers to small, mobile groups of people with simple social structures and a diffuse hunter-gatherer economy. From this perspective, these societies are considered an evolutionary stage or level of social complexity intermediate between migratory Big Game hunting Paleoindians and later, more sedentary, Woodland horticulturalists (Willey and Phillips 1958:107). Other archaeologists apply the term to early Native American societies that did not grow their own food, make pottery, or construct earthen burial mounds. In this view, Archaic assemblages are distinguished from earlier Paleoindian assemblages by the presence of unfluted, non-lanceolate notched and stemmed projectile points, and from more recent Woodland assemblages by the absence of pottery, earthen burial mounds, and domesticated plant foods.
In recent years both of these sets of criteria have been questioned. The sharp shifts in human adaptive strategies that separate Archaic cultures as a stage from earlier Big Game hunters in the first view have become blurred, as discussed in Part Two. In addition, pottery, earthen burial mounds, and domesticated plant foods have been found in contexts in some areas of eastern North America that previously had been accepted as Archaic. These discoveries negate the second view.
For our purposes, we define an Archaic complex in Minnesota as a complex that lacks both Paleoindian projectile points and pottery, and that dates roughly before 500 B.C. Components of an Archaic complex are usually identified by the presence of certain kinds of notched and stemmed projectile points. Most Archaic complexes in Minnesota date between about 10,700 - 500 B.C., or 9400 - 500 B.C. if the transitional Dalton point cluster point assemblages are excluded. The definition adopted here intentionally avoids special stage or adaptive connotations. A more complete descriptive definition of the Archaic emerges by the end of Part 3.
The Archaic has traditionally been divided into Early, Middle, and Late periods. That tradition is followed here to emphasize material culture changes during this long time span, although many of the original reasons for this tripartite division no longer seem valid. As evident in the previous chapter, the Early Archaic in our region can no longer be viewed as a transitional phase between Paleoindian and Archaic lifeways (for Late Paleoindian and Early Eastern Archaic social groups were contemporary in part and both seem to have had a Generalized Forager adaptation), and, as we will see, the Late Archaic can no longer be considered transitional to Woodland economies firmly based on domesticated plant foods. In addition, the ages assigned to these periods are only approximate, for they remain poorly dated, and transitions to and from an Archaic material culture seem to have occurred at different times in the separate archaeological regions of the state.
Chapter 6, Middle and Early Late Holocene Environments, reviews changes in the environment during the Middle and Late Archaic period. Chapters 7 and 8 review the material culture and lifeways during the Middle Archaic and Late Archaic, respectively.
Contributors to this section: Guy Gibbon
Date of last contribution: December 2008