Customer Reviews

The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast

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Very useful collection of papers and summaries of papers on paleo and early archaic Americans in this region. The thought provoking theories on settlement and hunting practices that evolved along with the changing climate make this well worth reading. I keep my copy handy and refer back to it often.

This book is a series of papers initially presented at a symposium during the Southeastern Archaeological Conference. It summarizes what was known at that time (1993) about the Paleoindian and early Archaic periods in the Southeast; that is, the time when the first ancestors of later Native American cultures first settled in what is now southeastern North America.

The book covers the entire southeastern region, with site reports and syntheses from Florida out to Arkansas and north to Virginia. It presents a good picture of what we know of the first human settlers in this region, including their believed use of "staging areas" - that is, places the first settlers could learn about their new environments before moving outward into more marginal territory - as well as the environmental factors, such as stone outcrops and plant and animal communities, that would have affected patterns of human settlement.

My only complaint against the book, like so many others in archaeology, is that it does not address what is known or what could be known of the cultures themselves beyond the merely physical. That is, there is far too much attention paid to environmental and technological factors at the expense of attempts to understand what these first settlers may have been thinking, or what their cultural systems or worldviews may have been. However, this alone does not mar what otherwise is a well-written and comprehensive synthesis.

I enjoyed the book, and recommend it to anyone interested in Native American cultures and archaeology.

I was really looking forward to this addition to my early American library. Fortunately I "Looked Inside" at the Table of Contents and Index and was very surprized to find no mention of the Atlatl, the major hunting weapon used by Paleo people the world over. Predating the bow and arrow by thousands of years. Not only artifacts but wonderful petroglyphs in the US Southwest. A simple but most effective weapon still used by the Aboriginal people in Australia's Outback as well as well as South American Indians for large fish in the Andean lakes and by Alaskan natives for seal.
Maybe I missed something.
Barry VanWinkle