Pre-Clovis Cultures

As one can see, the earthworks of the Ohio and Mississippi valley are critical in the understanding the past. They provide great clues about the migration of the Ancient people of this land. It is still not understood how the Western World was settled and under great debate. Any clues that are available should be used and the mounds are a great source. Native

This essay will aim to cover several archaeology techniques and methodologies that would have been used during excavation of archeological sites, in particular the New Kinord site. These methods will provide an insight into a wide range of information that I am interested in discovering. These include what the inhabitants of the site did for a living, their diet and how the term of occupation can be determined.

American archaeologist and anthropologist, Stephen Plog, wrote an account of the pre-Columbian natives of the Americans titled Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest. Plog’s purpose is to communicate the cultural and ritualistic lifestyles of the prehistoric natives of the southwest, which spans across the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada with some mention of trade with Mexico. The author has demonstrated an effective approach of an objective viewpoint on the lives of the prehistoric south westerners using sources from excursions from previous archaeologists such as, Paul S Martin and David R Wilcox among many others who excavated the vacant villages of the southwest.

In the early history of the United States, even before Europeans set foot in North America, there were Native Americans all across the continent. Native Americans lived in tribes and were nomadic. Although they were nomadic, they would also inhabit “permanent villages” where they would live year-round. On the occasion that those “permanent villages” were abandoned, left behind would be artifacts from their culture that explained a great amount about their lifestyle and traditions. These popular artifacts were most commonly found in southwest and northeast regions such as the Great Plains, the Great Basin, and the Mississippi River Valley.

Chapter Nine goes into detail about the late Paleoindian Period the growth of agriculture in North and South America. Clovis points appeared all over the Americas attesting to a continent-wide networking. However, as time pasted distinctive points and tools began to pop up based on region and the needs it provided for. In fact, a common theme of this chapter was the Native Americans ability to exploit their resources and maximize their intake of food sources.

An artifact has been found that pushes the timeline of the arrival of Native Americans in North Carolina back 4,000 years.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles offers a surface level depiction of Mesoamerican civilization and culture. It excludes essential information and instead gives a shallow representation that offers implications of a barbaric civilization.

Over the course of thousands of years, groups of people temporarily set up camp a valley in what is now Goshen County, Wyoming (Irwin-Williams et al. 1973; Larson, Kornfeld, and Frison 2009). Small-scale occupations and campsites, which make up the 27 Paleoindian components at the four localities of the site, named Hell Gap after the valley is lies in, provide insight into the lifeways of the individuals who chose to take refuge therein (Larson, Kornfeld, and Frison 2009). The semi-montane environment of the valley, at an elevation of around 1525 meters, opens to the east onto the High Plains, and as such, the resources of the valley and of the plains were easily accessible to the inhabitants (Irwin-Williams et al. 1973).

For years, it had been widely accepted “that small bands of humans carrying a generalized Upper Paleolithic tool kit entered the Americas around 11,500 radiocarbon years before the present” (Waters 1122); and that “Archaeologists called these presumed pioneers the Clovis culture, after distinctive stone tools that were found at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s” (Curry 13). However, the “peopling” of the Americas and their presumptive date of arrival is a topic of great debate within the field of Archeology; and the discovery of the Paisley Caves in south-central Oregon has thrown a wrench in the once widely accepted hypothesis that the “Clovis complex is considered to be the oldest unequivocal evidence of humans in the

Most if not all of the historical information that is provided at Town Creek today for visitors to witness is connected to the archaeological excavations that were completed of the area during the middle of the 20th century (NC Weekend). The work for the excavations began in 1937 with Floyd and Minnie Frutchey, but Floyd never got to see the completion of the excavation (Coe, 3). The excavations were completed in the year 1987 (Coe, 11). During the excavations, archaeologists recovered clay pottery, as well as bones from many of the burials that occurred during the time of residence in Town Creek. The archaeological record discovered through the excavations of Town Creek are pertinent in understanding the history of the people that lived on the bank of the Little River before English settlement occurred because very little is known historically about these people. The history of Town Creek remains somewhat a mystery because all that is known about the people and the site is solely based off of the excavations that occurred performed during the 20th century (NC

Although, no credible information regarding burials has been discovered, Headrick claims the highest-ranking ancestors underwent mortuary bundles, a treatment in which their remains are wrapped in assemblages (chapter 3). Mortuary bundles have not been found at Teotihuacan, thus, Headricks supports her claims by presenting information regarding mortuary bundles found in the Classical Maya and the Mixtec. Assimilating information about the treatment in those cultures and the discovery of the three stone masks, Headrick proposes that stone masks were likely tied to mortuary bundles as they are largely depicted in the city’s artistic record (chapter 3). Moreover, Headrick further supports her claim by comparing an archeological find of a ceramic bust with a mask to a similar one elsewhere in Mesoamerica (chapter 3). Headrick’s argument regarding mortuary bundles is convincing and the evidence to support her claim is

13,500 ago Paleo-Indains inhabited what is now North and Central America. Un until this time they hunted game significantly smaller than the massive woolly mammoth. This changed with the invention of the Clovis point. The creator of the Clovis point was the Clovis people.

An antiquated lance held up in a mastodon has demonstrated people populated North America 1,000 years sooner than beforehand suspected, it was asserted today. Researchers have now precisely cell based dated the sharp tip, itself cut from mastodon bone, 30 years after it was found in the U.S. condition of Washington. It was implanted in a rib from one of the animals, a goliath relative of the elephant and wooly mammoth, and after a long hold up specialists have said that the bone and lance point are both around 13,800 years of age.

If you leave your car behind and join a ranger-led hike in Southwest Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, you'll find yourself at a spot where the scrubby pinyon-juniper forest drops off. It falls into a sandstone chasm. It reveals a maze of 800-year-old stone dwellings. They are wedged beneath an overhang in the canyon wall. They're so well preserved that it's easy to imagine you've stepped back in time. And that nothing has changed in this high desert landscape since the Ancestral Puebloans built these chambers. They were built in the 12th century.

The ancient world of Mesoamerica entered a long period of change that soon led to the development a mammoth city that would serve as a regional center for more than 600 years. Beginning in about 1000 B.C. the majority of the people in the Valley of Mexico relocated to one of two primary sites, that of Cuicuilco in the southwest corner and Teotihuacan in the northeast. By about 300 B.C., Cuicuilco dominated the region, but its heyday would soon diminish. (Sabloff 2000, p 60)