Archaeology on the Threshold: Studies in the Processes of Change [1 ed.] 081306953X, 9780813069531

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Archaeology on the Threshold

University Press of Florida Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee New College of Florida, Sarasota University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola

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ARCHAEOLOGY ON THE THRESHOLD Studies in the Processes of Change

Edited by

Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu

University Press of Florida Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota

Copyright 2023 by Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu All rights reserved Published in the United States of America. 28 27 26 25 24 23

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022944345 ISBN 978-0-8130-6953-1 (cloth) The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 2046 NE Waldo Road Suite 2100 Gainesville, FL 32609 http://upress.ufl.edu

CONTENTS

List of Figures vii List of Tables ix Introduction 1 Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu

1. The Role of Theory and Ethnographic Analogies in Understanding Paleoindian Obsidian Acquisition, Mobility, and Mating Strategies in the Great Basin 18 David W. Zeanah, Brian F. Codding, Douglas W. Bird, Rebecca Bliege Bird, Chloe McGuire, George T. Jones, and Robert G. Elston

2. Across Boundaries: Origin of Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach 36 Meng Zhang

3. Fragmented Records: Fuego-Patagonian Hunter-Gatherers and Archaeological Change 68 Luis Alberto Borrero and Fabiana María Martin

4. Earth Oven Size and Camas Intensification in the Upper Willamette Valley, Oregon 89 Joseph D. Wardle

5. At the Edges of Food Production: The Archaic to Ancestral Pueblo Transition in Central New Mexico 111 Matthew Schmader

6. At the Pacific Edge and Field’s Margin: Edible Weeds, the Ideal Free Distribution, and Niche Construction in Neolithic Taiwan 145 Pei-Lin Yu

7. Domestic Crop Production among the Ju/’hoansi San of Nyae Nyae, Namibia: Ethnoarchaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives 174 Robert K. Hitchcock

8. Moving Beyond: Using New Methods to Assess Holocene Environmental Change in Northwestern Guyana 206 Louisa B. Daggers and Mark G. Plew

9. On the Edge of Inequality: Economic and Social Boundaries at the Onset of Megalithism in Western Iberia (Fourth Millennium BC) 220 António Faustino Carvalho

10. Megadroughts, Rodents, and Weevils: The Ecological Basis for Ritual Burning during the Iron Age in Southeastern Africa 242 Alan J. Osborn

11. Differentiating Ecological Contexts of Plant Cultivation and Animal Herding: Implications for Culture Process 268 Amber L. Johnson, Gianna Jamski, Tanigha McNellis, Ruthie Niesen, Anthony Scimeca, and Nick Pruett

List of Contributors 285 Index 289

FIGURES

I.1. Schematic of first, second, and third-order phenomena 4 1.1. Map of Great Basin 23 2.1. Four regions of microblade-based societies in Northeast Asia 43 2.2. Archaeological sites in Northeast Asia 53 2.3. Five subregions of microblade assemblages 57 3.1. Map of Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia 74 4.1. Map of the study area and archaeological sites 92 4.2. Middle and Late Holocene earth oven surface diameters 103 4.3. Relationship between oven depth and surface diameter 104 5.1. Location of research area in north-central New Mexico 112 5.2. Inferred relationships between key categories 115 5.3. Expected relationships between social system states 117 5.4. Summed probability distribution of absolute dates 123 6.1. Location map of Taiwan 147 6.2. Schematic of Dapenkeng-era sites 153 6.3. Schematic of successional areas of a settlement where edible weeds would be present 156 6.4. Indigenous language and culture groupings 159 6.5. Fafokod (Donghe) village 160 6.6. Edible weeds visible in the foreground 164 6.7. Anticipated order of Neolithic settlement 166 7.1. Map of Nyae Nyae and N≠a Jaqna Conservancies 178 7.2. Ju/’hoan man watering seeds in a fenced garden 187

viii · Figures

7.3. Ethnoarchaeological map of a contemporary Ju/’hoan village, ≠Om!o!o and its gardens 194 8.1. Location of shell mounds discussed in text 210 8.2. Values of δ13C and δ18O for each locality 211 8.3. Values of δ18O and δ13C in tooth enamel and bone from four localities in coastal Guyana 212 9.1. Distribution of sites mentioned in the text 222 9.2. Materials at Carapito dolmen 231 9.3. Bom Santo Cave 235 10.1. Map of study area 245 10.2. Flowchart of causal linkages 258 11.1. Hunter-gatherer diet 271 11.2. Zones with centers of independent domestication 277 11.3. Sites with evidence of plant domestication 279 11.4. Sites with evidence of animal domestication 281

TABLES

1.1. Comparison of annual mobility of hunter-gatherers with Great Basin Paleoindian obsidian conveyance zones 20 1.2. Obsidian sources represented in assemblages 24 2.1. Variables used in this project 41 2.2. Elementary techniques of microblade technology 50 2.3. Comparison of variables between Transbaikal and PSHK 51 4.1. Summary of Upper Willamette Valley earth oven data 102 5.1. Macrobotanical remains from dated features, Archaic and Early Ancestral Pueblo sites in the Middle Rio Grande Valley 130 5.2. Archaeofaunal remains from dated features, Early Ancestral Pueblo sites in the Middle Rio Grande Valley 134 6.1. Leafy edible weeds observed in Fafokod household gardens 162 6.2. Summarized results from interviews 162 7.1. Nyae Nyae village Facilities 184 7.2. Domestic food crops grown in Nyae Nyae 186 8.1. Radiocarbon dates for shell mounds in northwest Guyana 209 8.2. Frequency distribution of fauna from shell mounds 215 11.1. Archaeological expectations for intensification patterns 273 11.2. Summary of data used in this analysis 274 11.3. Evidence of plant-versus-animal domestication 276 11.4. Evidence for plant domestication 278 11.5. Sites with evidence for animal domestication 280

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Introduction Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu

Archaeology is on the threshold of an exciting future. The twenty-first century holds the promise of exponential increases in technology, which in turn will likely lead to methods that cannot be predicted at the present time. Yet technological advances have never been a silver bullet, since the science of archaeology has only been as successful as the theoretical and methodological ideas underpinning the day-to-day work that supports inference of the past through material remnants in the present. While certain limitations of processual archaeology were noted in the late twentieth century (Hodder and Hutson 2004), the paradigm and its approach still offers a profitable framework for archaeological inquiry in the twenty-first century. The basis of processualism lies in the study of cultural dynamics and an emphasis on making, and then testing, generalizations about evolutionary changes over time (Binford 1965; A. Johnson 2004; Kelly and Thomas 2014: 28–29; Renfrew and Bahn 2016: 40–41). Instead of abandoning that ethos, archaeologists should question assumptions behind assignments of cultural categories while continuing to pursue inquiry into change-causing events and larger evolutionary processes. In doing so, the discipline of archaeology can focus on topics of boundaries and transitions with fresh insight. This volume explores a renewed and revised potential for processual archaeology by bringing together case studies in archaeology and ethnoarchaeology from across the globe. Archaeology has long focused on the conceptual edges of units defined by time and space to recognize transitions, boundaries, and thresholds. The reason for this is that these phenomena encompass the most transformative and challenging of human social problems and related solutions. Variations occur periodically and often unpredictably, but as Childe (1950, 1951) ar-

2 · Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu

ticulated in his concept of revolutions, some changes are more complex and of greater consequence than others. Among social scientists, archaeologists have the unique opportunity to discern patterning in the remains of past behaviors and environments, which facilitate inferences about change from one system state to another based on prior definitions and markers of tipping points, thresholds, and margins (Binford 1968, 2001; Braidwood 1960, 1963; Flannery 1972, 1973; Gamble 1993; G. Johnson 1973; Kelly 2016; Redman 1978; Steward 1955). More than 100 years of important research on evolutionary transitions continue into the twenty-first century with recent macroregional and global-scale explorations of foraging to agriculture (Borcan et al. 2018; Ferrio et al. 2011; Fuller 2010; Gignoux et al. 2016; A. Johnson 2014; Price and Bar-Yosef 2011; de Saulieu and Testart 2015; Zvelebil and Pluciennik 2011; Johnson et al., this volume); sedentism and village life (Bar-Yosef 2014; Dow et al. 2009; Dow and Reed 2015; Gibbs and Jordan 2016; Hitchcock 1982; Kelly 1983, 1992, 2013: 77–113: Vigne 2011); and social complexity, inequality, and violence (Hayden 2001; Kohler et al. 2017; Martin and Harrod 2015; Prentiss et al. 2007; Price 2010; Wengrow and Graeber 2015). The many definitions of “change” usually flow from the theoretical or methodological orientations of individual researchers. An evolutionary archaeologist may define a transition differently from a Marxist, and a lithics expert may cite different markers of a key transition than an archaeobotanist (Chen and Yu 2017). Additionally, current research into social, environmental, economic, and technological change is generating new and varied results as well as “big data” and data mining from legacy sources (A. Johnson 2014; Kohler et al. 2017). This variety of emerging methods, types, and scales of inquiry raises questions about the effectiveness of pre-existing categories of change as defined by cultural and environmental units of time and space. The accomplishments of other research orientations should not be minimized, as they continue to hold relevance alongside new data, techniques, methodologies, and explanatory frameworks. The root-and-branch approach will remain essential to scientific replicability and data sharing: students will continue to acquire ways of knowing from their mentors and the research literature that influences their own research programs. Academics and cultural heritage managers will use existing categories to facilitate collaborations, pursue funding support, and communicate new research designs and results in mutually intelligible language and units. Yet the assumptions that flow from pre-existing categories of archaeological data and the phenomena that are inferred from them may

Introduction · 3

curtail our ability to perceive, explain, and retrodict important changes. As Lewis Binford challenged his students and colleagues continually to take stock: “How do I know what I think I know?” (Yu et al. 2015: 3). Many of the archaeologists represented in this volume could be categorized as processualists who view culture from a systemic perspective, and culture, as Leslie White (1959: 8) argues, is the extrasomatic means of human adaptation. Emphasis is placed on change in economic, social, and ideological systems and focuses more on cultural processes instead of culture history, which had dominated the field of archaeology from the early part of the twentieth century (Trigger 1989: 148–206). Processual archaeologists have been criticized for their emphases on subsistence, settlement systems, technology, and economics, and their lack of focus on religion, ideology, and belief systems. In contrast with processualism, a more “interpretive” approach emphasized the roles of individuals and human agency (see, for example, Hodder and Hutson 2004; Renfrew and Bahn 2016: 43–48; Shanks and Tilley 1987). This volume seeks to address not only thresholds of subsistence, technology, and settlement, but also the tangible remains of religion, rituals, and the growth of social inequality. The contributions presented in this volume examine transitions in three broad categories for causes of change, in descending order of their relation to fundamental properties of the earth’s climates and habitats (Figure I.1). First-order phenomena include direct climate and environmental stressors or drivers; second-order phenomena are of a demographic nature such as innovations, adoptions, migrations, and dispersals; and third-order phenomena include the cognitive realm or ritual activities that may cascade, multiply, or otherwise interact. These levels of phenomena may influence each other up and down the hierarchy. First Order: Climate and Environment

Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, cultural ecologists explored adaptive linkages of human systems with their homeostatic ecosystems as reflected by material culture, with the presumed goal of maximizing energetic returns (for example, Rappaport 1967). This approach necessitated ecological research to discern past climatic regimes, habitats, and key resources that influenced variation in subregional systems, as well as adaptive responses. In this volume, archaeological studies from the North American Southwest continue to explore the relevance of these concepts while incorporating newly available data on temporal and spatial variability in environ-

4 · Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu

Figure I.1. Schematic of first-, second-, and third-order phenomena and lines of change causality.

mental conditions and human subsistence strategies. Schmader presents archaeological data from the middle Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico, where a single group or social units could have alternated between different subsistence strategies in response to changing environmental or demographic conditions. Data from Ancestral Puebloan sites suggest a very wide dietary breadth, frequent crop failures, flexible residential mobility patterns, site reoccupations, and structural remodeling. These findings indicate a nonlinear transition that cycled back and forth between foraging and horticulture, based on adaptive responses to food availability and environmental variation. This chapter, like others in the book, offers a useful critique of pre-existing categories such as environmental (wet vs. dry periods) and cultural (forager vs. farmer). It is important to note, as Schmader does, that the transition from the Archaic foraging to the emergence of Ancestral Puebloan lifeways took place during a time of extensive droughts, and it was precisely in this period that Rio Grande populations adopted corn (Zea mays) as a major food source.

Introduction · 5

Since scientific interest in population growth in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, arguments using changes in population density are seen to be necessary precursors to reach certain thresholds, most notably, agriculture and sedentism (see, for example, Cohen 1977). The post-Pleistocene Period in the Middle East, East Asia, Central America, South America, and North America saw the rise of broad-spectrum adaptations in which local communities shifted toward the exploitation of a wider variety of plants and animals (Flannery 1973; Harris and Hillman 1989). Yet foraging intensification, long thought to be a linear process that culminated in a system change to agriculture, can vary in scale over time, as well as spatially on the landscape. As discussed by Wardle, salmon exploitation in the Pacific Northwest of North America is one example of a nonuniform process that varied according to physiographic characteristics. Because of a large waterfall that acted as an insurmountable barrier to salmon, peoples of the Willamette Valley in Oregon set out on a different cultural trajectory focused on the intensification of roots such as camas (Camassia quamash). Wardle argues that archaeological evidence of earth ovens alone is insufficient to infer that scale: the transition to village life and reduced residential mobility very likely changed the ways that earth ovens were created, used, maintained, and decommissioned or abandoned. The category of “hunter-gatherer” contains assumptions (for example, high mobility) that can influence the construction of hypotheses in ways that focus on one line of evidence (for example, earth ovens) without considering other processes (for example, levels of residential mobility) that influence archaeological site formation. The basic definition and recognition of “stability” is an important and understudied aspect of discerning temporally bounded change. Biological and archaeological markers of stability can include evidence for continuity in occupations over long periods of time. Working in Guyana in South America, Daggers and Plew report on stable isotope data for C3 plants as a proxy for modern forest conditions. Contrary to previous arguments for fluctuating environmental conditions, their evidence indicates relative stability throughout most of the middle to late Holocene. However, in patchier cool-temperate regions, assumptions of continuity should be continually re-evaluated. Daggers and Plew assess the development of mangrove swamps and associated peat deposition that resulted in brackish conditions important to prehistoric and contemporary Guyana coastal populations. There are similarities between the environmental conditions at 3000 BP and those of today. Substantial adaptive variation over time, includ-

6 · Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu

ing shellfish gathering, is seen partly in the contents of shell mounds used for occupation, foraging, and burial of the dead. Dietary data combined with stable carbon isotopes reveal that there was increased use of multiple resources during the later Holocene. They conclude that in northwestern Guyana, broad spectrum foraging appears to be associated with modern forest conditions that were also present in the Early Holocene, resulting in the need for traditional views of Holocene subsistence to be re-evaluated. Borrero and Martin contend that occupational continuity in FuegoPatagonian archaeological sequences in southern South America, argued from genetics and ethnographic analogies, has created a false dichotomy between terrestrial and aquatic foragers. Instead, archaeological evidence such as stable isotope data, specialized technology, and faunal remains suggests much more variation than previously recognized, as well as potentially different cultural designations. A number of different hunter-gatherer groups, each with its own name and identity, developed more recently in Fuego-Patagonia (Borrero 2011). There is strong archaeological and historical evidence of “mixed” groups that employed both maritime and terrestrial strategies. While it was assumed that there was continuity in the FuegoPatagonian archaeological and genetic records, more recent work indicates significant change over time. Discontinuity is seen in the use of marine resources in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, likely due to internal forces, climatic factors such as the Little Ice Age, as well as to the impacts of European presence. Hunter-gatherers in the region may have occupied separate but interconnected environmental patches. As was the case in the Great Plains of North America, the introduction of the horse in Patagonia had considerable impact, with semisedentary aggregations of groups living in villages. There were also long-distance moves made by mounted groups carrying goods for trade. While Borrero and Martin admit that it is difficult methodologically to come up with concise information on the chronological placement of tools and faunal remains, combined archaeological, historical, and ethnographic information reveals that Fuego-Patagonia was a truly diverse and dynamic cultural and environmental landscape. Second Order: Innovations, Movements, and Adoptions

Beginning in the early to mid-twentieth century, describing, categorizing, and identifying boundaries and transitions gave rise to taxonomic approaches based on various kinds of cultural adaptations. Variation in those adaptative types across space and through time allowed archaeologists to

Introduction · 7

delineate groupings, infer transitions, and devise schematics to measure and categorize those transitions. The culture-historical approach quietly continues to facilitate explorations into causal mechanisms of important transitions, especially at large scales of analysis. Although diffusion is no longer a broadly used term, a closer look at synthetic regional approaches from western North America to the Trans-Baikal region in northeastern Asia indicates that explanations for change through migration can still facilitate strategies for exploring and comparing alternative evolutionary mechanisms. Zhang employs a macroecological approach to argue that the spread of microblade technology in northeast Asia during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) may not have been the result of simple diffusion. Using projections of ungulate biomass from Binford’s (2001) Frames of Reference hunter-gatherer database, he debates the presence of refugia and human migration due to environmental deterioration as the cause for the spread of microblade technology. Rather, microblade-based societies had adaptive advantages that were able to respond to local environmental pressures and opportunities. In the Great Basin of North America, long-range mobility was an essential strategy for Paleoindians that likely aided adaptations to changing environmental conditions during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT). Zeanah and colleagues use new demographic data and Western Australian ethnographic analogs to explore the causes of mobility linked to obsidian transport. Old ethnographic analogies built around the assumption of the “band” are challenged, and a new hypothesis features high individual mobility, flexible group composition, and long-distance mating networks. Paleoindian societies in the Great Basin as well as the Great Plains moved frequently and for long distances, transported high value goods (obsidian), and extended marriage networks over broad areas. The analogy with Western Australian hunter-gatherers assumes that socioecological and subsistence incentives play noncompeting roles in structuring the mobility of hunter-gatherers. Landscapes of extremely low-population density favored wide dispersal among scattered habitats, which imposed high costs on finding mates. Drawing on data from Paleoindian sites in Nevada, Zeanah and coauthors demonstrate that obsidian was moved within an area almost 200,000 km2 in extent. Low population density was the key factor that accounted for the enormous size of Paleoindian obsidian conveyance zones, while expansive social networks and high individual mobility were necessary to

8 · Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu

address demographic fluctuations in adult sex ratios. The low density of Paleoindians in the Great Basin was due more to the widely dispersed and easily depleted foraging patches of wetlands than was the case for Western Desert Aboriginals, underscoring the complexity of citing Australian Aboriginal societies as direct ethnographic analogs for Paleoindians. In some cases, especially on islands and other remote settings, human migration and colonization demonstrably preceded major changes in subsistence, mobility, settlement, and social organization. Yu’s chapter on the Paleolithic to Neolithic transition in the island of Taiwan in eastern Asia explores the ramifications of the Ideal Free Distribution concept and positive density (Allee) effects that resulted from the arrival and dispersal of Neolithic Chinese farmers into territories that were previously held by the island’s foragers. Yu proposes fisher-farmers used economies of scale in labor for cultivation that allowed rapid colonization into preferred habitats— and the ability to hold them. The unique role of edible weeds in facilitating the Ideal Free Distribution is highlighted in ethnoarchaeological research among Amis farmers, and Yu’s results are used to predict the rank order of habitats that would have been colonized by Neolithic farmers, as well as adaptive responses of Paleolithic foragers they encountered. Third Order: Cascading, Interactive, or Stabilizing Adaptations

Change can influence adaptive cultural behaviors and norms in many ways, including ritual and exchange. In this volume, the archaeology of symbolism and cognition is considered in light of environmental fluctuations and the growth of societal inequality. Osborn presents an interesting case of ritual burning with an adaptive function from Iron Age southeastern Africa—a strategy that may have served to eradicate rodents, insects, and the diseases they carried. He argues that these ritual burnings were linked ultimately to a transition to a period of more frequent megadroughts due to El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events in the western Pacific Ocean and the Eastern Indian Ocean (McPhaden et al. 2006; Tudhope et al. 2001). Ritual activities among agricultural groups in southeastern Africa focused on rainmaking and at addressing pre- and postharvest food stress. There are correlations with rodent and insect responses to severe drought that, in turn, affected food availability. Iron Age and contemporary farmers in southern Africa both practiced the deliberate burning of domestic and storage structures. Osborn explores archaeological evidence for intense fires that occurred in granaries and houses, which correlate

Introduction · 9

with megadroughts (droughts lasting 10 or more years) and their relationships with ENSO events. He also shows their correlations with reliance on rituals, some of which involve burning. Osborn’s investigations of rodent ecology reveal that outbreaks of rodents and rodent-related diseases are correlated with precipitation and interactions between wild plant growth and domestic crop production. Rodent outbreaks were likely to occur once rains began at the end of a drought, and were correlated with an expansion in rodent-borne diseases that affected humans. The setting of fires as parts of rainmaking rituals served ecologically to reduce rodents and other vermin and, by extension, diseases. In this way, rituals had an ecological function that was aimed at alleviating epidemiological stress and promoting the well-being of human populations. Carvalho’s investigation of the onset of megalithism in western Iberia in Europe demonstrates that economic boundaries emerged and persisted during the fourth millennium BC, as evident from self-sustaining villages with territories bounded by dolmens. However, long-distance dissemination of megalithic art and prestige goods suggests a shared system of ideology and values. Thus, a boundary is not always isomorphic with cultural components such as language or ideology. This intriguing finding has implications for the ways that groups that are divided along socioeconomic lines may develop and change over time. As Lovis and Whallon (2016) point out, landscapes have meanings that people assign to them, and this was certainly the case in western Iberia where social-territorial boundaries were permeable and interactions among groups occurred over sizable areas. Exchanges of high-value goods took place over region-wide landscapes. Some of these goods appeared in mortuary contexts, underscoring the importance of rituals and intergroup exchange and trade. As Carvalho concludes, “megalithism” must be understood beyond mere architecture and landmarks, as expressions of politically independent communities sharing a common system of values. Contemporary case studies can open lines of inquiry into normative assumptions about the unilinearity of adaptations, with implications for archaeological inferences. Hitchcock uses ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological data to show cyclical multiannual modes of subsistence and settlement among Ju/’hoansi San forager-farmers of Namibia in southern Africa during the past seven decades (1951–2020). Changes that occurred during this time include the introduction and use of gardens with domestic crops as well as climatically influenced economic interactions with neighboring pastoralist-farmers. This raises important questions about the ability

10 · Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu

of archaeologists to infer these kinds of strategic variability patterns from mobility, subsistence, and technology. Hitchcock’s detailed analysis offers a useful frame of reference for potential modes of transition and interactions of foraging, food production, and competition or cooperation with nonforaging neighbors wherever territorial borders exist. The Ju/’hoansi and their neighbors were exposed to food production techniques through interactions with other groups, including Bantu-speaking agropastoralists and German, South African, and Namibian farmers, anthropologists, development workers, faith-based institutions, and the military (Gordon 2021; Gordon and Douglas 2000; Marshall and Ritchie 1984). Like Yu’s chapter on Taiwan, Hitchcock draws on niche construction theory (see Smith 2015; Zeanah 2017) to explain choices made by Ju/’hoansi in agricultural practices. Scale, Prediction, and Relevance

As mentioned above, “big data” analysis opens up exciting pathways for the exploration of major transformations on a macroregional and even global scale. Johnson and colleagues combine ethnographic reference data on foraging with habitat criteria to identify and define predictable conditions that favor the transition from foragers to food producers. This approach produces expectations about archaeological data from areas with the earliest evidence for plant and animal domestication. Johnson and her coauthors identify some provocative patterns that suggest how ecological conditions shape intensification options and other activities, which can lead to plant and animal domestication through new opportunities and constraints (as opposed to deterministic relationships). A significant proposition is that the margins of effective temperature zones may have been critical locations for the transition from foraging to farming, as minor fluctuations in temperature at these borders could have created major changes in the opportunities and limitations faced by hunter-gatherers. This proposition is eminently testable using evidence from archaeological and paleoenvironmental reconstructions and shows real promise for incorporating new data or legacy information. Patterns that manifest at the macroecological scale of analysis tell us less about individual decision making than about ecological relationships that offer different adaption options for people living under different environmental conditions. A number of features of hunter-gatherers can be discerned (Binford 2001; Lemke 2019) including mobility (both logistical and

Introduction · 11

residential), small-group living, seasonal and longer term aggregations and dispersals, groups that consist of both kin and nonkin, dependence upon specific environmental and social conditions, utilization of wild terrestrial and aquatic resources, low-to-moderate population growth and shifts in population densities, and direct consumption of resources versus storage of resources. As this final chapter shows, other things being equal, intensification of resource use is expected to be the earliest where hunter-gatherers cross a packing threshold of 13 to 15 persons per 100 square kilometers (see Binford 2001: 375–377). In some habitats there is a bias toward animal domestication, and in others there is a bias toward plant domestication. In cases away from coasts where hunter-gatherers begin to depend on plants, storage must be present. The environment does not cause people to behave a certain way, but as population densities grow, people are likely to recognize broadly similar opportunities and limitations in broadly similar settings. Concluding Remarks

In sum, recognizing consequential change in the archaeological record is a central problem of archaeology. Important transitions received explicit focus from the beginning with Thomsen’s (1837) three-age system, and interest culminated in the popular concept of Childe’s (1950; 1951) “revolutions.” But inquiry is one thing, and finding what you are looking for is another. On the latter point much is owed to Lewis Binford who, as Kelly (2015: 68) noted in a comparison with Childe, “was concerned with how we interpret the archaeological record . . . because the meanings of things were not self-evident.” The aim of this book is a broad-level scan of the phenomena that signal and accompany transitions: 12 chapters written by 24 scholars cover North America (three chapters), Africa (two chapters), Asia (two chapters), South America (two chapters), Europe (one chapter), and the globe (one chapter). Issues covered range from mobile hunter-gatherers and the strategies that they employ to sedentary food producers’ responses to factors such as drought, climatic change, population density shifts, and disease. Theoretical approaches range from processualism to postprocessual, humanistic, and interpretive. Methodologies include ethnoarchaeology, the use of ethnographic analogy, cross-cultural comparisons, oral history, historical approaches, ethnography, participant observation, and focus group discussions, among others. Archaeological inquiry is done at various levels: low-

12 · Joseph D. Wardle, Robert K. Hitchcock, Matthew Schmader, and Pei-Lin Yu

level theory, middle-range theory, and high-level theory are all featured. Some chapters argue from the existence of archaeological sites; others take a nonsite distributional archaeological approach (see Ebert 1992). Populations under consideration range from indigenous people to immigrants and from Europeans to past and present Asian, African, South American, and North American peoples. Some surprising conclusions include the fact that corn (maize) began to be used as a key resource by Ancestral Pueblo populations at the height of a drought and that megalith construction occurred in periods when there was territorial competition for land and resources, as well as expansions and contractions in exchange networks involving prestige goods. Research may stem from properties observed in the archaeological record, but improving our knowledge about transitions is of paramount significance and relevance to contemporary societies. Today, first-order phenomena such as climate-driven fires, superstorms, and droughts are accelerating; second-order phenomena of armed conflict, migrations, and stateless populations are running parallel with unprecedented technological innovations; and third-order cascading changes and interactions are eliminating entire ecosystems and disrupting cultures (yet third-order responses are generating unprecedented connectedness and synergistic potential). Examples of these occurrences should be familiar to any reader living in the twenty-first century: for example, demographic and economic pressures on wildlands and populations of animals likely led to the recent coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic of 2019. At the time of this writing, this particularly devastating end result of key transitions in the human narrative now rages across the planet, having killed millions and impacted the lives of billions more. One fact is certain: there is unique and compelling value in defining, explaining, and predicting variability of transitions. Can archaeologists always pinpoint definitive evidence of change, let alone causal mechanisms? Perhaps not every time, and perhaps not directly. Yet the unique relevance of archaeological inquiry into transitions calls for a continual reassessment of scientific assumptions and goals as we explore new scientific approaches, definitions, and methods to elucidate the past while striving to protect the heritage and scientific values of archaeological remnants for future generations. This may be the most crucial time in decades for robust, innovative, and inclusive scientific inquiries into the tempo, modes, and causes of change in the human story.

Introduction · 13

The contributors to this volume offer these articles as part of this ongoing and critical set of conversations. Acknowledgments

The editors of this volume wish to thank the Society for American Archaeology for its continuing support of archaeological collaborations and dissemination, particularly in the unprecedented challenges of 2020–22. We would like to thank the University Press of Florida and its editorial staff for their advice and assistance. The editors and authors of this volume also acknowledge the timely and important work of researchers on these topics across the globe in many languages and from varying perspectives. We specifically thank the traditional, indigenous, and descendant communities who collaborate with archaeologists to learn more about the past, and our contributors from other nations who have authored their articles in English for this publication. References Bar Yosef, O. 2014 The Origins of Sedentism and Agriculture in Western Asia. The Cambridge World Prehistory 3: 1408–1438. Binford, Lewis R. 1965 Archaeological Systematics and the Study of Cultural Process. American Antiquity 31(2): 203–210. 1968 Post-Pleistocene Adaptations. In New Perspectives in Archaeology, edited by Sally R. Binford and Lewis R. Binford, pp. 313–341. Aldine, Chicago. 2001 Constructing Frames of Reference: An Analytical Method for Archaeological Theory Building Using Ethnographic and Environmental Data Sets. University of California Press, Berkeley. Borcan, O., O. Olsson, and L. Putterman 2018 Transition to Agriculture and First State Presence: A Global Analysis. Working Paper in Economics No. 741, SSRN Working Papers 3243819, University of Gothenberg, Gothenberg, Sweden. Borrero, Luis A. 2011 Los cazadores orientales de Tierra del Fuego. In Los cazadores-recolectores del extremo oriental fueguino Arqueología de Península Mitre e Isla de los Estados, edited by Atilio F. J. Zangrando, Martin Vazquez, and Augusto Tessone, pp. 287–298. Sociedad Argentina de Antropología, Buenos Aires. Braidwood, Robert J. 1960 The Agricultural Revolution. Scientific American 203(3): 130–1252. 1963 Prehistoric Men. Chicago Natural History Museum, Chicago.

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Childe, V. Gordon 1950 The Urban Revolution. Town Planning Review 21: 3–17. 1951 Man Makes Himself. Third edition. Mentor Books, New York. Chen, S., and P. Yu 2017 Early “Neolithics” of China: Variation and Evolutionary Implications. Journal of Anthropological Research 73(2): 149–180. Cohen, Mark Nathan 1977 The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, and London. Dow, G. K., C. G. Reed, and N. Olewiler 2009 Climate Reversals and the Transition to Agriculture. Journal of Economic Growth 14(1): 27–53. Dow, G. K., and C. G. Reed 2015 The Origins of Sedentism: Climate, Population, and Technology. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 119: 56–71. Ebert, James I. 1992 Distributional Archaeology. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Ferrio, J. P., J. Voltas, and J. L. Araus 2011 Global Change and the Origins of Agriculture. Crop Stress Management and Global Climate Change 2011: 1–14. Flannery, Kent V. 1972 The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3: 399–426. 1973 The Origins of Agriculture. Annual Review of Anthropology 2: 271–309. Fuller, D. Q. 2010 An Emerging Paradigm Shift in the Origins of Agriculture. General Anthropology 17(2): 1–12. Gamble, Clive 1993 Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization. Penguin Books, London. Gibbs, K. and Jordan, P. 2016 A Comparative Perspective on the “Western” and “Eastern” Neolithics of Eurasia: Ceramics; Agriculture and Sedentism. Quaternary International 419: 27– 35. Gignoux, C. R., B. M. Henn, and J. L. Mountain 2016 Rapid, Global Demographic Expansions after the Origins of Agriculture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(15): 6044–6049. Gordon, Robert J. 2021 South Africa’s Dreams: Ethnologists and Apartheid in Namibia. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford. Gordon, Robert J., with Stuart Sholto Douglas 2000 The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass. Second edition. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Harris, David, and Gordon C. Hillman, editors 1989 Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation. Unwin Hyman, London.

Introduction · 15

Hayden, B. 2001 Richman, Poorman, Beggarman, Chief: The Dynamics of Social Inequality. In Archaeology at the Millenium: A Sourcebook, edited by G. Feinman, and T. Price, pp. 231–72. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York. Hitchcock, R. K. 1982 The Ethnoarchaeology of Sedentism: Mobility Strategies and Site Structure among Foraging and Food Producing Populations in the Eastern Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Doctoral dissertation, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Hodder, Ian, and Scott Hutson 2004 Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Third edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Johnson, Amber L. 2004 The Goals of Processual Archaeology. In Processual Archaeology: Exploring Analytical Strategies, Frames of Reference, and Culture Process, edited by Amber L. Johnson, pp. 11–27. Praeger, Westport, Connecticut, and London. 2014 Exploring Adaptive Variation among Hunter-Gatherers with Binford’s Frames of Reference. Journal of Archaeological Research 22(1): 1–42. Johnson, Gregory A. 1973 Local Exchange and Early State Development in Southwestern Iran. University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers No. 51. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Kelly, Robert L. 1983 Hunter-Gatherer Mobility Strategies. Journal of Anthropological Research 39: 277–306. 1992 Mobility/Sedentism: Concepts, Archaeological Measures, and Effects. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 43–60. 2013 The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 2015 Binford versus Childe: What Makes an Archaeologist Influential? Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 38: 67–71. 2016 The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of History Can Tell Us About Our Future. University of California Press, Berkeley. Kelly, Robert L., and David Hurst Thomas 2014 Archaeology. Fifth edition. Wadsworth Cencage Learning, Belmont, California. Kohler, Timothy A., Michael E. Smith, Amy Bogaard, Gary M. Feinman, Christian E. Peterson, Alleen Betzenhauser, Matthew Pailes, et al. 2017 Greater Post-Neolithic Wealth Disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica. Nature 551(7682): 619–622. Lemke, Ashley 2019 Hunter-Gatherers and Archaeology. In Foraging in the Past: Archaeological Studies of Hunter-Gatherer Diversity, edited by Ashley Lemke, pp. 1–18. Colorado University Press, Boulder. Lovis, William A., and Robert Whallon 2016 The Creation of Landscape Meaning by Mobile Hunter-Gatherers. In Marking the Land: Hunter-Gatherers Creation of Meaning in their Environment, edited

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by William A. Lovis and Robert Whallon, pp. 1–9. Routledge, London and New York. Marshall, John, and Claire Ritchie 1984 Where Are the Ju/Wasi of Nyae? Changes in a Bushman Society: 1958–1981. Communications No. 9, Center for African Area Studies, University of Cape Town. University of Cape Town, South Africa. Martin, D. L., and R. P. Harrod 2015 Bioarchaeological Contributions to the Study of Violence. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 156: 116–145. McPhaden, Michael J., Stephen E. Zebiak, and Michael H. Glantz 2006 ENSO as an Integrating Concept in Earth Science. Science 313: 1740–1745. Prentiss, Anna Marie, Natasha Lyons, Lucille E. Harris, Melisse R. P. Burns, and Terrence M. Godin 2007 The Emergence of Status Inequality in Intermediate Scale Societies: A Demographic and Socio-Economic History of the Keatley Creek Site, British Columbia. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2): 299–327. Price, T. D. 2010 Pathways to Power: New Perspectives on the Emergence of Social Inequality. Springer, New York. Price, T. D., and O. Bar-Yosef 2011 The Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas: An Introduction to Supplement 4. Current Anthropology 52(S4): S163–S174. Rappaport, Roy 1967 Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Redman, Charles L. 1978 The Rise of Civilization: From Early Farmers to Urban Society in the Ancient Near East. W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco. Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn 2016 Archaeology: Theories, Methods, Practice. Seventh Edition. Thames and Hudson, London. de Saulieu, G., and A. Testart 2015 Innovations, Food Storage and the Origins of Agriculture. Environmental Archaeology 20(4): 314–320. Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Tilley 1987 Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Smith, Bruce D. 2015 A Comparison of Niche Construction Theory and Diet Breadth Models as Explanatory Frameworks for the Initial Domestication of Plants and Animals. Journal of Archaeological Research 23(3): 215–262. Steward, Julian 1955 Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. University of Illinois Press, Champaign-Urbana.

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Thomsen, C. J. 1837 1962 The Various Periods to which Heathen Relics can be Assigned. In Man’s Discovery of His Past: Literary Landmarks in Archaeology, edited by R. F. Heizer, pp. 21–27. Prentice Hall, Englewood, New Jersey. Trigger, Bruce G. 1989 A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tudhope, A. W., C. P. Chilcott, M. T. McCulloch, E. R. Cook, J. Chappell, R. M. Ellam, D. W. Lea, et al. 2001 Variability in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation through a Glacial-Interglacial cycle. Science 291: 1511–1517. Vigne, J. D. 2011 The Origins of Animal Domestication and Husbandry: A Major Change in the History of Humanity and the Biosphere. Comptes rendus biologies 334(3): 171–181. Wengrow, D., and D. Graeber 2015 Farewell to the “Childhood of Man” Ritual, Seasonality, and the Origins of Inequality. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(3): 597–619. White, Leslie 1959 The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. Yu, Pei-Lin, Matthew Schmader, and James G. Enloe 2015 “I’m the Oldest New Archaeologist in Town”: The Intellectual Evolution of Lewis R. Binford. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 38: 2–7. Zeanah, D. W. 2017 Foraging Models, Niche Construction, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex. American Antiquity 82(1): 3–24. Zvelebil, M., and M. Pluciennik 2011 Historical Origins of Agriculture. The Role of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in Human Nutrition: 41–78.

1 The Role of Theory and Ethnographic Analogies in Understanding Paleoindian Obsidian Acquisition, Mobility, and Mating Strategies in the Great Basin David W. Zeanah, Brian F. Codding, Douglas W. Bird, Rebecca Bliege Bird, Chloe McGuire, George T. Jones, and Robert G. Elston

Great Basin Paleoindians procured obsidian from more distant sources than did most Holocene hunter-gatherers, suggesting high mobility was key to their adaptation to environments of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT). Because these transport distances were far larger than the annual rounds and logistic forays of ethnographically known hunter-gatherers, ethnoarchaeological mobility patterns may be invalid analogies for Paleoindian obsidian conveyance. Alternative interpretations pose social and ideological motives for obsidian transport based on ethnographic observations of foragers who procured and exchanged nonlocal materials over comparable distances. Both contending analogies rely on a questionable assumption that hunter-gatherers are socially organized as “bands” that follow prescribed annual rounds. A new explanation, informed by recent demographic evidence and a Western Australian ethnographic analogue, indicates that conveyance of obsidian during the PHT is better understood as resulting from high individual mobility, flexible group composition, and long-distance mating networks. This analogy assumes that socioideological and subsistence incentives play noncontradictory roles in structuring the mobility of hunter-gatherers in a landscape of extremely low-population density where the benefits of dispersing among widely scattered habitats impose high costs on finding mates.

Understanding Paleoindian Obsidian Acquisition, Mobility, and Mating Strategies · 19

Great Basin Paleoindian Obsidian Procurement and Conveyance

Other than basal strata of a handful of caves and rock shelters (Smith et al. 2019), the Great Basin Paleoindian archaeological record consists of surface sites that usually lack associated subsistence remains or features. The best evidence of mobility and exchange comes from using geochemical X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry to determine the distances and directions from sources to the open-air sites where obsidian artifacts were found. Paleoindian obsidian artifacts originate from more widely dispersed and distant quarries than all but some of their most recent prehistoric counterparts (King 2016; Thomas 2012), suggesting that Paleoindians were either more mobile or exchanged obsidian over broader areas than later Archaic foragers (Jones et al. 2003; Jones et al. 2012; Kelly 2012; King 2016; Madsen 2007; Newlander 2015, 2018; Smith 2010; Smith and Harvey 2018). Jones and colleagues (2003) initially proposed that Great Basin Paleoindian bands directly procured obsidian as they moved residential locales from one wetland basin to another in rounds encompassing nearly the entire geographic province. XRF sourcing of larger samples of obsidian artifacts (Jones, et al. 2012; Smith 2010), however, clarified that these huge obsidian conveyance zones were better conceptualized as more localized networks that were connected at seasonal or annual centralized aggregation sites. Even so, these local Paleoindian conveyance zones are much larger than annual ranges of all but later equestrian hunters (Table 1.1). Madsen (2007) argued that Paleoindian men procured obsidian while on long-distance hunting forays from productive but obsidian-poor wetlands that tethered women’s foraging and residential mobility. Simms (2008) suggested that Paleoindian conveyance zones represent lifetime mobility rather than a single annual round. But if either interpretation is correct, hunter-gatherers at this time may have made longer logistic hunting trips and traversed larger lifetime ranges than the Nunamiut (Binford 2001). If conveyance of exotic obsidian directly reflects subsistence-driven, logistic or band mobility, people here were significantly more mobile than the ethnographic cases on which models of hunter-gatherer mobility are based. An interpretation of high mobility is consistent with Great Basin Paleoindian lithic technology, which suggests an emphasis on the hunting of dispersed and easily depleted, large game, providing a strong economic incentive for a nomadic lifestyle (Elston et al. 2014). High mobility by groups hunting midsized ungulates is a likely cause of widespread conveyance of

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Table 1.1. Comparison of annual mobility of hunter-gatherers with Great Basin Paleoindian obsidian conveyance zones Ethnographically Known Forager Group1 Southern Paiute (Kaibab) G/wi (≠Kade) Pumé Owens Valley Paiute Washoe Ju/’hoansi Hadza Ngadadjara Montagnais Cree Ache Nunamiut (annual) Nunamiut (lifetime) Crow (with horse) Pintupi (annual) Pintupi (lifetime) Great Basin Paleoindian Obsidian Conveyance Zone2 Valley3

Grass Revised West North West Revised East South Central East

Annual Range (100 km2) 7 9 9 20 23 25 25–30 26 27 48 52 52 205 610 78 520 Area (100 km2) 196 221 393 442 466 471 785 932

Sources: 1. Pintupi—Myers 1971, Long 1971; Ache—Hill et al. 2014; Pumé—Kramer et al. 2017. All others, Kelly 2012. 2. Newlander 2018. 3. This chapter.

high quality toolstone and the spread of microblade projectile technology in Northeastern Asia (Zhang, this volume). Yet in the Great Basin, Paleoindian archeozoological assemblages contain higher proportions of small-to-large game than ensuing Archaic assemblages, demonstrating that Paleoindian foragers hunted a broad array of prey, most of which would not require extreme mobility to acquire (Goebel et al. 2011; Hockett 2015; Janetski et al. 2012; Smith and Barker 2017). Basin archaeologists are hardpressed to pose any alternative subsistence motivation to large game hunting for why Paleoindian foragers would have been so mobile (Elston et al.

Understanding Paleoindian Obsidian Acquisition, Mobility, and Mating Strategies · 21

2014; Smith and Barker 2017). Here lies the fundamental dilemma of ethnographic analogy: is archaeological evidence detecting prehistoric variability outside the range of ethnographic hunter-gatherers, or are archaeologists simply applying the wrong analogies? Following the latter reasoning, Rosenthal and Hildebrandt (2016) used Wobst’s (1974) simulations of Paleolithic demography to reckon that with minimal population densities of about 0.7 persons per 100 km2, a small obsidian conveyance zone held seven intermarrying bands of about 25 people apiece, each occupying a distinct, bounded territory comparable in size to the annual rounds of some ethnographic hunter-gatherers. They argued that residential mobility beyond band boundaries was infeasible because nomadic bands would have to reoccupy depleted patches recently vacated by neighboring groups. It seemed more likely that bands exchanged nonlocal obsidians at gatherings necessary to facilitate intermarriages, while procuring most toolstone from sources within their own territories. Their interpretation of Paleoindian settlement organization assumed annual mobility within the scale of ethnographically documented variation, but pointed to the necessity of long-distance mating networks to sustain fecundity among dispersed bands. The distance over which Paleoindians exchanged obsidian simply reflected the size of Paleoindian social networks in a low-density population. Speth and colleagues (2013) pointed to ethnographic accounts, particularly in Australia, of long-distance forays to procure ideologically significant materials over comparable distances to those over which Paleoindians transported obsidian. Also following Wobst’s (1974) models of Paleolithic band size, Newlander (2015; 2018) proposed that periodic interactions to exchange information and mates were necessary to sustain the cultural and biological viability of dispersed bands. Direct procurement and exchange of ideologically and socially significant obsidian appeared more plausible mechanisms for obsidian conveyance than subsistence-driven band mobility. While motivated primarily by “nonutilitarian” concerns, long-distance obsidian acquisition may have maintained far-flung social networks, as it may have in southern Siberia (Zhang, this volume). Occasional finds of Olivella shell beads in Paleoindian contexts in the Great Basin show that nonutilitarian items were transported over great distances probably by means of intergroup exchange rather than subsistence mobility (Fitzgerald et al. 2005; Smith et al. 2017). But why Paleoindian social networks and ideological goals entailed acquisition of obsidian over longer distances than Archaic groups remains unclear.

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We agree that obsidian conveyance zones are unlikely to directly reflect the annual rounds of Paleoindian bands, support incorporating social incentives into our notions of Paleoindian mobility and obsidian acquisition, and acknowledge that nonlocal materials likely held ideological significance to Paleoindian foragers. The challenge of sustaining a biologically viable population among widely dispersed foraging groups should have been critical for Paleoindians (Newlander 2018; Rosenthal and Hildebrandt 2016). Even so, we fear analogies have come to define Paleoindian obsidian conveyance as socially or ideologically driven, precisely because they imply scales of subsistence mobility beyond ethnographically understood variability. We are left with a notion that Paleoindian economies were simply old-fashioned versions of the very ethnographic cases (Smith and Barker 2017) from which we drew the analogies. This leaves the original question of why Paleoindians transported obsidian over greater distances than later groups unanswered except by appeal to causes that are inscrutable to further archaeological inquiry. Grass Valley Paleoindian Obsidian

Most of the central Great Basin lacks evidence of Paleoindian occupation comparable to that associated with the Pleistocene lakes and wetlands of surrounding lower elevation valleys in the Bonneville and Lahontan basins, southeast Oregon, and the Mohave Desert (Thomas 2013). Nonetheless, significant Paleoindian open-air sites are associated with smaller, isolated Pleistocene lakes in the central Great Basin. We have investigated two such sites in Grass Valley, Nevada (Figure 1.1). Both clearly date to the PHT. Both occur on lacustrine gravel features associated with Pleistocene Lake Gilbert, stratigraphically bounded between well-dated Late Pleistocene wetlands and Middle Holocene paleosols and ash deposits. Both assemblages overwhelmingly contain Paleoindian time markers (Western Stemmed and Concave Base points, Crescents), and obsidian hydration and radiocarbon dated faunal remains firmly anchor 26La4434 in the PHT (Beck et al. 2002; Elston and Kuypers 2018; Jones et al. 2003; Martin et al. 2019). Central Nevada lacks usable sources of obsidian, with most outcrops occurring in eastern California, southern Idaho, western and southern Nevada, southeastern Oregon, and western Utah (Thomas 2012). As a consequence, Paleoindian lithics in the central Great Basin are predominantly fashioned from more locally available fine-grained volcanic and

Understanding Paleoindian Obsidian Acquisition, Mobility, and Mating Strategies · 23

Figure 1.1. Map of Great Basin showing Grass Valley Study Area, source localities for obsidian in Grass Valley Paleoindian archaeological assemblages, and maximum extent of Pleistocene wetlands.

cryptocrystalline materials. Site 26LA781, for example, lies near a large dacite source (Colgan and Henry 2017) and quarry, from which immense numbers of middle-stage bifaces were transported to the site and reduced to stemmed projectile points during the Paleoindian period (Beck et al. 2002). Although obsidian artifacts make up only small proportions of the assemblages recovered from 26La4434 and 26LA781, they originate from 13 discrete source localities, ranging from 165 km to 345 km from Grass Valley (Table 1.2). The most common obsidians are Browns Bench and Paradise Valley, located, respectively, 250 and 220 km away from their outcrops in Northern Nevada; and Mt. Hicks, 225 km from its source to the southwest. These suggest that obsidian entered Grass Valley from a surrounding region exceeding 196,000 km2 in extent. Certainly artifacts made of high-quality but rare volcanic glass from distant sources held ideological and social significance for Paleoindian foragers. But if they are “righteous rocks” (sensu Binford and Stone 1985) they are not self-righteous, in that they are not obvious treasured mementos, prestige items, or sacred objects. Obsidian bifaces are fully used and reduced, and projectile points bear evidence of impact fractures, reworking, and manufacturing breaks similar to those on points made from local

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Table 1.2. Obsidian sources represented in assemblages from 26La4434 and 26LA781 Source Box Spring Crow Spring Obsidian Butte Double H Paradise Valley Tempiute Mountain Mt. Hicks Queen Bodie Hills Browns Bench Massacre Lake Topaz Mountain Shoshone Mountain Total

Distance (km) 95 165 185 195 220 220 225 225 235 250 260 285 345

Flake

Projectile Biface Point Other

1 3 10 35 1 66 4 117

1 1 1

1 2

3

1

1 1

1

1 2 1

237

1 7

8

3

Total 1 1 4 11 38 1 71 4 1 120 1 1 1 255

Sources: Includes data from Jones et al. 2003: Table 7; and Johnson and McQueen 2017: Appendix A.

fine-grained volcanic and cryptocrystalline materials (Elston and Kuypers 2018). Obsidian from two spatially discrete debitage clusters at 26La4434 are similarly dominated by pressure and bifacial thinning flakes, yet have different source profiles: one dominated by obsidian from the Browns Bench source, and the other with a mixture of Browns Bench and Paradise Valley obsidians. Their distinctive composition suggests they are different activity areas, likely temporally separate occupations, where functional obsidian bifaces were reduced and maintained. Edges of two obsidian bifacial thinning flakes were use-modified by scraping hard materials, similar to other flake tools in the assemblage (Bradshaw et al. 2018). Obsidian points and bifaces were clearly curated gear, actively used in a fully utilitarian toolkit, transported over at least the distance from source within a similar use-life between procurement and discard as points and bifaces fashioned from local toolstone sources. Ideological or social analogues alone fail to explain why nonlocal obsidians were carried over such great distances for utilitarian purposes.

Understanding Paleoindian Obsidian Acquisition, Mobility, and Mating Strategies · 25

Hunter-Gatherer Camp Group Organization

Previous interpretations of Great Basin obsidian conveyance assume, explicitly or implicitly, that hunter-gatherers are typically organized into bands of a few dozen closely related people. These bands occupy specific ranges, and are interconnected by marriage and kinship ties. They may move to pursue subsistence goals and exchange resources, information, and mates with one another. In the archaeologist’s mind, they are real social, demographic, and economic entities. Yet demographic evidence demonstrates that “bands” are better thought of as temporary groups whose size and composition shift relative to whoever happens to camp and forage together at the time (Bird et al. 2019). For example, adult kin typically make up only 7 percent of coresidents among 32 hunter-gatherer societies with reliable camp censuses. Although siblings often reside together, both men and women usually leave the group in which they were born. Married pairs are only 15–20 percent of Ache and San camp groups where there is sufficient information to quantify relationships, while 55–65 percent lack either close genetic or affinal relationships (Hill et al. 2011). Similar patterns are evident among Agta and Baka residential groups (Dyble et al. 2015), suggesting fluid camp residence is the norm among mobile hunter-gatherers (Bird et al. 2019). Such flexibility requires high mobility by people linked by ritual and social ties more than consanguineal or affinal relationships. As a result, individual foragers are likely to interact directly with hundreds of unrelated adults over their lifetimes (Hill et al. 2014). For example, 171 Hadza women surveyed had camped with an average of 69 different people over a 15-year period (Blurton Jones 2016). Similarly, Hadza and Ache men are likely to observe over 300 different men making tools through their lives (Hill et al. 2014). Hunter-Gatherers of Western Australia

Anthropologists long realized that hunter-gatherers of the Little Sandy and Great Sandy deserts of Western Australia did not fit the traditional band model of hunter-gatherer organization. Myers (1991: 97), for example, commented that Pintupi “bands are hypothetical entities . . . with different individuals affiliating themselves . . . as they move from place to place, traveling with them for a while and then moving on. The size of the band may remain constant while the actual composition may vary greatly.” Only

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about 20 percent of coresidents among nine groups encountered during the middle twentieth century were adult kin (Scelza and Bliege Bird 2008), documenting the flexible composition of camp groups that Myers describes and contemporary Martu foragers recall (Bird et al. 2019). Population densities (0.5–0.7 person per 100 km2) in the Western Desert were among the lowest documented among ethnographic hunter-gatherers (Cane 1990; Dousset 2002), requiring individuals to be extremely mobile to sustain social ties. A camp group might forage over nearly 8,000 km2 annually, well within the range size of pedestrian hunter-gatherers discussed earlier (Table 1.1), but most adults had occasion to roam beyond a 52,000 km2 area at some point in their lives (Long 1971). Each camping group typically contained fewer than 20 people (Bird et al. 2019), but hundreds would occasionally congregate for ritual or social purposes (McDonald and Veth 2012). Such aggregations were critical for sustaining such a spatially dispersed society. Parties of men and boys often journeyed great distances to visit kin, participate in ceremonies, and attend gatherings. By traveling, men and women gained custodianship of sacred sites far beyond their birthplaces. Red ochre, toolstone, and pearl shells were often procured and exchanged on such journeys (Tonkinson 1978), perhaps offering a direct parallel to obsidian acquisition in the PHT Great Basin. However, it was by participating in such long-distance networks that Western Australian foragers acquired rights to forage in territories great distances from where they were born. For example, in a well-documented case, patrols encountered a Pitjantjara male in Western Australia, over 600 km from his natal estates (Davenport et al. 2005), who subsequently married and lived among Martu. Four of six men in a Pintupi group encountered north of Lake Mackay in the 1950s were living 160 to 250 km away from where they were born (Long 1971). We suspect that many of the Australian examples of long-distance, nonutilitarian procurement cited by Speth and colleagues (2013) are best understood in this context. Long’s (1971: 265) observation that Pintupi adults had lifetime ranges exceeding 52,000 km2 in area exceeds that for Nunamiut lifetime ranges, and falls within range of Great Basin obsidian conveyance zones (Table 1), which appear to be feasible estimates of lifetime mobility in a low-density forager population. While we acknowledge that ideology and exchange played roles in toolstone conveyance among Paleoindian foragers, we pose that the simplest explanation for Paleoindian obsidian conveyance zones is that they directly reflect individual mobility in a region where extremely

Understanding Paleoindian Obsidian Acquisition, Mobility, and Mating Strategies · 27

low-population density demanded expansive social networks. If this is a valid analogy for understanding Paleoindian obsidian distributions, we see little value in divorcing socioideologically motivated acquisition and exchange from subsistence mobility because large-scale social networks were precisely what allowed low-density Paleoindians to forage in resource patches far from their birthplaces (Bird et al. 2019). Building Better Theory from Ethnographic Cases

We argue that the essential factor in common between the PHT Great Basin and ethnographic Western Australia is extremely low-population density. But our goal is not to simply replace one analogy with another, but to specify what aspects of the PHT environment made similar relationships worthwhile in both cases, while also identifying key differences. Ethnographic Western Desert foragers, for example, intensively ground seeds using a milling technology (Zeanah et al. 2015; Zeanah et al. 2017) that has no counterpart in the PHT Great Basin (Elston et al. 2014). The absence of Paleoindian milling equipment is all the more striking given ubiquitous milling stones and seed macrofossils in subsequent Archaic contexts. Western Desert and Paleoindian mobility strategies clearly articulated to quite different subsistence economies, with resources requiring high handling relative to search costs contributing relatively little to Paleoindian sustenance. Secondly, widely dispersed and seasonally available water sources in an arid environment were the critical limitations to forager population density and mobility in Western Australian deserts (Bliege Bird et al. 2020; Zeanah et al. 2017). It is difficult to envision similar constraints on Paleoindian population distributions given the large and abundant wetlands that covered many Great Basin valleys during the PHT, that were the focus of settlement (Elston et al. 2014). Although their size and productivity would have fluctuated in response to climatic volatility, wetlands persisted and distance between lake basins remained relatively constant throughout the PHT, thereby imposing few long-term constraints on Paleoindian population densities or distributions. A third difference may lie in the importance of mosaic burning to aboriginal Australian foraging economies (Bird et al. 2016). Largely motivated to improve short-term returns for hunting small game, sustained burning enhances the predictability and productivity of future foraging opportunities by increasing the abundance of game and enriching the diversity of

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gathered resources. Because of such emergent properties, anthropogenic mosaics become persistently richer patches than surrounding regions (see also Yu, this volume). Travel costs between widely dispersed but high-quality anthropogenic habitats triggered use of more reliable and sustainable small animals and plant foods, without regional population pressure. We argue elsewhere that this was a primary cause of the importance of plant foods and milling technologies in aboriginal foraging economies (Bliege Bird et al. 2020; Zeanah et al. 2017). Although we expect that Paleoindians used fire to improve hunting returns, we know of no evidence that Paleoindian foragers constructed niches on the scale of Western Australian mosaic burning (Brugger and Rhode 2020), perhaps explaining the absence of intensive seed use in the PHT Great Basin. We previously hypothesized that Paleoindian foraging strategies emphasized high energetic yield resources that were reliably encountered near riparian and lake wetlands, but were easily depleted (Elston et al. 2014). These included rabbit drives, grasshopper/cricket windrows, sage grouse leks, waterfowl, and fish, but intercept hunting of large artiodactyls near wetlands likely explains the hunting-oriented character of Paleoindian lithic assemblages. Successful hunting quickly depressed local artiodactyls, causing diet to broaden to include lower return prey. However, given the abundance of PHT wetlands, the pay-off for abandoning a depleted hunting patch exceeded those for exploiting low-return resources such as seeds. Such a foraging ecology would have encouraged Paleoindian camp groups to disperse widely among abundant wetlands. The historical context of the period when Western Australian foragers were ethnographically encountered is also worth noting when using them as analogies for Paleoindian hunter-gatherers. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, trade and employment opportunities drew people away from the already sparsely settled interior. Diminished burning led many anthropogenic mosaics to revert to unproductive climax plant communities. As populations declined in the western deserts, remaining foragers had to travel longer distances to maintain contact with kin dispersed among widely separated anthropogenic mosaics (Bliege Bird et al. 2020). Small, dispersed foraging groups in low-density populations are vulnerable to stochastic fluctuations in adult sex ratios due to births, mortality, and migration. In the Western Desert, the nine contact-period groups previously discussed, show strong biases in sex ratio, with about 1.6 adult females for every adult male (although some groups are biased toward males). Scelza and Bliege Bird (2008) argue that women of childbearing

Understanding Paleoindian Obsidian Acquisition, Mobility, and Mating Strategies · 29

age preferred to camp and forage with related women to cooperate in foraging and childcare, as reflected in the significantly higher number of coresiding same-sex kin for women (2.67), than men (1.32) among the nine groups. If so, individual mobility among Western Australian foragers may have been biased toward male dispersal among camps organized around related females. However, censuses among hunter-gatherer groups worldwide suggest that dual-sex dispersal and postmarital residence is typical for human foragers (Alvarez 2004; Dyble et al. 2015; Hill et al. 2011; Kramer et al. 2017). It seems likely that the female biased sex ratios among many residential groups in Western Australia also reflect the draw of wage labor for men during the contact period, higher male mortality due to violence, and/or greater male mobility drawing men to visit other sites far from their residential locales (Scelza and Bliege Bird 2008). Access to eligible spouses of appropriate age, sex, and kinship became a critical problem as the number of nomadic foragers in the western deserts declined (Dousset 2002). Such stochasticity adversely affects fitness opportunities of young people (Kramer et al. 2017) and, in nonhuman populations, are likely to encourage periodic population aggregations and high individual mobility as mechanisms for finding mates (Gascoigne et al. 2009, Yu this volume). Both are key features of settlement patterns and social networks in ethnographic Western Australia. Given the high environmental variability evident in the Great Basin between the Bølling-Allerød interstadial and the early Holocene (Elston et al. 2014), it may well be that Paleoindians vacated and repopulated the Great Basin on occasions that we have yet to be able to detect. Available evidence suggests sparse, yet sustained, occupation of the Great Basin from at least the Younger Dryas (Goebel et al. 2011; Smith and Barker 2017; Smith et al. 2019). Regardless, Paleoindian camp groups would have been consistently vulnerable to stochastic fluctuations in adult sex ratios, making similar mate-finding mechanisms in Paleoindian social networks essential for sustaining individual fitness. Discussion

We infer by analogy with recent Australian foragers that extremely low population density was the key factor accounting for the enormous size of Paleoindian obsidian conveyance zones in the Great Basin. Expansive social networks and high individual mobility were necessary to address stochastic fluctuations in adult sex ratios among widely dispersed Paleoindian

30 · Zeanah, Codding, Bird, Bliege Bird, McGuire, Jones, and Elston

foraging groups, who likely embedded obsidian acquisition and transport within movements to maintain social ties. Yet the causes of low-population densities appear to differ between the two cases. In Western Australia, populations were limited by the distribution and seasonal availability of water, and associated anthropogenic fire mosaics. Water sources were the intercept points in the landscape where foragers could shift camp membership and participate in trade, courtship, and ritual among larger groups of people (Bliege Bird et al. 2020). In contrast, Paleoindian foraging groups were pulled apart by widely dispersed, but easily depleted, foraging patches associated with expansive PHT wetlands. Periodic rendezvous of dispersed camp groups were likely features of the Paleoindian social landscape, and a venue by which nonlocal obsidians were conveyed from one camp group to another (Jones et al. 2012; Rosenthal and Hildebrandt 2016; Smith 2010). But the foraging landscape of the PHT Great Basin lacked similar nodes upon which to anchor wide-ranging social networks. We suggest that source localities of highquality toolstone, particularly those suitably located near wetland patches and travel routes between wetland basins, were the Paleoindian substitute. Regular visits to quarries to replenish toolstone supplies would have been essential for Paleoindian camp groups that foraged predominantly in wetland patches lacking toolstone sources. Access to abundant quantities of raw material, as well as multiple potential mentors, would also have been essential for novices to learn to knap, making proximity to quarries ideal locations, an important criterion for periodic aggregations (Miller et al. 2019, cf. Hill et al. 2014). Huge quantities of lithic reduction debris at 26La781 from the nearby dacite quarry suggests bifacial reduction by groups of people larger than a single camp, perhaps to teach youngsters how to make stemmed points. It is easy to conjecture by analogy with Western Australian foragers, that possession of tools made from obsidians signified custodianship of those distant sources and their associated foraging territories. Whatever their ideological or social significance however, their presence in Grass Valley is archaeological evidence of high individual mobility in a sparsely settled landscape. Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Martu people of Parnngurr, and the staff at the University of Nevada Gund Ranch Facility for facilitating this project. This

Understanding Paleoindian Obsidian Acquisition, Mobility, and Mating Strategies · 31

research is funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-Archaeology 1632541). References Cited Alvarez, Helen Perich 2004 Residence Groups among Hunter-Gatherers: A View of the Claims and Evidence for Patrilocal Bands. In Kinship and Behavior in Primates, edited by Bernard Chapais and Carol M. Berman, pp. 420–442. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York. Beck, Charlotte, Amanda K. Taylor, George T. Jones, Cynthia M. Fadem, Caitlyn R. Cook, and Sara A. Millward 2002 Rocks are Heavy: Transport Costs and Paleoarchaic Quarry Behavior in the Great Basin. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 21(4): 481–507. Binford, Lewis R. 2001 Constructing Frames of Reference: An Analytical Method for Archaeological Theory Building Using Ethnographic and Environmental Data Sets. University of California Press, Berkeley. Binford, Lewis R., and Nancy M. Stone 1985 “Righteous Rocks” and Richard Gould: Some Observations on Misguided “Debate.” American Antiquity 50(1): 151–153. Bird, Douglas W., Rebecca Bliege Bird, Brian F. Codding, and Nyalangka Taylor 2016 A Landscape Architecture of Fire: Cultural Emergence and Ecological Pyrodiversity in Australia’s Western Desert. Current Anthropology 57(S13): S65–S79. Bird, Douglas W., Rebecca Bliege Bird, Brian F. Codding, and David W. Zeanah 2019 Variability in the Organization and Size of Hunter-Gatherer Groups: Foragers Do Not Live in Small-Scale Societies. Journal of Human Evolution 131: 96–108. Bliege Bird, Rebecca, Chloe McGuire, Douglas W. Bird, Michael H. Price, David Zeanah, and Dale G. Nimmo 2020 Fire Mosaics and Habitat Choice in Nomadic Foragers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(23): 12904–12914. Blurton Jones, N. 2016 Demography and Evolutionary Ecology of Hadza Hunter-Gatherers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Bradshaw, Ryan, Martijn Kuypers, David Zeanah, Robert Elston, and Nathan Stevens 2018 Technological Organization of a Prearchaic Site in Grass Valley, Nevada. Poster presented at the Society for American Archaeology, Washington D.C. Brugger, Sandra Olivia, and David Rhode 2020 Impact of Pleistocene–Holocene Climate Shifts on Vegetation and Fire Dynamics and Its Implications for Prearchaic Humans in the Central Great Basin, USA. Journal of Quaternary Science 35(8): 987–993. Cane, Scott 1990 Desert Demography: A Case Study of Pre-Contact Aboriginal Densities in the Western Desert of Australia. In Hunter-Gatherer Demography: Past and Pres-

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ent, edited by Betty Meehan and Neville White, pp. 145–159. University of Sydney. Colgan, Joseph P., and Christopher D. Henry 2017 Eruptive History, Geochronology, and Post-Eruption Structural Evolution of the Late Eocene Hall Creek Caldera, Toiyabe Range, Nevada. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1832. Davenport, Sue, Peter Johnson, and Yuwali 2005 Cleared Out: First Contact in the Western Desert. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Dousset, Laurent 2002 Politics and Demography in a Contact Situation: The Establishment of the Giles Meteorological Station in the Rawlinson Ranges, West Australia. Aboriginal History 26: 1–22. Dyble, M., G. D. Salali, N. Chaudhary, A. Page, D. Smith, J. Thompson, L. Vinicius, R. Mace, and A. B. Migliano 2015 Sex Equality Can Explain the Unique Social Structure of Hunter-Gatherer Bands. Science 348(6236): 796. Elston, Robert G., and Martijn Kuypers 2018 Preliminary Comparison of Paleoindian Sites 26LA4434 and 26LA781 (Knudtsen site), Grass Valley, Nevada. Poster presented at the 36th Biennial Great Basin Anthropological Conference, Salt Lake City. Elston, Robert G., D. W. Zeanah, and B. F. Codding 2014 Living Outside the Box: An Updated Perspective on Diet Breadth and Sexual Division of Labor in the Prearchaic Great Basin. Quaternary International 352: 200–211. Fitzgerald, Richard T., Terry L. Jones, and Adella Schroth 2005 Ancient Long-Distance Trade in Western North America: New AMS Radiocarbon Dates from Southern California. Journal of Archaeological Science 32(3): 423–434. Gascoigne, Joanna, Ludek Berec, Stephen Gregory, and Franck Courchamp 2009 Dangerously Few Liaisons: A Review of Mate-finding Allee Effects. Population Ecology 51(3): 355–372. Goebel, Ted, Bryan Hockett, Kenneth D. Adams, David Rhode, and Kelly Graf 2011 Climate, Environment, and Humans in North America’s Great Basin during the Younger Dryas, 12,900–11,600 calendar years ago. Quaternary International 242(2): 479–501. Hill, Kim R., Robert S. Walker, Miran Božičević, James Eder, Thomas Headland, Barry Hewlett, A. Magdalena Hurtado, Frank Marlowe, Polly Wiessner, and Brian Wood 2011 Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure. Science 331(6022): 1286. Hill, Kim R., Brian M. Wood, Jacopo Baggio, A. Magdalena Hurtado, and Robert T. Boyd 2014 Hunter-Gatherer Inter-Band Interaction Rates: Implications for Cumulative Culture. PLOS ONE 9(7): e102806. Hockett, Bryan 2015 The Zooarchaeology of Bonneville Estates Rockshelter: 13,000 Years of Great

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Basin Hunting Strategies. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 2(0): 291– 301. Janetski, Joel, Mark Bodily, Bradley Newbold, and David Yoder 2012 The Paleoarchaic to Early Archaic Transition on the Colorado Plateau: The Archaeology of North Creek Shelter. American Antiquity 77(1): 125–159. Johnson, Erika, and Robert McQueen 2017 Mitigation of Cortez Gold Mines’ Cortez Hills Expansion Project, Lander and Eureka Counties, Nevada. BLM Battle Mountain District Report BLM6–2454/ BLM Elko District Report BLM1–2532. Prepared by Summit Envirosolutions, Nevada, for Barrick Gold of North America, Reno. Jones, George T., Charlotte Beck, Eric E. Jones, and Richard E. Hughes 2003 Lithic Source Use and Paleoarchaic Foraging Territories in the Great Basin. American Antiquity 68(1): 5–38. Jones, George T., Lisa M. Fontes, Rachel A. Horowitz, Charlotte Beck, and David G. Bailey 2012 Reconsidering Paleoarchaic Mobility in the Central Great Basin. American Antiquity 77(2): 351–367. Kelly, Robert L. 2012 Obsidian in the Carson Desert: Mobility or Trade? In Meetings at the Margins: Prehistoric Cultural Interactions in the Intermountain West, edited by David Rhode, pp. 189–200. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. King, Jerome 2016 Obsidian Conveyance Patterns. In Prehistory of Nevada’s Northern Tier: Archaeological Investigations Along the Ruby Pipeline, edited by William Hildebrandt, Kelly McGuire, Jerome King, Allika Ruby, and D. Craig Young, pp. 299–313. American Museum of Natural History, New York. Kramer, Karen L., Ryan Schacht, and Adrian Bell 2017 Adult Sex Ratios and Partner Scarcity among Hunter-Gatherers: Implications for Dispersal Patterns and the Evolution of Human Sociality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 372(1729): 20160316. Long, Jeremy P. M. 1971 Arid Region Aborigines: The Pintubi in Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia, edited by D. J. Mulvaney, and J. Golson, pp. 262–270. Australian National University Press, Canberra. Madsen, David B. 2007 The Paleoarchaic to Archaic Transition in the Great Basin. In Paleoindian or Paleoarchaic?: Great Basin Human Ecology at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition, edited by K. E. Graf and D. N. Schmitt, pp. 3–20. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Martin, Erik P., Kenneth Blake Vernon, Ryan Bradshaw, D. Craig Young, David Zeanah, Robert G. Elston, Brian F. Codding, and David Rhode 2019 Theoretically Based Investigations of the Paleoindian Occupation of Grass Valley, Nevada. Poster presented at the Society for American Archaeology, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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McDonald, Jo, and Peter M. Veth 2012 The Social Dynamics of Aggregation and Dispersal in the Western Desert. In A Companion to Rock Art, edited by J. McDonald, and P. M. Veth, pp. 90–102. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. Miller, G. Logan, Michelle R. Bebber, Ashley Rutkoski, Richard Haythorn, Matthew T. Boulanger, Briggs Buchanan, Jennifer Bush, C. Owen Lovejoy, and Metin I. Eren 2019 Hunter-Gatherer Gatherings: Stone-tool Microwear from the Welling Site (33Co-2), Ohio, U.S.A. Supports Clovis Use of Outcrop-Related Base Camps during the Pleistocene Peopling of the Americas. World Archaeology 51(1): 47–75. Myers, Fred R. 1991 Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines. University of California Press, Berkeley. Newlander, Khori 2015 Beyond Obsidian: Documenting the Conveyance of Fine-Grained Volcanics and Cherts in the North American Great Basin. PaleoAmerica 1(1): 123–126. 2018 Imagining the Cultural Landscapes of Paleoindians. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 19: 836–845. Rosenthal, Jeffrey S., and William R. Hildebrandt 2016 Behaviorial Ecology, Demography, and Foraging Territories in the Great Basin Paleoarchaic. In Prehistory of Nevada’s Northern Tier: Archaeological Investigations along the Ruby Pipeline, edited by William Hildebrandt, Kelly McGuire, Jerome King, Allika Ruby, and D. Craig Young, pp. 323–349. American Museum of Natural History, New York. Scelza, Brooke, and Rebecca Bliege Bird 2008 Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert. Human Nature 19(3): 231–248. Simms, Steve R. 2008 Ancient Peoples of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Smith, Geoffrey M. 2010 Footprints across the Black Rock: Temporal Variability in Prehistoric Foraging Territories and Toolstone Procurement Strategies in the Western Great Basin. American Antiquity 75(4): 865–885. Smith, Geoffrey M., and Pat Barker 2017 The Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Record in the Northwestern Great Basin: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and How We May Be Wrong. PaleoAmerica 3(1): 13–47. Smith, Geoffrey M., Alexander Cherkinsky, Carla Hadden, and Aaron P. Ollivier 2017 The Age and Origin of Olivella Beads from Oregon’s LSP-1 Rockshelter: The Oldest Marine Shell Beads in the Northern Great Basin. American Antiquity 81(3): 550–561. Smith, Geoffrey M., Daron Duke, Dennis L. Jenkins, Ted Goebel, Loren G. Davis, Patrick O’Grady, Dan Stueber, Jordan E. Pratt, and Heather L. Smith 2019 The Western Stemmed Tradition: Problems and Prospects in Paleoindian Archaeology in the Intermountain West. PaleoAmerica: 1–20.

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Smith, Geoffrey M., and David C. Harvey 2018 Reconstructing Prehistoric Landscape Use at a Regional Scale: A Critical Review of the Lithic Conveyance Zone Concept with a Focus on Its Limitations. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 19: 828–835. Speth, John D., Khori Newlander, Andrew A. White, Ashley K. Lemke, and Lars E. Anderson 2013 Early Paleoindian Big-Game Hunting in North America: Provisioning or Politics? Quaternary International 285: 111–139. Thomas, David Hurst 2012 The Chert Core and the Obsidian Rim: Some Long-Term Implications for the Central Great Basin. In Meetings at the Margins: Prehistoric Cultural Interactions in the Intermountain West, edited by David Rhode, pp. 254–270. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. 2013 Great Basin Projectile Point Typology: Still Relevant? Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 33(1): 133–152. Tonkinson, Robert 1978 The Mardudjara Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Wobst, H. Martin 1974 Boundary Conditions for Paleolithic Social Systems: A Simulation Approach. American Antiquity 39(2): 147–178. 1978 The Archaeo-Ethnology of Hunter-Gatherers or the Tyranny of the Ethnographic Record in Archaeology. American Antiquity 43(2): 303–309. Zeanah, David W., Brian F. Codding, Douglas W. Bird, Rebecca Bliege Bird, and Peter M. Veth 2015 Diesel and Damper: Changes in Seed Use and Mobility Patterns Following Contact amongst the Martu of Western Australia. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 39: 51–62. Zeanah, David W., Brian F. Codding, Rebecca Bliege Bird, and Douglas W. Bird 2017 Mosaics of Fire and Water: The Co-emergence of Anthropogenic Landscapes and Intensive Seed Exploitation in the Australian Arid Zone. Australian Archaeology 83(1–2): 2–19.

2 Across Boundaries Origin of Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach Meng Zhang

Issues of the origin and spread of microblade technology in northeast Asia have become an enduring and controversial topic during the last several decades. The spread of microblade technology is also related to other big questions, such as “the First Americans” problem (Meltzer 2009) and global microlithization, a near-global phenomenon during the late Pleistocene (Elston and Kuhn 2002; Goebel and Buvit 2011; Kuzmin et al. 2007). However, the dominant culture-historical paradigm which assumes that types of microblade production methods representing real human ethnic groups neglects the adaptive significance of foraging societies equipped with microblade technology operating under harsh environmental conditions during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). This was a very cold period when ice sheets were at their greatest extent, roughly between 33,000 and 14,000 years before the present. During this time prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Northeast Asia used composite (multiple-part) weaponry to solve the questions around them, depending on the curated (kept and maintained) technologies and complicated social networks to exploit resources effectively. This chapter aims to provide a methodology to investigate cross-boundary behaviors of prehistoric hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene and suggest a research strategy to evaluate previous hypotheses on the issue of origin and spread of microblade technology in Northeast Asia. A macroecological approach based on “frames of reference” as proposed by Lewis Binford (2001) provides archaeologists with a background to investigate variation and change among microblade-based societies in Northeast Asia. Based on macroecol-

Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach · 37

ogy and technological organization approaches, the present paper seeks to clarify mechanisms behind the emergence of microblade technology and the establishment of microblade-based societies in Northeast Asia in different culture-ecological regions. Key questions include how foraging societies adopted microblade technology in this vast subcontinental area before and during the LGM, explaining the emergence of microblade technology in different ecological regions, and, if cross-boundary migration happened, interpreting the relationship between the formation of microblade-based societies and the spread of the technology against the background of glaciation. To evaluate previous ideas proposed by specialists in Paleolithic microblades, this chapter provides a referential framework for a “refugium model” created by the last glaciation. Since many controversial ideas on the origin and spread of microblade technology are linked in this model, this is a perfect entry point to assess those views. After reviewing these various perspectives, I will propose alternative hypotheses based on the macroecological approach. Theoretical and Methodological Building

Prehistoric hunter-gatherers, like those living today, should have occupied a space with ecological boundaries due to their scales of mobility and settlement systems (Binford 1980; Binford 1982; Binford 1983; Schmader, this volume; Yellen 1977), scale of territoriality if applicable (Cashdan 1983; Dyson-Hudson and Smith 1978; Peterson 1975; Wardle, this volume; Yu, this volume), and scale of social networks (Gamble 1999; Gilman 1984; Zeanah et al., this volume) are associated with uneven distribution of accessible resources, especially edible plant and animal species. Lifeways of hunter-gatherers form flexible ecoanthropological boundaries according to kinds of available resources to exploit. These boundaries dividing different adaptive systems are essential for the study of human decision-making processes within the boundaries, such as residential movement and activity scheduling (Binford 1980; Schmader, this volume; Wiessner 1982), and also for investigating cross-boundary behaviors like large-scale migration linked with trade and exchange, human (re)-colonization, seasonal movement of hunter-gather peoples, and forced migration and resettlement (Bell-Fialkoff 2000; Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson 1980; Gamble 2013; Hitchcock 2012; Hitchcock, this volume; Satiroglu and Choi 2015). The latter widely applies to prehistoric and historical hunter-gatherers. Cross-boundary movement at the scale of groups entails the loss of prior

38 · Meng Zhang

patches, local knowledge about resource distribution, and social networks; meanwhile, new opportunities arose to organize different lifeways, access new resources, and build new social networks. Thus, cross-boundary behavior is risky, but it is also a buffering strategy adopted to avoid risks associated with prior adaptations. Niche is an effective terminology for investigating how humans employ both somatic and extrasomatic means of adaptation to deal with problems resulting from uneven distribution of key resources, both spatially and temporally. Unlike animals, humans build their niches using both biological and cultural means. Cultural innovations such as technology play an essential role in niche construction, along with controlled use of fire, manufacturing clothes, and building shelters for warmth and protection (Laland et al. 2000). However, the application of technology is conditioned by raw material accessibility, activity variability, and basic knowledge of toolmaking for specific functions. For prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Northeast Asia during the late Pleistocene, lithic technology provided them with new niches from competition with other animals—sophisticated tools helped to extract energy from mouths of nonhuman large-game predatory competitors, and ground stone tools gave last hunters and early farmers an advantage in getting nutrients from grains. Microblade technology might have expanded their niche by improving hunting returns and quick (re-)colonization of the Siberia and Beringia (for example, a niche-filling process). Unfortunately, current knowledge is insufficient for direct investigation of ecoanthropological boundaries of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Paleoenvironmental studies can only provide data for local climate reconstruction with the aid of paleoethnobotany, paleozoology, oxygen isotope analysis, and most of the materials are from riverine, lacustrine, eolian (loess) sediments, and others (Li and Sun 2004; Solotchina et al. 2009; Yang et al. 2015). However, large-scale paleoenvironmental research based on data sampled from ice cores and marine sediments and on multiregional pollen can at most allow the reconstruction of proximate paleo-vegetation distribution globally or regionally during the LGM (Iwase et al. 2012; Ray and Adams 2001; Wang et al. 2017). On the other hand, anthropological studies on boundaries have mainly focused on interassemblage variability across large regions, mostly using lithic types and specific variables of lithic artifacts to describe and outline cultural regions, neglecting the factors responsible for the variability. In Late Pleistocene Northeast Asia, techniques of producing microblades have been used as indicators to distinguish material cultures in terms of

Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach · 39

lithic technology variability, implying that different peoples equipped with specific technological skills were attached to potential ethnic groups in which prior knowledge was inherited and transmitted across generations. Based on this assumption, many archaeologists devote themselves to the study of the origin and spread of microblade technology, try to identify the routes of transmission and expansion, and map their trajectories based on chronology and types, following an explanation of cultural change from the framework of migration and diffusion (Gómez Coutouly 2011; Kuzmin et al. 2007; Li et al. 2019). The culture-historical paradigm insisted upon by mainstream Paleolithic archaeologists specializing in microblade technology research fails to provide an explanatory framework because it lacks a bridge to link static archaeological remains with dynamic human behaviors (sensu Binford 1983). Explanations cannot be developed from simple pattern recognition of archaeological record without considering variability of human activities, resource backgrounds, or consequential materialized archaeological remains. Thus, to provide a strong argument for the old question of origins of microblade technology, we need to change our research strategy to be more anthropology-oriented rather than observed archaeological characteristics and artifacts equated with ethnic group assumptions. This strategy has become a mainstream and a paradigm in North American and European Paleolithic studies since the late 1960s (see Kuhn 2020, 2021), but it is still in its infancy in Northeast Asian archaeology. Two decades ago, Lewis Binford (2001) published Constructing Frames of Reference with the help of students and colleagues, seeking a method to study hunter-gatherers’ lifeway on a global scale through a series of models and projections from known foraging groups with both ethnographic and climate data to disappeared or transformed foraging groups, and using proximate climate data. Amber Johnson (2014; also see Johnson et al., this volume) refined this methodology and renamed it the macroecological approach. With the help of program EnvCalc2.1, hundreds of variables can be calculated in seconds for localities given basic geographic and climatic data (Binford and Johnson 2014). The present paper combines the macroecological approach and simulated climate database under the LGM climatic conditions to investigate variability of LGM foraging societies in different regions in Northeast Asia, as well as behavioral and demographic changes of foraging societies during the glacial-interglacial cycles (MIS 3–MIS 2–MIS 1; MIS = Marine Isotope Stages).1 The maps, produced with ArcGIS, can help generate anthropology-oriented hypotheses awaiting archaeological data to test. Thus, the

40 · Meng Zhang

macroecological approach, paleoenvironmental database, and prehistoric technological organization can be combined to study the role of microblade technology in the development of human adaptations in Northeast Asia, especially northern China, during the closing millennia of the Upper Pleistocene and across the Pleistocene-Holocene transition (Zhang 2019). Detailed procedures will not be shown here. For more information on the derivation of variables used in this study, cite the Binford Database website, http://ajohnson.sites.truman.edu/data-and-program/. By a series of calculations, models and projections, impacts of the LGM on growing season, effective temperature, and primary and secondary biomes, paleodemographic distribution, and variability in subsistence specializations have been reconstructed for each culture-ecological region (Table 2.1). Prehistoric hunter-gatherers exploited local resources, including terrestrial plants and animals and aquatic resources, to satisfy their daily needs for survival, organized themselves into different-size groups among dispersed, aggregated, and annually/multi-yearly aggregated phases of subsistence-settlement systems, and maintained or transformed their lifeways in unpacked or packed demographic conditions. A series of maps in Zhang’s (2019) dissertation provide robust support for the significant impact of the LGM environment on behaviors of prehistoric foraging societies. The present paper evaluates previous hypotheses on the issue of origins and spread of microblade technology in Northeast Asia, especially in the Transbaikal, the Paleo-Sakhalin-Hokkaido-Kurile (PSHK) and North China. To effectively investigate convergence and divergence of prehistoric huntergatherers in Northeast Asia equipped with microblade technology, I have proposed a new concept: “microblade-based societies” for investigating adaptive strategies from a broader technosociological perspective, versus the previous microblade technocomplex, microblade-bearing sites from an archaeological perspective (Zhang 2019). The “Refugium Model”: A Starting Point

Climate refugia preserve local habitats “that enabled species to persist in an otherwise inhospitable region, from which they expanded when conditions improved” (Gavin et al. 2014: 38). During glacial periods, discrete patchy refugia for humans formed, surrounded by ecological boundaries. Humans almost completely abandoned North Eurasia and moved to refugia in the southern continent during the LGM, and recolonized abandoned areas during warming periods after the LGM (Alexander and David

Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach · 41

Table 2.1. Variables used in this project Topics and Models Climate, biomes, and habitat

Hunter-gatherers

Variable

Definition

Climate

GROWC

Length of growing season: Number of months with mean temperatures greater than 8 degrees Celsius Effective Temperature: a measure designed to examine biological implications of ambient warmth Net Above-Ground Productivity Primary biomass

ET

Biomes and Habitat

NAGP BIO5 EXPREY

Minimalist Terrestrial Model

Modeling density-dependent change in hunter-gatherer subsistence

Population density

TERMD2

Subsistence specialty

SUBSPX2

Subsistence

SUBSPE

Population density

WDEN

Expected moderate bodysize ungulate biomass (kg/ km2) Population density expected at a particular location, expressed in terms of persons per 100 km2. Terrestrial model expected subsistence bias for use with ethnographic cases: h=hunting, g=gathering, m=mixed, u=uninhabited Ordinal classification of projected HG subsistence specialty: 1=hunting, 2=gathering, 3=fishing Projected hunter-gatherer density

Source: Author.

2016). The refugia/colonization perspective (Gamble and Soffer 1990) can be shortened to the “refugium model” for the purposes of this project. The terms “refuge,” “refugium” and “refugia” have been used in the literature in Northeast Asian Upper Paleolithic (for example, Buvit and Terry 2016; Buvit et al. 2015; Graf 2009a) to discuss possible human migrations prior to and after the LGM and the appearance of microblade technology in Transbaikal after the end of the LGM (Buvit et al. 2016). The “refugium model” has been used widely in European Upper Paleolithic archaeology, such as

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the Solutrean phenomenon and the microlithization process (Straus 2002) and post-LGM recolonization of northern Europe (Fu et al. 2016; Jochim 1987; Soffer 1987). According to recent studies on microblade technology, two refugia are assumed in Northeast Asia. The first is the PSHK, in which LGM refugia for humans are assumed to be outside of Siberia (Graf 2014). Wedgeshaped microcores from the Altai and microcores from the Transbaikal are assumed to be transmitted to the PSHK at the beginning of LGM, then transmitted back to the formerly unpopulated Transbaikal at the end of LGM (Buvit et al. 2016). Another refugium is in northern China, with southward migration of hunter-gatherers (Barton et al. 2007). The appearance of wedge-shaped microcores in the Nihewan Basin is assumed to be the consequence of human migration from Transbaikal (Zhu 2006). This model is based on a culture-historical explanation of cultural change, using human migration and technological diffusion to explain the appearance of microblade technology in Transbaikal during the post-LGM Pleistocene and its spread to northern China. By generalizing current published archaeological data, two waves of cultural change of the microblade-based societies happened in Northeast Asia during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. During the interglacialglacial-interglacial cycle from MIS 3 to MIS 1 through harsh MIS 2, microblade-based societies budded-off, blossomed, flourished, and declined (and ultimately ceased to exist), a process divided into Phases I, II, III, and IV (about 30–22 kya, 22–15 kya, 15–10 kya, 10–about 1 kya uncal. BP, correspondingly). Paleoclimatic and archaeological records suggest that two waves of cultural change are linked with cycles of climate deterioration and amelioration. The beginning of Phase II saw full adoption of microblade technology and the establishment of microblade-based societies, while the transition from Phase II/III to IV witnessed the divergence, radiation, and decline of microblade technology and the transformation of microbladebased societies. This paper focuses on the first wave of cultural change, corresponding to the onset of the LGM. Debates on Origins of the Microblade Technology

The Transbaikal: Continuously Occupied or Abandoned? In the high latitudes of Northeast Asia, microblade-based societies lived in the northern continental and northern island areas. In terms of culture-

Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach · 43

Figure 2.1. Four regions of microblade-based societies in Northeast Asia.

ecological regions, this covers western, central, and eastern Siberia, as well as the Xing’anling and the Changbai Mountains, and the PSHK Peninsula. These areas have short growing seasons, low effective temperature, low above-ground productivity, and low primary biomass. Climate deterioration of the LGM greatly decreased the values of the variables given above, and seriously changed the landscape from boreal forest to Mammoth Steppe, tundra, and polar desert. Occupation of the Transbaikal has become controversial since the 2000s. Ted Goebel (1999; 2002) challenged the long standstill model in Siberia proposed by Russian archaeologists by questioning the association of C14 data with the respective strata dated to pre-LGM in which microblade assemblages were discovered. This led to prominent debates with Russian

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archaeologists. Goebel (2002) hypothesizes the abandonment of Siberia and post-LGM recolonization of North Asia by peoples equipped with microblade technology. Graf (2009a) finds no evidence of cultural occupation that reliably dates to 20.8–17.2 kya uncal. BP in the Yenisey River Valley, and argues that other regions in Siberia might have experienced a similar drop in the frequency of dated occupations during the LGM. This matches a bimodal distribution of C14-dated Upper Paleolithic occupation frequencies with peaks before and after the LGM. Subsequently, Graf (2009b; 2010; 2014; 2015) points out differences between the Middle Upper Paleolithic (MUP) and the Late Upper Paleolithic (LUP) industries in the Yenisey River Valley, including tool production, technological provisioning, and land-use patterns. She observes that LUP hunters equipped with microblade technology “were consistently reworking and maintaining their tools, especially formal tools more than MUP hunter-gatherers,” though the latter also might have practiced logistical strategies, and “were maximizing usable pieces within their toolkits and provisioning individuals” (Graf 2010: 220). Thus the long standstill model is questioned on the basis of both chronology and technological organization. Nevertheless, the long standstill model remains unchallenged in Russia (with various interpretations of the evidence). Kuzmin (2008: 202, 206) argues that the “number of Paleolithic occupations in Siberia during the LGM has not declined compared with those dated to pre-LGM,” and that LGM people in Siberia were fully equipped with highly effective microblade tools for large mammals such as bison, horse, reindeer, and others (excluding megafauna like mammoth or rhinoceros). Radiocarbon dates published by Kuzmin and Keates (2005; 2013) as a validity check they termed “chronometric hygiene” suggest that the LGM-associated sites are widely distributed in the major regions of southern and central Siberia, and humans did not abandon Western Siberia, the Yenisey River Basin, the Angara River Basin and Cis-Baikal, and the Russian Far East (Kuzmin 2016). In addition to the tit-for-tat argument on abandonment and continuity of occupation in Siberia between Goebel and Graf on the one hand, and of Kuzmin and Keates on the other, Buivit, Terry and colleagues (Buvit et al. 2016; Terry et al. 2018; Terry et al. 2016) provide detailed information on population dynamics in Transbaikal and PSHK Peninsula. They assume that wedge-shaped microcores from the Altai and microcores from the Transbaikal are ancestral types of the later (post-LGM) ones in Transbaikal, using human immigration and technological transmission across the two

Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach · 45

regions to explain their hypothesis. They also propose that the PSHK might have served as an LGM human refugium for populations from interior Siberia, and that multiple post-LGM movements from the PSHK reflect a parent source area for dispersal into western and eastern Beringia (Terry et al. 2018). Although these researchers have different viewpoints on occupation and population dynamics in Siberia and PSHK, they all adopt a migrationist/diffusionist explanation in the culture-historical paradigm. The longstanding model implies that microblade technology had its roots in the microcores uncovered in the Altai and Transbaikal regions in Siberia, with the only change through time being greater standardization. This viewpoint assumes that prehistoric people during the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP), even Middle Paleolithic (MP), did not experience dramatic population change, and that technology followed an evolutionary line from EUP and MUP to LUP. The Siberian abandonment model of Goebel and Graf suggests an outside origin of microblade technology in eastern Mongolia (Goebel 2002) or another refugium such as the PSHK (Graf 2009b; Graf 2015), and assumes that some peoples equipped with microblade technology recolonized Transbaikal. Buvit and Terry’s viewpoint is a development of Goebel and Graf ’s model (especially Graf ’s PSHK hypothesis), but with more detailed chronological data on reconstructed historical events. A paper by Graf and Buvit (2017) discussed the significance of the LGM Siberian abandonment model for human dispersal to Beringia and the New World. Archaeologists arguing for the Siberian abandonment model question the reliability of C14 dates from early sites associated with identified microblade assemblages, proposing that very few people were left in Siberia during the LGM. They see a region associated with early microblade technology (dated to the beginning of the LGM) like eastern Mongolia (Goebel), or PSHK (Buvit, Terry, and others) as candidates for LGM human refugia. Finally, it is assumed that microblade technology appearing at the end of the LGM was introduced from the refugia, such as Rankoshi-type microcores at the sites of Kashiwadai-1 (Hokkaido) and Ogonki-5 (Sakhalin). However, archaeologists in the long-standing model camp argue for the reliability of the C14 dates that would correspond to the LGM, mostly at the sites that contain microblade assemblages. Three key controversies between the models are: (1) did prehistoric foragers abandon Siberia during the LGM? (2) can technology prior to the LGM be identified as microblades? and (3) can the post-LGM microblade technology in Transbaikal be securely proven to be a descendent from

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those in the LGM PSHK? The first issue is related to chronology, so the only solution for this issue is to obtain more high-precision radiocarbon samples with good archeological associations. The second key issue depends on definitions of microblade technology. Goebel, Graf, Buvit, Terry, and others narrow the definition to wedge-shaped microliths, especially System A in Kobayashi’s classification, but Bar-Yosef and Wang’s (2012) four-type classification system and Ikawa-Smith’s (2007) viewpoint on early microblade assemblages (especially dating around 35/40–18 kya uncal BP) indicate that lithic assemblages discovered in the Altai Mountains, Upper Yenisey River Basin, Angara River Basin, Lena River Basin, Russian Far East, Transbaikal, Mongolia, North China, and Japan should be categorized as microblade-based. This is the viewpoint adopted in this study. The key issue (3), until now, remains an assumption. There is no effective method to trace the “family trees” of microblade technology itself because of the lack of cultural markers on microblades and microcores. Finally, it is essential to note that both the long standstill and the Siberian abandonment model are built on similar assumptions: that microblade technology could have been invented only once in one region, and microblade assemblages discovered in the sites dated to a later period were introduced by human migration or cultural transmission. This is not defensible, since any technological system could have been “invented, abandoned, and reinvented due to a variety of factors, of which their success or failure in the technoeconomic sphere is only one” (see Bar-Yosef and Kuhn 1999). Thus, rather than seeking the origins and spread of microblade technology, it is better to investigate the technoeconomic sphere which favored or impeded its adoption in each culture-ecological region. In this paper, I use a macroecological and technological organization approach to provide an alternative explanatory framework. The Northern China: Local Origin or Exotic Technology? The Loess Plateau and North China Plain formed the core region of microblade-based societies in northern China. This culture-ecological region today is characterized by temperate forest and steppe on its NW edge. During the LGM, the temperate deciduous forest shrank as a steppe-dominant landscape was established. The Effective Temperature (ET) line of the terrestrial plant threshold (12.75°C) under modern climatic conditions almost matches the northwestern edge of this region, while under LGM climatic conditions that line approached the southern edge. Detailed information on climate, habitat, and variables of hunter-gatherers under both climatic

Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach · 47

conditions are listed in Tables 5.6 and 5.7 of Zhang’s (2019) dissertation. This region witnessed a sequence of expansion-shrinkage-expansion of site distributions during the MIS 3, LGM, and Post Glacial periods (Barton et al. 2007: Fig.2). During the LGM, the number of archaeological sites decreased in northern China. Particularly low numbers in the northeast suggest abandonment of the latter region. These population dynamics show a similar “refugium model.” In China, the long-standing dominant viewpoint on the origin of microblade technology in northern China, based on the logic of microlithization of existing lithic tool types (Jia et al. 1972), has been challenged by younger scholars, especially graduates of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) such as Zhi-Yong Zhu (2006; 2008) and Ming-Jie Yi (Yi et al. 2016). In addition to Sheng-Qian Chen’s (2008) North China origin hypothesis derived from a culture-ecological approach, the last three decades have seen additional proposals such as Sen-Shui Zhang (1990), who proposed that China’s microblade technology may be linked with blade technology at the EUP Shuidonggou site. This suggests regional evolution and cultural interaction between northern China and Inner Asia. Shui-Sheng Du (2004; 2007a) proposed a double-origin model: the Xiachuan type began in North China, while the Hutouliang type arose in Middle Paleolithic Siberia. Du (2007a) argues for local continuity in both regions and spread of the Xiachuan microlith type from south to north and the Hutouliang type from north to south. Shinji Kato (2015) proposed a hypothesis on the origin of microblade technology in China, assuming that the human migration or diffusion of the technology from Siberia might be responsible for the rise of microblade technology in northern China. The above viewpoints—except the traditional North China origin hypothesis of Jia et al. (1972) and regional interaction by Sen-Shui Zhang (1990)—almost all fit under the rubric of a “refugium model” in which North China became a LGM refugium for foraging societies. Chen (2008) emphasizes the southern shift of the forest-steppe ecotone and the ET line, and models microblade technology as invented in southern North China. Others, including Du (2007a), Zhu (2008), Kato (2015), and Yi et al. (2016), stress the introduction of microblade technology (especially System A or the bifacially prepared microcore reduction method), widely seen in Siberia. The recent theory of an origin or innovation of microblade technology in the PSHK by Buvit and his colleagues has not yet been widely introduced into China, and Chinese archaeologists who insist on a Siberian origin tend

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to adopt Goebel’s (2002) viewpoint (see Yi et al. 2016; Zhu 2006; Zhu and Gao 2007). Though some approaches are technological-functional, population migration and technological diffusion remain the prominent explanations of cultural change. Using the culture-historical approach, archaeological studies on the origin and spread of microblades in North China can be summarized as follows:

Hypotheses H1–H2 H1: Microblade technology developed from local flake and blade technologies during the MIS 3 / MIS 2 boundary. The harsh LGM climates probably forced people to use it widely to support high mobility. H2: Microblade technology was introduced by Siberian migrants. Foragers migrated to northern China with the Mammoth Steppe fauna at the beginning of the LGM. Local people learned the immigrants’ technology and created their own microblade industry.

Just as argued above regarding the Transbaikal and the PSHK case study, the culture-historical approach has lower potential to explain the emergence and expansion of microblade technology compared to the macroecological approach. Hypothesis H1 is based on chronometric site dates associated with early microblade assemblages. Some early published dates have been questioned because of association and stratigraphy issues and/or low-precision radiocarbon dates compared with recently published dates (Chen 2008; Yi et al. 2016). However, high-resolution Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) C14 dates based on multiple samples with Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) reference dates strongly support the existence of early microblade technology in northern China at or before the LGM onset (Nian et al. 2014: Fig. 6b). Relying on these early dates, XiaoQing Wang and Jia-Fu Zhang (2016) argue that microlith technology in northern China was derived from the small flake tool tradition during the regional EUP. A decade ago, Jing-Zhi Liu (2004) had developed a model for microblade technology of northern China origin that evolved from local small flake tool traditions. Lithic artifacts recovered from the Fanjiagouwan site on the Ordos Plateau also suggest an early stage of microblade technology in northern China (Huang and Hou 2003). Hypothesis H2 assumes human migration occurred from the Transbaikal or neighboring regions. Zhu (2008) stresses that microlith/microblade technology was used to hunt mammoth and woolly rhinoceros (Mammuthus-Coelodonta) fauna, so groups equipped with microblade

Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach · 49

technology who lived in the southern Lake Baikal and Central Mongolia regions contracted their range southward over time to North China, following the southward migration of big game. Kato (2015) proposes that the residents in North China adjusted the microblade technology to characteristics of local raw materials. This hypothesis is also based on the much earlier dates of the sites associated with microcores in the “Southern Siberia Belt” (Zhang 2019). As noted above, the reliability of the early radiocarbon dates in North China has been questioned. The dates in South Siberia and the Altai Mountains. are much earlier than those in North China, but it is noted again that early dates in Siberia also have been questioned by Goebel (2002). The single origin for microblade technology in Siberia proposed by Yi et al. (2016) is also unconvincing, since the harsh environments of North China would also condition for high foraging mobility. The techniques used in microblade technology (core preparation, systematic knapping, soft hammer and indirect/pressure flaking techniques) were already present in North China (Table 2.2), although more evidence is needed. The Macroecological Approach

The Southern Siberian Belt The macroecological approach based on variables calculated by the program EnvCalc2.1 under the LGM climatic conditions provides adequate information to evaluate the assumption that the PSHK had a relatively favorable environment for foraging societies. A comparison can be conducted between the Transbaikal and PSHK based a series of maps (Zhang 2019) and the differences among several variables are summarized in Table 2.3. There is no significant difference between the two regions, which are associated with a short growing season, low effective temperature, and net above-ground productivity. Primary biomass is higher in the PSHK than the Transbaikal, but secondary (ungulate) biomass is lower in the latter. Thus, according to EnvCalc projections, the Transbaikal seems to be more attractive than the PSHK region for hunting specialists (Figure 2.2); it is close to an area with highest values of secondary biomass (the eastern conjunction of Russia, Mongolia, and China). Thus, if prehistoric hunter-gatherers’ subsistence was terrestrial animal–dependent, there was no reason to abandon the Transbaikal and migrate to the PSHK about 1,500 miles to the east. However, Table 2.2 shows high values for aquatic resources in the PSHK, which can support much higher population densities, and the

Composite Tool Production

Indirect Techniques

Pressure Techniques

Soft Hammer Technology

Du (2007a), Ren (2016)

Du (2007b), Jia and Wei (1976), Ren (2016) (1976), Ren (2016)

The author’s flintknapping experiments suggest the significance of bottom wedge for keeping continuous flaking. Li et al. (1991)

Chen (2008), Gao (2012)

Hou (2008), Jia and Wei (1976)

Reference

Some points at Salawusu and Tshuihe sites might be arrow tips; Chen (1989), Jia and Wei (1976), Liu burins, drills, and points at the Xujiayao site might be used for (2004) grooving.

Present in the EUP localities at the Shuidonggou site. Could be traced to Early Paleolithic sites in the Nihewan Basin, and EUP Xujiayao site. Long-lasting technique in handaxe making and tool-retouch processes, although evidence is unsystematic and sparse. Both boat-shaped and wedge-shaped microcores can be produced from flakes, and the only requirement is to form a bottom wedge to lead force from the striking point. Evidence found at the MP/EUP Banjingzi site in the Nihewan Basin Some tools’ cutting edges were carefully retouched; these were unearthed from some sites categorized into the small flakes tradition, implying the existence of pressure techniques during the EUP. May exist at Salawusu and the Houhedong EUP sites.

Prismatic Blade Technology

Bifacially Blank-making Technique Microcore Blank Preparation

Archaeological Record and Experimental Results

Element of Microblade Technology

Table 2.2. Elementary techniques of microblade technology in Northern China

Microblade Technology in Northeastern Asia under the Macroecological Approach · 51

Table 2.3. Comparison of variables between the Transbaikal and the PSHK under LGM climatic conditions Variable (name)

Variable (unit)

The Transbaikal

Growing season

GROWC (month) ET (°C) NAGP (g/m2/ year) BIO5 (g/m2/ year)

3

Effective temperature Net above-ground productivity Primary biomass

Secondary biomass

EXPREY (kg/ km2/year)

The PSHK 2–4