Earliest Man in the Southwestern Lake Erie Basin: A 1990 Perspective

Abstract

This article is an update to an article published under the same title by the senior author, in Man in the Northeast (1982). It is an attempt to resynthesize, reintegrate, and interpret new data and theoretical concepts pertaining to the first 8,000 years of human occupation in the western Lake Erie drainage basin. While the nature of the database has changed little, these new interpretations are derived from a much greater database than what existed in 1982, as well as new regional overview interpretations which have appeared in the literature of the past ten years. A new interpretation of the Western Lake Erie Basin Early Archaic sequence is also proposed, which abandons the traditional tri-partite taxonomy in favor of a bi-partite taxonomy. It is proposed that this interpretation better fits the archaeological phenomena as observed during the first 5,000 years of the Archaic sequence in this region of the Northeast.