North American Archaeologist

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.

This study examines the Clarkson Mine (33BL333), an eastern Ohio coal mine complex dating to the 1910s to 1920s, situated along Wheeling Creek. The results of preliminary surveys and the subsequent mitigation of four structures at the site are presented. The historical archaeology conducted at the site demonstrates the significant research possibilities inherent at many of these early industrial mine complexes. Of particular interest is the findings of depositional patterning around residential structures that revealed the influence of architecture on where and how items were deposited on the land surface. The ceramic and faunal assemblage were analyzed and provide significant details on socioeconomic attributes associated with the workers or staff. Artifacts recovered at the site provide an excellent diagnostic framework from which other similarly aged sites can be compared and dated. The findings at the Clarkson Mine are also placed into a more regional perspective and compared with other contemporary studies.

In 1946, Albert C. Spaulding, while at the University of Kansas, investigated a mound in southeast Kansas. The mound, composed of earth and fire-cracked rock contained artifacts and several burials. Based largely on the presence of cord marked ceramics, the mound can probably be assigned to the Late Woodland, perhaps ca. A.D. 700 to 900. The mound may be an incipient burned rock midden, possibly related to the gathering and processing of nut mast, particularly acorns, in autumn and possibly too the processing tubers, roots, or bulbs in spring. Buried within mound fill were several inhumations, indicating that it also served a mortuary function. An unconfirmed report of a projectile point embedded in one human vertebra hints at violence. Description of the site and the excavations are based on Spaulding's notes, while the small collection of artifacts from the site, curated by the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, was analyzed. The limited data from the investigation is herein compared to other, similar sites in the region.