Late Archaic Settlement Patterns of the Inner Coastal Plain of New Jersey

Abstract

Late Archaic (4000-1000 B.C.) settlement patterns in the State of New Jersey are poorly understood in comparison with other parts of the Northeastern United States. This study is designed to evaluate current settlement pattern data, using logistical models of land use, against available archaeological data. Current data indicate that Late Archaic populations exhibited a complex series of seasonal movements, based upon seasonal availability of resources and highly ritualized cremation burial behavior. Late Archaic groups coalesced in riverine zones of the Inner Coastal Plain in the fall, as economic activities oriented toward nut harvesting, mammal hunting, and fishing, coincided with increasingly formal and complex cremation burial ritual; settlement systems at this time broadly correspond to collectors. With the completion of the fall season food harvesting and ritual cycle, mobile groups most resembling foragers dispersed into upland zones in the winter months to hunt mammals and coastal zones in the spring and summer to procure aquatic-related resources. Regional climatic changes toward the end of the Late (Terminal) Archaic and the early portion of the Early Woodland (1200-500 B.C.) may have necessitated higher group mobility more typical of foragers and corresponding changes in cremation burial ritual.