You've got the Clovis being the fluted points,
Folsom being the deeper fluted points,
and then Plano being these unfluted points.
So like the like Jethro Tall without Ian Anderson.
Basically.
The listener can't see that Ken just checked his notes
for that joke.
I'm just gonna, yeah, I didn't want that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
The New Brunswick Archeology Podcast featuring your hosts,
Gabe Reineck and Ken Bleuk.
Well, welcome back to the New Brunswick Archeology
podcast.
I'm Gabe Reineck, joining you from New Hampshire today.
And I'm joined as always by Ken Bleuk,
who is in Left Bridge, Alberta.
How are you Ken?
Not too bad.
We're international tonight.
We are international tonight.
And in fact, that brings me to our first order
of housekeeping business, which is that we still do not
have a new name for this podcast, which means that the prize
has rolled over.
And in fact, much like Mega Millions,
we've upped the ante on this.
So I'm joining you.
It's an iterative jackpot.
It is an iterative jackpot.
Are we allowed to say that and still maintain
the non-explicit rating on this prize?
I'm not sure.
Well, anyway, the iterative jackpot this week
is that because I'm joining you from Manchester, New Hampshire,
which listeners will have to regard as a bit of foreshadowing
for next week when we talk about the Neville site
in the Atlantic Slope tradition, I'm
about a kilometer or a kilometer and a half maybe
from where the bridge of Buttman that blasted out
the Neville site now sits.
And so the Neville site is one thing
that Manchester, New Hampshire is known for.
But Ken, do you know what food was
invented in Manchester, New Hampshire?
I don't.
The chicken tender.
No way.
Manchester, New Hampshire, the Puritan Backroom,
which is a well-regarded and I have to say quite excellent
restaurant, nice cream parlor here in New Hampshire,
invented the chicken tender.
And so if we.
Just a sec.
Did you say the Puritan Backroom?
That's what it's called.
Speaking of the explicit rating, we've just sacrificed.
What goes on in a Puritan Backroom?
Well, it's essentially it's a large family restaurant
run by a Greek family for a very long time.
So it's sort of a if a Greek diner went and became very
similar to a friendlies.
I don't know if you ever were a friendlies in New England.
Yeah.
But it's a little it went a little bit more corporate.
Like smitties or denies for Canadian listeners.
Yeah, yeah.
But but with a huge lofted ceiling and in a takeout window.
And the food is pretty good, actually.
And the the tendies are delicious.
But so anyway, if someone comes up with the winning name
this week, what we're going to offer is that you get the
we're calling this the New England archaeology tour package.
And the way this works, you get to join me, Ken will fly in
for this.
And we will get the complete set of chicken tenders.
That means that you'll get the the spicy, the traditional
and the ranch at the Puritan Backroom.
Subsequent to that, we will go to where the bridge
abutment sits on top of the Neville site.
We will climb over the no trespassing sign.
I'm sure I've never done this before.
We will dodge the heroin needles that now litter the site.
And then we will observe the site.
But we'll do this for the full New England experience
with it while clutching extra large
Dunkin Donuts iced coffees.
So this is this is the this is what we've got.
So send those in as always.
And Ken, what's our email address again?
New Brunswick Archaeology at gmail.com.
It's still fantastic that that wasn't taken.
Yeah, it is.
It is very surprising.
So we'll call this one maybe the an evening on the Merrimack.
Oh, that's a great name.
Yeah, fantastic.
Yeah, Merrimack River.
It's it's just as lovely as it sounds, just as merry.
And it's really everything you could possibly
desire in our tourism down here in southern New England.
We're sponsored this week, as always,
by the Association of Professional Archaeologists
of New Brunswick.
They can be visited at APNB.ca.
And I was actually talking to Trevor Dowd this morning.
And president of the APNB.
He is.
He's not just a handsome man.
He's a powerful man.
And and Trevor, he said he gave, you know,
that I appreciate the read you gave last time.
But I'm concerned that you just don't have that that Canadian
voice, that Canadian charisma.
So maybe you can do it.
And I said, no, no, no one.
I take a backseat to absolutely no one in my love for the APNB.
So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to just insert
an aspirated yes at some point in a subsequent podcast.
And that aspirated yes will be fully paid for by the APNB
and all of our listeners will know that.
Ken and I realized that we made a slight error
in the last podcast.
And so this segment we're calling Hakuna Erata.
And this will be a recurring segment, too.
We're a fact based podcast.
And and we're we're not above, you know,
calling out ourselves for when we when we mix up the facts.
That's exactly right.
And so we were my understanding is several G's off in a in a
factoid we shared with the listeners.
Yes, several G's, incidentally, being the amount it costs
to get a sponsorship on this podcast.
13 G's, actually.
So Canada in the last podcast, we're talking about federal
heritage legislation.
And I misspoke and said that Canada was the only G20 nation
without federal heritage legislation.
We are actually the only G we are the G7, the only G7 nation
without federal heritage legislation.
So we're 13 G's off.
And I'm not sure the composition of those 13 G's.
But that's that's, yeah, that's kind of the target for our
fundraising appeal right now, isn't it?
I think that's exactly the target.
I think with 13 G's, we would we would we would have matching
fleece vests at at this year's CA meeting.
If one can only hope.
Yeah, to say nothing if the lapel pins that we would
undoubtedly have.
What we're going to talk about this fortnight is paleo Indians.
So these are the indigenous inhabitants of New Brunswick
between about 13,000 and 9,000 years ago.
And I think maybe a good place to start with our discussion is
just with the term paleo Indian, which is going to sit
gradingly on the listeners years, and it's going to sit
gradingly with us when we say it.
And so what I'm going to do is begin by saying why I still use
the term paleo Indian and then Ken can chime in with why he
does or does not.
And so the reason that I'm still using this term is that
even though the the second half of that word is one that we
don't use describe indigenous people anymore because it
refers to an error on the part of Columbus.
There's this challenge in that that term achieved real
acceptance on a continental scale.
And so that term refers to collectively the first indigenous
inhabitants of the Americas.
And so you can think, well, there would be all sorts of really
good alternative terms for that.
But the problem is the terms like paleo and paleo American
have both been kind of co-opted by these really like fringy
groups that are very into this idea that Europeans came over
the Atlantic and colonized North America or other much
actually more conspiratorial ideas than that about the first
people in North America.
And so as a result, paleo Indian remains the kind of widespread
term across North America.
And we hope that despite it obviously seeming dated that
what it does is it emphasizes continuity across the whole
continent.
And so that all these different places are really linked by
this very impressive cultural phenomenon that is ancestral to
the subsequent indigenous groups in North America.
What is your take on all of this, Ken?
So basically the way you describe it is sort of my
thinking as well.
And I think there's a couple things too.
So first of all, to the listener, like we have the word
spelled out in front of us, but when we talk about paleo Indians
in North America, it's capital P-A-L-A-E-O-I-N-D-I-A-N-S.
And so there's a couple things there.
First is that instead of making it paleo with a dash Indian,
you avoid the connotation of capitalizing Indian and kind
of making it the root.
It is old Indians.
You make it kind of a new word, paleo Indian, which is all
pushed together.
I use the A-E as opposed to just E-O for paleo,
because A-E by convention is a more North American reference.
Paleo P-A-L-E-O sort of connotes paleolithic, so old world,
so Europe and Asia and African subcontinents.
And so basically all the same reasons for you as well,
continuity with other regions, particularly in the Northeast
and the Far Northeast where we work,
it's important to kind of use cohesive terminology,
because what we're viewing during the paleo Indian period
that we'll be talking about today is one or many migrations
of people making their way sort of into the continent
and then across the continent very rapidly
as part of the first settlers of this new continent.
And I think that that terminology
unites the first people of North America under one rubric,
basically.
And also, I think in modern parlance
as we talked about in the first episode,
it sort of encompasses both the first people,
like the pre-Clovis, and then what
we'll be talking about today more Clovis
and other descendants of later paleo.
Absolutely.
And I think the other thing that we should mention,
except I'm in total agreement with you on all of that,
is that there are, in fact, localized indigenous terms
for paleo Indian people.
So for instance, the folks at DeBurt
have come up with terminology.
But because we're trying to focus on this integrative approach
and we're trying to encompass different groups
of indigenous people that now occupy the Wabaraki homeland,
we're not trying to preference any particular terminology
and trying to emphasize those continuities.
But we are absolutely referring to the ancestors
of the contemporary indigenous people who occupy this place.
And we'll be including in the show notes
reference to, for example, the MiGMA culture
historical terminology for the eastern Maritimes region.
Absolutely.
And so we're going to take a kind of excuse here
to not talk about pre-Clovis, which is complicated and fraught.
And we're going to say that here in the Northeast,
the first archaeological evidence for people being here
are descendant and related to Clovis.
And so we're going to sort of frame this show around the idea
that we're going to focus first on a kind of broad outline
of paleo Indians in North America, beginning with Clovis.
Then we're going to look at the New England Maritimes region.
And then we're going to look at New Brunswick.
So we're going to kind of funnel this down
and hope that we don't lose the thread as we do that.
But one thing we should warn the listener about
is that it's a fascinating thing about paleo Indians
is that the study of paleo Indians
routinely makes otherwise sane people,
otherwise sane archaeologists, just lose their minds.
It's really fascinating.
It's called Olditis and the biz.
And Ken and I were talking before the show.
And in fact, I've had somewhat limited experience
on paleo Indian sites.
I directed work one summer at the...
So if you're going to do one summer of paleo Indian research,
it should probably be at the Misho cluster.
That was my attitude.
It's this important cluster of paleo Indian sites in Maine.
I worked at the La Montaigne site.
But when I was doing this,
I was on this really sweet health insurance plan
through Bates College, an American college,
well-due college.
And so as a result, I actually, I was seeing my analysts
during this three days, three days a week.
I'd cranked my well butron prescription up.
I just threw the roof.
And I was also recording all sorts of information,
biometrics, just to make sure that I was firmly keeping
my boots on the ground during this.
Because what happens sometimes is your archaeologists
get into these into paleo Indian studies.
And it's as if Captain Ahab had just nailed the silver dollar
to the mast.
And you are chasing that white whale
and come hell or high water,
you're going to find that white whale.
So that's my well-made...
And what is that white whale game?
That white whale can is a fluted point.
And a fluted point is a point which is,
has a flake, so a concoital fracture,
that as if you were to shoot a BB through glass,
but it starts at the bottom of the point
and goes towards the tip.
And it shears off what's called a channel flake.
And the result is a point that has usually on both sides,
a flute that's removed,
and it goes from base to tip,
rather than most lithic reduction,
which goes side to side.
And the flute is,
the fluted point is totally unique,
Ken, you're the lithics guy,
but I believe this is totally unique to North America, right?
So up until a few years ago, yeah.
So this is, so fluting is a uniquely North American technology.
And so fluting of paleo Indian points,
up until actually just a few years ago
was thought to be actually an exclusively
North American technology.
But there are only actually three places in the world
where that's been found.
And so there's the paleo Indian period in North America.
And then a couple of years ago,
they found evidence of fluting in Yemen and Oman
from Neolithic sites
between about eight and 7,000 years ago apparently.
No kidding.
And they don't look the same as Clovis points, right?
Like these aren't like collateraly flaked or parallel flaked.
And so what's unique about fluted points in North America
is that the projectile points, the byfaces
that they're made on are really elegantly made
and have a very distinctive flaking pattern
where all of the flakes are taken from the sides,
meet almost at the middle,
and they're almost parallel the whole way down the point.
And then you strike this flute up the middle of them.
The photos I've seen of these fluted points,
these Neolithic fluted points from Oman
and from the Arab world,
basically are not as fancy as Clovis ones.
And there's obviously no relationship between the two of them.
This is sort of like an independent thing.
But certainly North America, it's unique to North America.
It's fairly unique in the world.
And it is the first indication of fluting in all of the world,
which is, which is,
and so I think really it is still kind of a uniquely
North American technology, which is cool
because it's among maybe the only technology
that was sort of developed here first, I guess,
like that wasn't sort of built on some other
or similar patterns elsewhere in the world.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
I had no idea that fluting ever occurred elsewhere.
I'm gonna have to change my lecture notes now actually.
So I had to actually correct myself during a class
because I had a student ask me,
is this the only place in the world where fluting has occurred?
And I said, yeah, I think so.
And I said, I think it's a uniquely North American thing.
And then I did some research that evening.
And I like the next class, I had to come back and say,
so I was wrong up until about 2020.
And there's this interesting article here.
Let me just pull up.
And we'll throw this article in the show notes too
because this is incredibly cool.
I did, this is, this could almost be a hit piece.
It's that new.
I don't know if it's a hit, I don't know if it's that new.
It's like 2020, I think was, you just keep rolling.
I'm gonna pull it up.
I've got it in the wrong bookmark.
So, well, Ken is pulling this up though.
I should say that the,
what we're gonna then describe here
as we're fitting those through,
the reason we're talking about this
fluted point technology is that the first fluted points
in North America, the fluted points that people think about
when they think about fluted points are Clovis.
And we talked a little bit last to Fortnite
about the importance of establishing time depth
in North America.
And we mentioned that there were particular kinds
of diagnostic projectile points
that were discovered in association
with old forms of fauna.
So, basically with Pleistocene megafauna.
And that was really crucial to saying,
well, humans were killing these ice age megafauna.
Therefore humans have been in North America
for a really long time
since the basically the end of the ice age.
Yeah, like a really important historical moment
in North America.
And the understanding of indigenous history
in North America was that,
you find a fulsome point embedded in a bison antiquus.
It's you're older than 4,000 years right there.
Absolutely, yeah.
And so when we're,
and this actually really speaks to the sort of,
we're gonna lay out a framework for you here,
a kind of temporal framework.
And we're gonna try to do this without pictures,
which is tricky, but we're gonna, throughout this,
everything is gonna be sort of hung on three
time periods, which are named basically
after forms of spear points.
Okay, so this is points that are attached to spears.
And probably at least at first,
very much used to hunt big mammals.
And the first of these is Clovis.
And Clovis is known for having a slightly shorter flute.
That's that flake driven from base tip.
And then we get a fulsome with that,
with a longer flute from base to tip.
And then we get at the very end of the Paleo-Indian period
around the continent, Lancelot points.
And these don't have those flutes,
although occasionally they've got a little bit of
playing around with the base.
Yeah, aggressively basely thinned,
I believe is Chris Ellis and David Black's terminology.
It's a fantastic term, I like it a lot.
And but as a result,
we're gonna give you some more terminology for time
related to these points as the show goes on
and we narrow this down.
But basically one of the fascinating things
of Paleo-Indians is that their mobility is in excess
of what we would know for almost any ethnographically
understood hunter-gatherer group.
So as a result, these are ancestors of indigenous people
that now inhabit the Wabanaki homeland,
who are basically colonizing all of North America
in a number of years that is in the hundreds,
rather than in the thousands.
So very, very quickly.
So as a result, we're gonna talk about the region we're in
as we're gonna use terms like Clovis derived
or Folsom derived.
Clovis like?
Clovis like, these sorts of things.
And what this just means is that we're using
a local terminology for these groups
that implies a slightly later occupation,
but later in very relative, you know, small terms,
basically that people are still moving from West to East,
colonizing North America,
and they're doing so very, very quickly.
Yeah, yeah, there's like a 300 year time lag
between classic, the beginning of classic Clovis
and the beginning of Clovis like
in the far Northeast basically.
Yeah, did you find that article Ken?
I did, yeah.
Fluted Point Technology in Neolithic Arabia,
an independent invention far from the Americas.
It's a plus one article by Remy Cressard,
Vincent Charpentier, Joy McCorston, Jeremy Wozke,
Sophia Bousid and Michael D. Petrelia.
Fantastic, and that far from the Americas,
I think says, you know, all you need to know
about where Clovis, where Fluted Points are known from.
Yeah, exactly.
And so when we're talking about Peleum Indians,
we're talking about the first, you know,
well understood colonization of North America.
And so about 13,000 years ago,
moving very rapidly across the Americas from the Northwest,
and it's characterized by Clovis spear points,
these fluted spear points we've talked about,
and this hyperdiagnostic technology and hunting megafauna.
So this is kind of the classic basic frame
that we're gonna build all of this on.
These people have a classic toolkit,
and this includes big scrapers,
and it's got a variety of styles
made from really nice rock.
So, you know, Ken's a rock guy,
but I think it's actually better to hear this
from a non-rock guy,
which is that Peleum Indians seemed to really like nice rocks.
Like they like the kind of rocks
that even I can make something that looks like a flake out of.
Is that your sense, too, Ken?
Yeah, they like pretty rocks.
And as we talked about the first week,
they seemed to like red rocks.
You know, Nathaniel Kitchell has a paper out on this,
but even Dean Snow in like 1980 was talking about
how red chirp might have been something to do with,
you know, the kind of connotations of blood
and an animal hunt, you know.
So there's some, these high quality materials
were attractive, probably because you need
very good material to make these elaborately flake fluted points,
but also there was something,
there was definitely,
I think there was probably an aesthetic element to it,
and there's definitely preferential materials
in different time periods.
So in Southern Ontario,
they really, Peleum Indians particularly fluted point,
and then up until basically sort of on the cusp of like
Lance O'Lake, but Peleum Indians in general,
like calling woodchirt, which is this site,
very beautiful white chert, very fine grained and everything,
but it's not used basically after the Peleum Indian period.
So it's almost diagnostic in Southern Ontario.
So if you find calling woodchirt, it's probably Peleo.
Well, that's very cool.
The, there's the real Peleum Indian enthusiasm though
for high quality cherts.
It seems to be a thing like throughout the continent though.
I think that's fair to say.
Yeah.
And even like, you know,
homeland of Clovis, which, you know,
in New Mexico where the type site is,
all throughout North America, it's nice material.
Like, so this was a thing that a group of people
did have a real preference for.
And there's a possible fluted point made even on raw material
from Labrador that was found in Vermont, I believe.
Oh, really? Oh, wow.
Yeah. Okay, cool.
Yeah. It's a little dubious, you know, on the base,
but the, but it looks like a fluted point to me
and other people have suggested that as well.
So in addition to these fluted points,
it's the fluted point is the big diagnostic thing.
And we should say, we mentioned,
we mentioned that occasionally,
Paleo-Indian makes archaeologists lose their minds.
There's actually even a song about this.
There's a popular song about this.
That's a great song too.
But yeah, yeah, by Tyler Childers,
who's in a song called Banded Clovis.
And Tyler Childers, he's from Ohio,
but he sort of purports to be a West Virginian,
which is something you would do if you were from Ohio,
which is, you know, maybe Ohio's probably the worst state
in the United States, West Virginia is easily in the top five.
And so if we had any listeners from Ohio before this episode,
I think we've just lost them.
Yeah, we didn't have any listeners from Ohio.
We might have gained some West Virginians though.
Yeah, well, I should hope.
It's the West Virginia Archaeological Society
has welcomed the chime in to sponsor this
with a rigging endorsement from Tyler Childers.
But the, but Childers has a song called Banded Clovis
and it's about these looters who go out
and one of the looters finds a point
that I believe the quote is,
it's banded as hell, it was fluted in Clovis.
Yep. Is that the line?
Yeah, and then the other fellow that he's looting with
kills him and takes the point, I think.
This is the premise of the whole country song.
Yeah.
Which is, that's a niche country song right there,
but it's got a certain ring to it.
It's great teaching material too.
It is, yeah, you can rag the puck
for a good three and a half minutes on a class with that.
But there are other things in the kind of classic
fluted point paleo Indian toolkit.
And so these include big scrapers,
which are also usually made on high quality stone.
And that's likely for handling the hides
from big mammals that people are killing
with the projectile points.
And there's also some other kind of interesting things.
You get on some of the scrapers, you get spurs.
And the reason that the spurs exist,
these are little basically protrusion
off the sides of the scrapers.
And that may exist.
There's all sorts of literature on this
because people may get tired as they're scraping.
And so as a result, the scrapers wear out
more on one side than the other.
Might relate to handedness.
We don't really know.
In addition to this, you get a material called limbises,
which Ken, you're bilingual.
I think means slug in French, doesn't it?
Yeah, this slug or a flake shaver
or I think a burr is another name for them.
Yeah.
But yeah, these sort of slug shaped flake shavers.
So they're basically a unifacial artifact
that was kind of humpbacked and probably used for
and hafted, I think is the idea behind them.
And so some of the, I think the large humpback,
like the big scrapers, the big unifaces,
I think were probably big enough to be used in hand.
And then the thinking is the limbises were probably hafted.
I think I've got that correct, don't I?
I think that's true.
I think with fairly new material though,
whether or not things were hafted is in the eye of the,
everything seems so large
that you sort of think, well, it must be hafted.
Yeah, kind of cool thing about scrapers too.
So in the Southeast, you have scrapers as part of this
sort of diagnostic paleo Indian toolkit,
and then they disappear for like the rest of history
until like the contact period in the Southeast.
Oh, that's totally bizarre.
Really?
You don't see like them as sort of a part of toolkits.
There's a line in like that Sassman and Papatat textbook
that basically they talk about that scrapers essentially
like the paleo style scrapers could disappear
basically until contact.
Huh, that's totally wild
because they remain a huge thing up here.
Yeah, yeah.
And changing shape and form and everything
as we'll talk about on the show.
But yeah, but don't disappear like they do there apparently.
So.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
And in fact, we'll talk more about Uniface technology
at length, either the show after next or next show,
we still haven't quite figured this out.
We'll even get back to spurred scrapers at some point.
We will, that's true.
Yeah.
So stay tuned, if you're still listening,
even you Ohio listeners, we'll be back.
In six to eight weeks,
we'll be talking about spurred scrapers again.
Precisely.
There are drills, drills appear sometimes
in paleo Indian toolkits.
And then, but one thing we should mention
that I feel obliged to mention is that even though
we associate and we mentioned that paleo Indian toolkits
with really high quality stone, really impressive tools.
They also in the Northeast use junky local material
to make choppers.
Basically junky tools out of junky material,
like heavy stuff for chopping down trees
or breaking bone and processing,
probably as you're initially tearing apart a large mammal,
you need a heavy tool for it.
So at the Lamontaine site,
the stuff was called Christian Hill Diabase.
And the source had been blown up to expand the airport.
But the material, it looked like,
I've got family from New Jersey,
and it looked like if you'd blown up their driveways.
Essentially, he created something out of the tar,
cement stuff that they use in that part of the world
to make driveways.
So we've talked a little bit about the toolkit.
We've talked a little bit about the people.
We're going to narrow this down more.
So to quickly kind of recap,
we've got people who are probably big game specialists.
They're using a very diagnostic toolkit
using high quality stone.
And they are moving really, really rapidly
to colonize North America from West to East.
But we haven't talked much about the landscape.
And so this period in time is the end of the last Ice Age
or the Pleistocene.
So it's this transitional period.
And this is going to be important when we talk about
our more local region.
But it's also sort of important for understanding
broader trends in the region.
So what we're looking at, I think,
is and kind of correct me here as a nuance this can,
is that in a broad sense, we're going
to lump Clovis and Falsum, the first two fluted point
periods together, as being the end of the Ice Age.
And we can lump that together even more narrowly.
As being part of the Younger Dryas, which is basically
that as the Ice Age is ending, especially during Falsum,
things get a little bit colder again.
So you kind of get Paleoidium, then things get chilly,
and they get dry.
Yeah.
And there's a little bit more nuance in there,
in that traditional Clovis predates the Younger Dryas
in the Southwest and in other parts of the continent.
But when you get into the Northeast,
Clovis begins at the start of the Younger Dryas.
So I mentioned earlier this 300-year lag.
And so traditional Clovis starts around 13,200 years ago.
The Younger Dryas starts around 12,900 years ago.
And as we're talking now for the next few minutes
about the Northeast New England Maritimes region,
we're starting at around 12,900 years ago,
which is the start of the Younger Dryas
and which terminates at around 11,600 years ago
at the end of the Pleistocene, basically.
And I should direct the listener to Ken and Dave Black.
So I just had a chapter out in a book from Nimbus Publishing
called The Last Billion Years.
The Last Billion Years.
Yep.
And it's fantastic.
And it deals with a lot of this because it considers humans
alongside the kind of geological information
and the kind of environmental information Ken's just
talking about.
And it's actually, it's a book that's really suitable
for everybody too.
So I think that's one of the many things.
And it's also the illustrations are fantastic.
And one thing I would say is absolutely get
the most recent one.
You might be lured into some of the earlier ones,
which were fantastic.
But Ken and Dave's chapter really updates some of the stuff
he was just talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're very, so it's The Last Billion Years,
a geological history of the maritime provinces of Canada.
So it's the second edition just came out last year.
Rob Fensom and Graham Williams are the editors.
And this is, Dave and I played a very small part
in two chapters toward the end of the book.
But if you want to learn basically where the Maritimes,
all of our rocks come from, how our part of the continent
was formed, the life that was here well before humans.
And then toward the end of it, they contextualized
the human history.
And so Dave and I had the opportunity
to contribute to a couple of chapters
toward the end, which is really great.
I mean, there was archaeology in the original version.
And so this is basically, we got a couple extra pages
to add this time to provide a little bit of extra context.
But yeah, fantastic book.
And I've told this story a few times to Gabe and others
that this was a book that I read when I was like,
I don't know, in early high school years.
And so it was in the first edition.
And so it's something that even for those of you in grade school,
it makes a fantastic Christmas gift or birthday
gift for the young rockhound among us.
I was just going to plug that in.
And the other thing is the illustrations are really, really
high quality in that book.
They are.
Including of one of New Brunswick's oldest
Pillionaire points, which we'll return to later in the show.
So what we've got then is a situation where we might as well
just sort of pivot local now to the New England Maritimes area.
And that's a clunky formulation, I realize.
But basically what that is denoting
is that it seems like the Rotten New England and Maritime
provinces of Canada, there's no evidence for Pillionians
in Newfoundland, that we've got this basically sort of shared
cultural formulation for the Pillionian period, where people
are interacting across this enormous distance.
It's this kind of shared cultural thing that's going on.
What the environment probably would have looked like during this period
is that it would have been really dynamic.
So it would have been changing a lot.
It's probably a sort of tundra-like environment.
And as people moved around, this is actually
why I left Fredrickton today, was that this region would
have had remnant ice caps, much like downtown Fredrickton has
in this wonderful day.
But the glaciers were retreating.
And can I feel bad putting you on the spot about this?
But would you like to explain isostatic rebound
to the listener?
Well, so basically at one point, probably, I think,
up to about 14,000 years ago, most of the Maritimes
was covered in what was it, like over a kilometer of ice
or something like that.
Yeah, the Wisconsin glaciation, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So the Wisconsin glaciation reached its peak.
Our part of the Wisconsin glaciation
is the Laurentide ice sheet, which
covered basically all of continental North America
from the Rockies east and covered south down
to about probably what, like Virginia, like West Virginia
area, or did it get that far down?
I'm squinting at the map in my mind.
Below the Great Lakes, certainly.
There's a fascinating tangent about this, which
at this year's ESAF meeting, I learned
that there are some extremely dubious, essentially
unbelievable ideas about when Pennsylvania and West Virginia
and Ohio were deglaciated.
Enough that made me basically not believe
the mid-Atlantic maps on this stuff.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And I sort of remember this looking at the other archaeologists.
It was, don't hold me to this listener,
but this may be a Hakuna Orata next show.
But someone said something like that there were places
in, I think, Pennsylvania that weren't
de-ice until 4,000 years ago.
And that's impossible.
That can't be right.
That can't be right, no.
Yeah.
Like even in the Maritimes, which had the younger, driest ice
re-advance, I think all the ice was gone by 9,000 years ago.
Yeah, exactly right.
And so we questioned that.
Yeah.
And we questioned this during the session.
And it turns out that this is there actually
like legit geological and environmental models that
suggest this.
They must just be incorrect.
Huh.
That is interesting.
Yeah.
So I'm actually looking at it.
But I'll shoot it, seems impossible.
I am looking at an ice margin map right now.
And it looks like actually that the max,
like so the peak glaciation would have covered down
to below the Great Lakes, but probably hovering right
around kind of like a straight line between like Pennsylvania
and sort of like Maryland.
So let's just say that the Potomac,
is that what drains out in Maryland?
Yeah.
I think this is what William Gardner,
who worked at the Thunderbird Paleo-Ine site in Virginia,
called the Biotic Mason-Dixon line.
Oh, that would, there you go.
That's a little bit more eloquent than me kind of umming
and awing about what's going on.
I think it's a great phrase anyway.
I like the phrase.
Yeah.
So getting back to ice is that a rebound though.
So picture over a kilometer of ice sitting on rock.
And that rock is sitting on a plastic surface,
which is magma underneath the North American tectonic plate.
And so as that ice melts, it lets off water,
but it's also getting lighter.
And so over time, basically what happens
is that the more of the ice that melts,
there's more water going, streaming off of it.
But the weight that is pressing down
on the continental ice shelf releases.
And so you have basically a shift where for a time,
you have high levels of water because you have water melting
rapidly.
And so you have the formation of, you have what are called
marine incursions.
And so parts of central New Brunswick basically up into really
like past Fredericton would have been under,
and most of the Grand Lake region
would have been under a much larger marine incursions
as body of water that kind of came inland.
And then over time, what happens is
that that water comes down in a flash very quickly.
And then starting at around 12,000 or so years ago,
that water starts to drop down again.
And the continent springs back up basically
because the weight that has been sitting on it, all that ice,
has been let off.
And the continent starts to rise back up.
And so you have a really dramatic change
where you have ice melting and a huge influx
of water.
Basically, the ocean comes up very high.
And then that drops down.
And the land rises up again.
And the water levels drop very low again.
And so you have changing landscapes all around.
And in particular, this is pertinent to Paleo-Indians
because at the time that they were moving
into the Atlantic Northeast, there was basically more land
available for them to live in than we would see today.
And another reason that it's significant archaeologically
is that this means that it's something
on the order of a 50-meter difference about where
so that there would have been about.
Vertical difference.
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
Exactly.
So there would have been.
If there were coastal Paleo-Indian occupations,
they would be substantially underwater now.
Along with this, there's all sorts of things
that happen to water courses on the interior.
So one of the things that happens is many things that
are now swamps were glacial lakes.
So you get this sort of change from lake to swamp.
You get changes in the where water courses go in meander
and how big they are.
And so it's this period of really also rapid change.
That's, I think, another important point
is that the landscape is changing really, really quickly
in this region.
Yeah.
And you have this original marine incursion.
And in the Maritimes, in Central New Brunswick,
for example, you have this kind of interesting situation
where you have an influx of ocean water at first.
But then you have, because of isostatic rebound,
the water that's sitting in central New Brunswick,
as the land rises up, gets trapped in there,
as the Bay of Fundy drops down.
And so you have the formation of what are called proglacial
lakes, or these sort of stranded meltwater bodies
that are a mix of marine water and freshwater runoff
from melting glaciers.
And so you have the formation of what's
called glacial lake Acadia, which
is sort of this ancestral lake for the string of lakes
that dot the lower reaches of Veloste River,
forming for at least like probably 3,000 or so years,
coinciding with when paleo-union groups were in the region.
And so the knock-on effect of all this
is that the analogy everybody always
uses for thinking about paleo-union landscapes
is basically the subarctic.
And there's some problems with that
because you don't necessarily want
to think about the paleo-union period as being equivalent
to subarctic people because subarctic people have been,
by the time we know them in the ethnostoric record,
Stephen Lawrence talked about this.
By the time we hear about subarctic people
in the ethnostoric record, they've
been forced off the coast because by Europeans, essentially.
So it's possibly a very different life way,
and it's not one that's directly applicable.
But in terms of just a kind of landscape,
if you're to imagine the landscape,
thinking about the subarctic, you're not
going to be far off in the sort of what
fluted point paleo-union we're living on.
And you'll be pretty close.
So it's colder.
You've got different kinds of low shrubs.
Scrubs?
Yeah, absolutely.
And so as this is all happening, one of the things
that the Maritimes is known for is this extremely important
paleo-union site.
And it's called the DeBert site.
It's in Nova Scotia.
My connection to the DeBert site is that I almost wrecked
or was part of wrecking a minivan filled with column
samples of shell from a wooden period shell heap.
Essentially at the DeBert site, we pulled off to fuel up.
The van was somewhat overloaded.
I told the joke to the driver.
We very nearly rolled it.
It would have been interesting to have the two of us
in a shell midden and a minivan in this site.
Very grateful it didn't happen.
But the DeBert site is one of these.
It's not the earliest period of site known from the region.
But it's among the earliest sites known from the region.
And it's one of these big clusters of sites.
And so we should talk for a minute here
about the phenomenon of site clustering.
So we mentioned that the environment.
And to give the listeners just a range,
DeBert was occupied around averages out to around 12,600.
That falls into a period between about 12,700 and 12,200
years ago.
Fantastic.
And those are real years too.
So we're using them.
Those are calendar years.
We're going to focus on using calendar years in our podcast
broadcast so that we do not lead the listener astray
by throwing out random radiocarbon dates that
aren't calibrated.
And so just while we're on the subject of dates, actually,
because we're about to go down this rabbit hole of dates
and naming these time periods in more narrow ways
than we probably should, we should
say that there's extreme difficulty in dating
palliative sites.
And that's for a variety of reasons.
But basically, you'll remember from the last episode
that radiocarbon dating works on things
that have died.
So the classic example is wood charcoal.
So you burn some wood.
It preserves.
It can date the death of the tree.
The palliative sites are old.
They're often in very sandy soil matrices.
I believe you explained your summer at Lamontang
is playing in the sandbox, actually.
It was.
It was really fantastic, actually.
Essentially, you throw the sand in the screen.
You barely shake the screen.
You kick the screen.
You pull the artifacts out.
And then you do it again.
The only tricky part is that the walls keep
caving in on your excavations if you're not careful.
So you just keep an eye on that.
But they're mostly in these fantastic soils.
But there are very few features.
And features are what archaeologists
call immovable artifacts.
So things like house floors, hearths, fire pits.
A hearth is a fire pit.
Exactly, yeah.
Are pretty rare in palliative sites.
So as a result, we have very few good radiocarbon absolute
dates on palliative sites.
We do have some, though.
And many of these sites, so many of these dates,
are from burned bone.
We've got some burned bone.
And then others are from some of these bigger sites,
such as actually DeBurke, which had some fairly
identifiable features.
From these dates, what archaeologists have done,
and especially, and we'll put a link to this in the show notes,
but Bradley and colleagues in Archaeology of Eastern North
America, use these absolute dates to devise a point typology
for New England and the Maritime's Region.
What this point typology does, it
looks at what are actually pretty small nuances in the changes
in Pellewindian points.
So things like the length of the flute,
the depth of the basal concavity,
whether or not there is a flute or not,
to try to put in approximate order a series of types.
And these types are each named for sites.
Most of them are named for two sites.
Yeah.
So we're going back to what Gabe was talking about before,
where you've got the Clovis being the fluted points,
Folsom being the deeper fluted points,
and then Plano being these unfluted points.
So like Jethro Tall without Ian Anderson basically.
So the listener can't see that Ken just
checked his notes for that joke.
I'm just going to put it out of the moment.
Yeah.
Cue the tall note.
And so these point types are in sequence, though.
I'm going to name them, just because why not.
The first one, Kings Road Whipple.
The next one, Vale de Bert.
The next one, Bullbrook West Athens Hill.
And those are the earliest ones.
Those are equivalent.
If you hear those terms, those are your Clovis-like,
or your Clovis-derived.
Yeah.
And that ranges from 12,900 to 12,200 years ago.
Exactly.
And then your next ones are your Michonne de Ponset.
This one kind of cheats because it's just got the one site.
Your Crowfield related.
Which is the site in southern Ontario, actually.
Yeah.
The stupe listener will notice it's not in the Maritimes
or in New England.
And then your Cormier, Nicholas.
And those are your Folsom-like points,
your Middle Paleo-Indian points.
And that is ranging from 12,200 to 11,600.
So at the end of this, this is the end of the Middle Paleo-Indian
period, which is the end of the Younger Dryas as well,
and also the end of the Pleistocene.
That's right.
And so for, and then we switch to our landslut forms
with no fluting, or occasionally aggressive base.
Was it aggressively basally thinned?
Fantastic, yep.
And these are your agate basin related.
And these refer to San Varni points, which
are your unflooded or Plano-like points,
if you're thinking about this in a broad, continental term.
For my purposes, I tend to think about fluted point,
Paleo-Indian, merging the middle and the late,
at the middle and the early.
And then I tend to think about late Paleo-Indian,
referring to the landsluts.
And so Gabe, the listener might be wondering,
why fluted point?
Ken, I thought you'd never ask.
We just leave this here as a pause, right?
The answer is nobody knows.
This is this.
So I'm glad you brought that up.
Nobody knows why fluted point.
In addition to that, we don't know how exactly
Paleo-Indian's fluted points.
We know that contemporary footnappers can flute points.
They often do it through direct percussion,
so basically hitting the base of the point hard.
But they also have a variety of other complicated methods.
I think you've looked into recently, Ken, am I right?
There's this chest punch method, where
you basically put an anchor, a very long rod, basically,
in your chest.
And you kind of heave down and try to shove off a point.
But yeah, for the most part, it basically
takes a lot of prep work, sort of you prepare a very clean
platform, which is basically you're
setting up a place to make contact between your percusser
and your stone.
Because essentially you have one.
Your percusser.
I'm going to walk you back just for a second.
When you say percusser.
So you're either you're probably
using a piece of antler in this case,
or you could use rock as well.
But in most demonstrations of this,
and most of what I've read about,
is that if you're going to try to flute a point,
you'll probably use antler.
So an antler billet, so a piece of moose or deer antler
that you've carved into with a butt end.
You'll prepare this platform.
So you're going to prepare a place to strike.
And you kind of have one go at this,
which makes it kind of all the more interesting why people
did this.
And I think we do we talk about bullbroken here,
but like what they're doing in the circle?
You know, it's not in our show outline.
As you can tell, listener, Ken and I
have carefully prepared the notes for this.
We scanned the same cocktail napkins
to one another before this.
But no, we don't.
So you kind of raise this point that you said
you get one go at it.
It's easy to screw this up, right?
This is contemporary foot nappers report
that frequently you get this beautiful point.
And the last step you do is you go to drive this flake
from base to tip off.
And you snap the thing in two, because it's very hard to do.
Even with a complicated rig, like the crotch described
that you're going to hit with your chest,
you know, when the point's in a vice,
it's still pretty easy to break.
And so at bullbrook, which is an important paleo-union
site in Massachusetts, so in the New England Maritimes region.
And this is, you'll recall, because I know you all
were taking careful notes on this.
This is one of the earlier paleo-union occupations.
There's this really, really fascinating site.
And this site has really precise spatial patterning.
It was worked on by Brian Robinson and colleagues.
And they identified that there were essentially
tight areas at this site.
So walk back one step here.
First of all, this site was probably an aggregation site,
where groups of families came together.
And this is due to the large number of probably
contemporaneously inhabited houses.
And you may be like, well, OK, you just said,
you don't have features.
And that's true.
But what you do get is you get artifact patterning
in basically round patterns.
That seems like there were structures around where people
were working on these artifacts.
And these artifact patterns are like, right
in the size of what type of houses
that you would expect people to live in even later in time.
So they're four to six meters and around there,
they look like they're basically probably nuclear families
or maybe a little bit bigger than that in some cases.
And so yeah, it is really interesting
that this particular site is really fascinating to look at,
how they've mapped out all this patterning.
Yeah.
And Brian, in a series of articles,
sort of explored why are the activities within this area,
within this aggregation site so seemingly patterned, right?
So for instance, you get spaces where it seems like people
are fluting points.
You get spaces where it seems like people are using scrapers.
And so Brian's interpretation of this
using a number of ethnographic analogies
involve gender, that there were very tightly prescribed
gendered spaces.
But one of his other, I think, particularly interesting
hypotheses about this kind of patterning
was this idea of a fluting shaman.
So that there might actually be, as part of this preparation
for going out hunting, this sort of activity
where the actual fluting of the point
was an important, basically, ritual activity
before going on a hunt.
And I think one thing just about hunter-gatherers in general,
that's, I find, very intriguing.
And we've talked about this before, Ken,
is that when we think about the hunt, right?
If we think about, if you're going
to just watch an ethnographic documentary,
the temptation to treat the hunt as a thing in which,
you know, a bunch of dudes with a spear go out and kill
something is not how actually most hunter-gatherers conceive
of hunting.
Yeah.
In the ethnographic literature, they mostly
conceive of hunting as really this much more sort
of ongoing process in which the animals are essentially
often giving themselves up to the hunter.
And so as a result, that's got all sorts
of interesting implications.
And so for the Kree, which is the analogy everyone uses for this,
and the reason that everyone uses this analogy
is because Adrian Tanner wrote a brilliant book called
Bring Home Animals that everybody should read.
But basically, there are all sorts of things
that happen just on day-to-day life
that you need to worry about to make sure
that the animals will continue to give themselves up
to the hunter.
So the way in which people organize their houses
is really, really important.
There's all sorts of gendered patterning about this.
Like, Tanner's got that great diagram.
You probably remember this.
About you need to be a little bit careful,
because there's all these gender prescriptions about bears.
And you want to make sure that bears and women,
because they're both precisely gendered,
because bears are so gendered in the ethnographic literature,
you just slide the bear under the tent flap rather than
through the door, because you don't want women and bears
in the same door.
Once you get the bear in there, you've
got to make sure that different parts of the bear,
the male parts of the bear are aligned,
and the male parts of the tent, the women's parts of the bear
are aligned, the women's parts of the tent.
You need to be careful not to step over them.
So there's all this patterning going on.
And so as a result, you can imagine the situation,
and Brian really lays out this situation.
Brian's the one who turned me on to Adrian Tanner's book,
actually.
So I've got a tremendous font spot for this whole thing.
But basically saying that, well, it
would make sense that there would be at a big aggregation site
where everyone's on their best behavior,
because all these families have come together,
and we're hunting all these caribou that probably come
to this place in a very predictable way.
And so what we're doing is we've really precisely
sorted out how we're going to act.
And that means that this Fluting Shaman thing
needs to be in a particular place,
because we've got to do this right tonight
so that the caribou will behave the way we want them to tomorrow.
Yeah.
You can tell Gabe is the domestic space archaeologist
here on the podcast.
But that's great.
And actually, it's really important to understand this context.
And so this is one of the things that I've had a lot of questions
from my students when they read this article,
is how is it that he can make these interpretations about gender
based on just patterning and stone tools?
And then you have to kind of wind things back,
and you get an opportunity to introduce
this whole notion of ethnographic analogy
that we use in archaeology that's
sort of, as Gabe has mentioned a few times,
that a lot of what we understand about Piliu Indians
is derived from sort of contemporary and probably
19th and early 20th century ethnographic studies of hunter
gatherers living in cold environments, basically.
And one place to actually, if you're
thinking about these sorts of topic
studies, a great ethnographic film was available online.
It's from the National Film Board of Canada.
And it's called The Cree Hunters of Mastassany.
Fantastic film.
And I completely recommend it for this.
And actually, you can watch it online now.
Almost all these NFB films are streamable online.
Yeah.
And it's just terrific about this stuff.
It's got this great line in it.
One of the things that's going on here is that it's
the shared hunting territory in maybe the 60s and 70s.
And there's all sorts of patterning
about how they handle animal remains.
And so there's this fellow tying up
beaver remains in a tree.
And the interviewer basically says,
they're talking creeps.
Why are you doing that?
And he says something like, that's what we've always done.
And I think that's this fantastic idea
that there could be this time depth of this stuff,
but also this fantastically human moment
at which you're trying to reflect on why do we do it this way.
And the answer is essentially culture.
Jethic is kind of great.
Happy to us?
Yeah.
Traditionally?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
They fantastic.
And so we should just kind of summarize them maybe quickly
the way in which it seems like Peraevanians are living
in the main Maritimes region before we move on specifically
to New Brunswick, which we're leaving very little time
for New Brunswick, but there's a reason for that.
You'll notice that there's sort of diminishing information
the further north we get.
It's true.
We've mentioned one site in Nova Scotia
for the up and over effect.
But so what's going on here is we mentioned
that Peraevanians are probably big game specialists.
So in the far northeast in the New England Maritimes region,
big game equals caribou.
And caribou are really, really fascinating.
And I, Arthur Space, main state archaeologist, important
and really, really interesting work on Peraevanians.
But before that was a kind of caribou hunter
guy in general interested in this.
And I read his book and I thought to myself,
I'd always thought the mystery about caribou hunters
was the people.
It turns out the mystery is also the caribou.
There are all sorts of things we don't know about caribou,
including how exactly they decide when to move,
how they can detect hunters, all these kinds of things.
Caribou herds are more complicated
than I certainly would have thought.
But one of the things that we know about caribou
is that you can say, well, yeah, they're following caribou,
but they're not really following caribou.
Caribou move too quickly.
So they're intercepting caribou at places they know caribou
are going.
And caribou, just to scale it back here,
caribou are fundamentally migratory and large mammals.
They sort of move in semi-predictable large aggregations
between sort of they sort of have spring and fall movements
to sort of favored patches of lichen, I'm guessing,
and other resources.
Yeah, and potentially to remnant ice caps
where there are no bugs.
Yeah.
This is a place you maybe would intercept them.
Brian Robinson and Bert Pelletier did some work on this
and basically said, you know, and the premise would
be that at a place like Fort Brook where we're talking about,
the landscape is such that it would be easier
to predict where they were there,
but it would happen less often, whereas you could go further
north and caribou are hanging out
on these relatively bug-free icy areas where you can have
some degree of success hunting them.
We know that one of the kinds of migrations
that we're talking about for Northeast Pelletier
and even we're about to caveat this are over 400 kilometers.
So we're talking about people moving
over these massive areas on a seasonal basis,
but, intrepid listener, you may be about to ask,
how do they know that?
And the reason we know that is pegged extensively
to one particular kind of rock.
And that rock is called Monsungan Chirt,
and it's from far northern Maine.
Have you been to, I don't think?
I haven't been up to Monsungan yet.
I haven't had a chance to take in one of these field trips.
So I went last summer and to give the listener some sense
of what it's like, you drive to Presgyle, Maine,
the bustling metropolis that is Presgyle, Maine.
Spend the night in Presgyle.
And then you go on for a while and you end up
in basically Ashland, Maine.
You stop in at a mill and you speak to the fellow there
that handles the woods road.
And he then directs you to another person
who handles the woods road.
And then you drive for about six miles
and your cell phone cuts out.
And 50 miles later, you end up at the field camp
where the archeologists are working.
And so we stayed with the Salve Regina Field School, who
were out there for a lot of time in a very rustic location.
And the reason they're there is that Nathaniel Ketchel
and Heather Rockwell just identified the quarry.
A few years ago for the gourmet paleo-Indian shirt.
And not just paleo-Indian, like the stuff
that you see in the late woodland as well,
like the really nice red variant of this solidified mudstone
that we call shirt.
Yeah, even Ken calls it red and he can't see the color red,
which is the Christmas trees, the phrase they use.
It's kind of a green, graying your red material often.
And this stuff appears throughout the Maritimes, New England
region.
So now we add two caveats.
The first caveat is that Stony Speth at the University
of Michigan has pointed out that the actual amount of shirt
that appears at paleo-Indian sites
is something like two backpacks worth.
So it's not like we've got a huge amount of this stuff.
So it's possible a couple of guys are hauling up
to Monsungan every once in a while
and returning with enough shirt for a generation.
So that's one possibility rather than the whole group's
moving.
We might be having some sort of direct procurement going on.
Yeah.
The other problem is that it's become increasingly apparent
that actually telling Monsungan shirt
from a few varieties of New York shirt is really, really
difficult.
So there are kinds of Norman-skilled
shirts that look an awful lot like Monsungan shirt.
And you're looking concerned, Ken.
I hope this isn't too much for you to come out.
This is the XRF study they did a couple of years ago, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
It's XRF.
It's also just visually the stuff is alarmingly similar.
The mutual colleague and friend of ours,
Zach Singer, who's a peyolianing guy.
He's not a peyolianing guy.
He's a peyolianing researcher.
From, and he works in Maryland now,
but did a lot of work in Connecticut.
Posted, I think, to his Instagram,
a picture from the source Monsungan,
beside from the source Norman-skill,
and invited the viewer to try to tell which was which.
And it was not comforting for any of us, I don't think.
No.
And this is, I mean, we have the same issues in New Brunswick.
So there's carboniferous shirts from South Central New
Brunswick, the stuff that I study that also occur in northern
New Brunswick, and in small pieces
look almost indistinguishable from material from Nova Scotia.
Yeah.
And so that's how we interpret this big, long range.
And we've talked about some of the problems with peyolianing sites,
and this continues to be a problem in this area
where they are shallowly buried.
They're often on soils that are deposited by glacial runoff.
There's not many plants during the younger dryests.
And so the soils are probably these like windblown dunes
that made nice sheltered landforms.
And then only later do these get secured by vegetation
once the climate gets warmer.
And we find peyolianing sites generally
a place where there are good views of what
were water courses back then.
So we've got this complicated model for understanding
peyolianing sites, which is that you need to,
if you're looking at, say, more recent sites,
you can typically say, well, the landscape's about like it was.
It's not really true for peyolianing sites.
You need to think about them in terms of these other factors.
Yeah.
You need to be sort of a more than casual geologist
to really get at where peyolianing people were living
and have more than just a cursory knowledge
of surfacial geology because a quaternary geology
in particular, so late Pleistocene, early Holocene,
geological processes to really understand
the kinds of landscapes and understand, first of all,
the formation.
And so when these sort of landscapes would be available
and whether they persisted after peyolianing groups
would have been there.
So there are places, for example, where
we talked about the younger dryests.
And there are landscapes in New Brunswick
that would have been ice free when the Paleoindians were
in the region.
But during the younger dryests, or when the Paleoindians
were coming in, I guess, and then during the younger dryests,
for 1,500 years or so, the area was recovered with ice.
And so there's absolutely almost no chance
of finding stuff from that time period in some areas
because I had a geologist explain to me
that if they were here, you'd find it in a fine paste.
In this till layer, basically.
So this stuff would be crushed and ground by a glacier.
And so understanding these past landscapes
is really important for understanding
where Paleoindian people would have lived
and doing the archaeology.
And that massively changing landscape also
creates, I think, one of the most interesting aspects
of Paleoindian summit, which is that it's
this phenomenon of Paleoindian-like clustering.
And so typically, Paleoindian sites occurring clusters,
where there are a bunch of sites around one landform,
and the sites don't perfectly overlap.
And so we've talked about one that I worked at, which
is the Lomontaine site.
The Lomontaine site is part of the Mishu cluster, which
is around the Lewiston-Alburn Airport.
This is actually, it turns out that Paleoindian site
locations are also very good for municipal airports.
This is a strange fluke of geology.
But so there are a series of sites located, basically,
clustered around that airport.
And they're in the same approximate location,
but they're a kilometer, half a kilometer apart
from one another.
What it seems like is probably happening
is that the landscape is changing so rapidly
that there's a bunch of good reasons
to keep coming back to that approximate area.
But the ideal place to camp will change slightly over time.
And so you end up with these, through a few generations,
you end up with a bunch of sites in approximately the same area.
And because we have such difficulty
with dating these sites, we also have really poor resolution
about how we don't even have sort of generational overlap
in a lot of these dates.
We have ranges of a couple of hundred years in these clusters.
And I guess maybe, me shows a little bit different.
But I think like DeBurt Belmont, they overlap,
but there's no clear contemporaneity
other than looking at the types of stone tools
that they were using.
We can say, well, this fits into a broad period of five
to 600 years when we know these groups were
using this sort of tool.
Yeah.
And in general, I mean, contemporaneity
is really difficult in archaeology
because radio carbonates don't work at the same scale
that hunter-gatherers lived.
Yeah.
So that'll be a recurring theme in this podcast, I suppose,
or this podcast series.
And it seems like there are probably also aggregation sites
that occur at places where people would have intercepted
caribou.
So different family bands coming together
may be to intercept caribou.
And this is in some part a riff on these big Pleistocene kill
sites that we get out west, where groups of paleo-anions came
together to kill a bunch of caribou and process them
and eat a whole bunch of them.
We get like fulsomes known for this out west.
Like bison kill sites.
Yeah, exactly.
So is this scaled down for caribou?
That's sort of the model that we have out here.
And then, so that sort of talks about fluted point paleo-anion.
And then there's the big problem that in a cultural historical
term, late paleo-anion happens.
There's the environmental change from the younger dryus
to climate that starts to be much more
similar to what we have now.
And then things change.
And then archaeologists don't know what happens.
Is that a fair summary?
Yeah, I think it's pretty like people,
they stop fluting their points.
And then for a while, they make things that sort of look
like fluted points.
And then they start notching their points.
And this all kind of happens somewhere between 11,600
and 9,000 years ago.
There aren't a ton of sites that we found for around that time
period.
And yeah, there's a whole lot of ambiguity
about what's happening.
Is it population change?
Are there new people coming in?
Or is it just new ideas?
Is it sort of a dramatic response to the fundamental changes
going on around you?
And so people are kind of negotiating
changes in their worlds.
It's a confusing time, archaeologically.
And for a time, I guess we'll get to this.
We even thought people weren't here for a few thousand years.
That's true.
And that's going to be a big theme next fortnight, I think.
It's going to be this kind of great hiatus,
this idea that there was this big chunk of missing time
in the region.
One thing we do know about late Paleo-Ingian
is that it appears like things become much more local.
So if the theme of Fluted Point Paleo-Ingian
is a shared continental culture, these big kind of cultures,
it seems like we start to see more specialization
in late Paleo-Ingian.
Do you think that's fair?
Yeah.
And I think it's the materials get to be,
like lithic material gets to be more localized.
I mean, despite this, though, like you know,
Agate Basin style Lancy-Ole points in Alberta look almost
identical to, you know, Michonne or St. Anne Barney
Lancy-Ole points in the New England Maritimes region.
You know?
Yeah.
We found a Lancy-Ole point in Southern Ontario
that looks almost identical to what you'd see in like New
England.
So there is still this shared idea of how you make your tools.
But I guess it's that we're not, you know,
going 400 kilometers or so to get the rock.
Yeah.
Or only sometimes doing that, I guess.
Yeah.
So should we talk about New Brunswick?
I think we should.
Yeah.
All right.
The code on late Paleo-Ingian is that the story continues.
Yeah, exactly.
And the story continues and it overlap with next week.
I guess that we can foreshadow that.
That's one of the problems.
And I'm going to just put a teaser out there.
People didn't leave.
So we're going to now turn to New Brunswick, which is going
to be a short part of this.
A mutual friend and colleague of ours, Ken, the Emmy Fox,
the great archaeologist from Toronto who works on a lot
of mathematical stuff.
She told me that her partner said
that these are called SODS in the biz.
Like apostrophe S-O-D-E-S.
Rather than Fs.
We've been calling them Fs.
Yeah, but apparently they're SODS.
This is like how I called Instagram the gram for a while.
And I learned that it's actually supposed to be called Insta.
Oh, I've still been doing that wrong, maybe.
Yeah.
Anyway, this is the shorter part of the SOD
or the F or whatever this is.
And so what we should say, I guess,
is where does New Brunswick fit in this?
And we basically suspect that New Brunswick is the same
as the New England Maritah's model we've described in general.
For a long time, most of what we knew about New Brunswick,
Peleunions, and this fits with, if you were to say,
what did we know about Maine Peleunions in the 1970s?
We knew that Peleunions were there,
but we knew that mostly from find spots,
which is that people, mostly evocational,
would occasionally find these incredibly diagnostic fluted
points and deport them.
And so this in New Brunswick...
You have a line, actually, that I think we didn't actually
mention at the start.
So Gabe said diagnostic.
And so when you find a fluted point,
you have a really great note here
that these are actually hyperdiagnostic.
We talked at the start of the show
that there might actually be another spot in the world where
people made fluted points.
But if you find a fluted point in North America,
there is no other time period in 13,000 plus years of history
here.
If you find one of these, you're talking very old stuff,
which is really fascinating.
Yeah, the hyperdiagnostic line, I think
that's a Brian Robinson line from a review of archaeology
article.
Oh, nice.
OK.
Yeah, contrasting it with pre-Clovis,
with what you might expect for pre-Clovis.
And the premise of the article is
that it's almost unfair to expect that pre-Clovis would
be something equivalent to Clovis,
because Clovis occurs once.
You know, the old phrase, like people
talk about projectile points, is there's only so many ways
to skin a cat.
And it's true, but they really only skinned it that way
for a little while.
But so we strongly suspect from these fine spots,
just like we did in Maine, that there's
no reason to imagine that paleo-nibroids are
any different than it is anywhere else.
And these fine spots have been at places like Kingsclair,
at Quacko Head, at New Norton Creek,
at the Northwest Mirror Machine.
You pointed out there's probably a Holcombe-esque point
in the George Friedrich Cart collection.
And is this maybe wash-demoic?
Yeah, possibly made on carboniferous shirt that
looks like wash-demoic shirt for various reasons, probably not
coming from Belie's Cove.
Because as I talked about earlier,
Belie's Cove was probably under water at around that time,
under Glacial Lake Acadia waters, basically.
But we do know some of my research has indicated
that there are other places where you could get
a shirt that looks almost identical to wash-demoic shirt
that would have been above the water at that time.
So maybe on a high point, overlooking a much bigger
lake at that time in the past.
And yeah, and there's other places like in the Petticoatiac.
What's interesting, too, is if you
look at the patterning of where all these fine spots are found,
they're mostly almost all in the southern part of the province.
I don't think anything's been found
north of the Northwest Maramoshi,
like the big clear water.
That's in central New Brunswick.
Do you think that's real patterning,
or do you think that's population?
I don't know.
I guess it could be a population thing.
I just mean that if you look at it on a map,
you've got all the main Paleo-Indian sites,
and then you get DeBurke, and then you've
got a straight line of people finding points
across southern New Brunswick.
And some of that may be an environmental thing.
I don't know, you definitely had remnant ice
in northern parts of the province,
and certainly ice re-advancing during the Younger Dryas
down into places like even in Napa Dog and in Juniper area,
you'd have a nice margin around that area.
And so there may have been limited space for people
to be at that time, too.
We just don't have a clear picture.
The listener may have just caught my aspirated yes
there, as promised earlier.
I think that's the good thing.
Take your way.
Want to practice that one again?
I think it's part of your residency requirements.
And so when we were in graduate school, 2010 or so.
2010, 2009 to 11.
Is that when Darcy found the Pennfield site?
It was while we were in grad school,
because I remember taking a road trip down there.
Yes.
And so we're now shifting into, so can I say that we're now
shifting into pretty much the realm of stuff that's not
published, and we know only by impressions.
And you listener might wonder what your taxpayer dollars
are going for.
And Ken and I might say you would be correct to wonder
about that.
Yeah, there's been some conference papers
and a couple of short reports.
But we haven't seen a big publication on Pennfield
or any of the other.
There was another site, Marysville,
that was executed a few years ago as well.
It has a short technical report that we can draw some inferences
from, but the big picture is still out there to be said.
So Pennfield's in Charlotte County, New Brunswick.
So basically, kind of coastal, it's near St. Andrews.
Excellent pie there, actually.
Oh, is it?
Mackay's pies.
They have a blueberry stand in Pennfield
that has possibly the best blueberry pies I've ever eaten.
Holy cow.
And I've eaten an entire blueberry pie
from Mackay's on the drive between Pennfield and Frederick
Town.
That's impressive.
I couldn't do that now.
I find myself more able to do that now than I used to be.
I'm just less able to fit into my sweater the next day.
So what do we actually know at the Pennfield site?
It's on a high point.
It's kind of an odd location.
It's not even really all that nice of a location
for a characteristic site for a paleo-Indian site.
It's not like a big well-drained outwash deposit.
But it is at a high point and probably would have been fairly
close to the edge of the water at that time.
It is located close to a stream that probably would have been
running.
It's kind of a deeper gully now.
There's some local lithic material
that was available, but probably not used
during paleo-Indian times.
We know that there's a transitional archaic component
at the site that that local material.
Which fits with paleo-Indian actually.
Which does fit with.
Yeah.
So by knowledge of the transitional archaic site,
we know that there's also.
I don't know in terms of diagnostic tools.
I know that the original Site Find Darcy, I think,
was walking through an area.
So this was during the Route 1 bypass.
So they were twinning the highway between St. John
and St. Stephen.
And basically, the developer had gone out
and had prepped an area that had actually not been surveyed yet.
And so Darcy Dignum went out, was called up
to go and survey the area and was walking around.
And the story goes that he was on his phone.
With Jesse Webb, wasn't he?
With Jesse Webb.
Yeah.
And I think she had a curse word or something.
And under his boot or near his toe,
just before he stepped on there, something
was a Monsungan shirt, Spurred Scraper.
I think that was.
Isn't that the history?
That's my recollection.
Yeah.
So like a very diagnostic paleo-Indian artifact
made on a distinctive fine grain
shirt from northern Maine, which you find on a lot of paleo-Indian
sites in the Maine Maritimes region.
And certainly a very interesting find.
And there was a fairly large mitigation excavation project
done there in the subsequent summer put on by the New Brunswick
Archaeology Branch, the provincial archaeology branch.
I think that focused mostly on the transitional archaic
component.
The province actually shifted the highway design
so that they were able to avoid the main occupation where
the paleo-Indian site was.
They also found a Lake Woodland site there as well.
Oh, interesting.
I didn't know that.
Ramachur and a small Lake Woodland campsite.
So an interesting landscape, but certainly one
that we'll hopefully find out more about in the coming years.
Yeah.
And we should make clear that Darcy and Jesse and those folks
were just involved in the initial finding of the site,
not actually the subsequent.
Yeah, not the subsequent excavation.
Yeah.
And to their credit presented on that at the CAA.
So that is in some sense in the literature.
And then the only other intact site
would be the Marysville paleo-Indian site, which
was also found because of row construction during some work
route 8 just outside of Marysville a few years back now.
Again, same thing.
There had been some ground prep work done.
An archaeologist who works in the city was driving by
and took a look at some backdoor piles
and noticed some artifacts in them,
some subsequent work basically determined
that recovered some scrapers and a denticulate,
spurred scraper, probably a few other diagnostic artifacts.
I've looked at four pieces from that assemblage
that appear to be carboniferous chert.
So another example of what a material that
looks like washed and milk lake chert,
but in a paleo-Indian context.
There's some thinking that the site, it's really sandy there.
And so there's thinking this might have been
an old beach, probably well-drained beach area
sort of on the margins of Glacier Lake, Acadia.
That's based on local topography
and some of the geological work.
But we don't have a whole lot of other.
I don't know if there's any other excavation that's
gone on in a paleo-Indian site in New Brunswick.
Is there?
I'm not sure.
No.
And am I correct that Marysville is not in the literature yet?
It's excavated by the.
There's a short technical report that the province put out,
but no publication says yet.
No.
OK, right.
Yeah, no peer review publications.
I'm unaware of any others in the province.
So but one of the things this may speak to you actually,
though, is that in places like Maine and the rest of New
England, one of the real successes,
I think of government, academic, CRM, and even
public collaboration around archaeological research
has really been to find out much more
about the Paleo-Indian period.
Yeah.
And you know, like the finds of Penfield, for example,
shifted the way the places that we
were looking for for archaeological sites in CRM
and New Brunswick, it prompted a shift in the places
that we were required to do meditory testing in,
or at least recommend testing in.
So I think having a better sense of where these sites might
be located and doing a better job of identifying
those sorts of landscapes will certainly
give us a better sense of a better chance
to find another one of these sites intact.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
And we've mentioned the importance of cultural research
management for this.
And some of this is that just that a characteristic of Paleo-Indian
sites is that they tend to be fairly what archaeologists
call low density, which just means not necessarily
a ton of stuff.
And so the way you find them is by digging holes
at pretty close intervals, typically at, say, five
or even less, actually, sometimes at 2 and 1 half meter
intervals in high probability areas for Paleo-Indians.
And so that is not if you're a cultural research management
archaeologist, what you want to explain to your client
that you're going to dig at minute intervals
across this landform.
And so much of the work in Paleo-Indians and New England
has been through those collaborations I just mentioned.
And some of that is actually then used
a vocational archaeologist as well, who are basically
having an awareness of these things
and who then have an opportunity to be engaged in mitigating
or even identifying Paleo-Indian sites.
And I just wanted to flag two programs that I think
are the kinds of things we should be thinking about here
in Canada.
One of these is the Maryland Fluted Point Survey.
The other is the New York Paleo-Indian Database project.
These are projects that avocationalists report back,
especially from farmers fields, about Paleo-Indian artifacts
they maybe have found.
And it's this great project in each case
from by government archaeologist John Lothrop in New York,
Zach Singer in Maryland, who's the state archaeologist
in Maryland, John Lothrop's the New York State Museum
archaeologist.
And they go out when one of these artifacts is reported,
and they go out with a high resolution GPS
and work with the avocational archaeologists
to record the location.
The avocational archaeologists access to those data.
And to my mind, they're really fantastic ways
to include the avocational community as peers
in this research.
And as a result, these two states
have got really good management of that time period
and are getting really great resolution on that time period.
Yeah.
And if you look at, if you scale a little bit further,
there's PIDBA, which is the Paleo-Indian Database
of the Americas.
Which so like, it's funny because we
talked about Paleo-Indian research kind
of being the succession, right?
It's also one of the very few kind of big data enterprises
in North American archaeology.
And so PIDBA, which I'm at a loss to remember who's
the spearhead behind this.
I can't die.
Is it Meltzer?
It sounds like a Meltzer.
Oh, it's David Anderson, University Tennessee.
Yeah.
So he's a fairly famous Southeast archaeologist
and a true georchaeologist in every sense of the word.
But basically, PIDBA aggregates Paleo-Indian data
from across the continent.
And in particular, it has like tracked,
you can pull up this great map that they have of fluted points
across North America 13,000 years ago, whatever, right?
And a testament to the work that's
going on in Eastern North America and in places
like Maryland and New York is the incredibly dense clustering
of fluted points in Eastern North America, which
has prompted people as early as the 50s
to speculate that Clovis maybe has this Eastern origin as opposed
to origins in the West.
But I think when you look at this,
it's maybe a function more of like there's
a lot more people and a lot more densely occupied landscapes
in the Eastern part of the continent.
But it is fascinating to see how it
maps out on a continental scale.
We're kind of scaling up thinking about the scale of Clovis,
for example, when you're looking at.
You can see little dots of Debert up in the Northeast tip
of this, and then you see these clusters all around the rest
of the continent.
So pretty neat.
Yeah.
[?].
So are we looking at a half-finished part of Corva-Ciel, Ken, and are we on to hit pieces?
I think we are.
Yeah.
Well, and we should also say, so we invite the listener to email in if they have helpful
suggestions on quality control on this podcast.
We are happy to respond to the listener.
Yeah.
Happy to have listener mail.
You might even win the evening on the Merrimack just by becoming our first listener mail.
It's true.
You could be having an iced-dunk at donuts in 15 degrees centigrade weather while we
overlook a bridge apartment.
But the hit piece I've got this week is the main archaeology newsletter, and that is the
newsletter of the main archaeological society.
And the main archaeology society is probably one of the best bargains in memberships that
you could possibly have.
If you're interested in New Brunswick archaeology, that may sound counterintuitive, but it's nearby.
They do presentations twice a year, and sometimes actually in collaboration with the Association
of Professional Archaeologists in New Brunswick.
Membership is extremely inexpensive.
I can't remember how inexpensive it is on top of my head.
It's something like $10 for a student.
Yeah.
American dollars.
And it's not much more for professionals either.
No, it really isn't.
A very professionally done journal.
I really can't recommend it enough.
I also have a publication series.
I'm showing actually the cover of this, and then I realized after I was doing that that
we don't actually show our listeners the video of these podcasts.
No, not yet.
We might something.
Not yet.
We record these for posterity.
We do.
But I wanted to draw in addition to the bulletin, which is the journal that they do, they do
a newsletter.
There's an interesting section of the newsletter called the Odd Artifact with Dr. Arthur Spiece.
Arts the State Archaeologist in Maine.
Just one of these kind of model old guard New England State Archaeologists, super high
productivity, super engaged with the discipline.
And as we mentioned, I think earlier, a very important Pedro Indian researcher.
But this is an interesting article about, or it's interesting blurb really, about incised
pebbles from a site at the Waterville Winslow Bridge.
And in re-boxing these artifacts from a previous project, I came across this and thought it
was worthy of a blurb.
There's some analog to these actually in New Brunswick at the Holtz Point site in coastal
New Brunswick.
So you and Arthur Anderson were looking into these not too long ago, right?
We were looking at the region.
And so there's, we photograph them.
But yeah, they're super cool.
They're these incised pebbles.
And then the other article in here to check out is Sarah Loftus at the Northeast Archaeological
Research Center in Farmington.
Has written a short piece on construction monitoring in downtown Portland, Maine.
Yeah, and it's even got the obligatory, every archaeological monitoring project involves
finding one creepy looking doll and or figurine.
And this has a one.
Not far off the mark.
Yeah, yeah, no, this one's called Frozen Charlotte.
And so I encourage the listener to check out this, the most recent newsletter of the Maine
Arc Society.
That's excellent.
And I think the only the only hit piece I have to highlight is that for those of you
in New Brunswick who are interested in archaeology and are interested in taking in a full weekend
of archaeology and experience, member two First Nation is going to be co-hosting the
Canadian Archaeological Association annual meeting this year.
This will be hosted in member two Nova Scotia.
So member two First Nation is sort of embedded within the municipal limits of Sydney, Nova
Scotia.
That conference runs from May 3 to 7.
You can find out more information about the conference itself on Canadianarchaeology.com
slash CAA slash annual dash meeting.
And there's information in there about if you have a paper you might want to submit a
session you might want to host.
Or if you are just a member of the public looking to attend for a day or two.
It looks like they have daily rates starting at as little as $50 for students or non archaeologists
as low as $15 or less dollars.
So come join us and member two Gabe and I will be there.
We might even be hosting our first live podcast.
Would that be a?
I think we were going to try to do some kind of live soad.
Yes.
From member two.
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with that terminology.
It makes me a little uncomfortable as well.
But actually since you mentioned the live podcast we should say we're also we're going to start
trying to plug in some special apps perhaps the fill in the in between.
So we've got some some ideas for that.
Yeah.
So what you might find in this episode is by the time we do all the editing you might
get a first glimpse at this this week and you might get the part two next week because
we're we're clocking it at close to two hours tonight and and I'm not sure if I'm not sure
if the listeners are ready for that yet.
So well the I feel like this my my partner in when she was in medical school would listen
to some of the recordings of the lectures and there were probably some lectures that
just sounded a little better at 1.5 speed that might be us.
That's how I listen when I'm editing actually.
Oh fantastic.
I got a fast forward to the parts where I know we need to we need to clip.
Yeah.
Well speaking of clipping can I think we're at a half a half finished bottle of Corvacea
and I think we should say goodbye to listener until our next fortnight is passed.
Yeah.
And so thank you all for listening again.
Please don't forget to subscribe or follow us on whichever your favorite podcasting platform
is and we look forward to hearing from you our first listener mail.
We'll talk to you soon listener.
OK.
I