10.0 Conclusion: the Broader View

The data coming from this research project indicate a complex cultural picture for the Late and Terminal Archaic periods. Continuity is a resounding theme during these periods. From the Mast Forest adaptation Tinkham phase two descendant phases can be seen to have developed through the Terminal Archaic period and into Early Woodland times. The Lake Forest adaptation of the Late Archaic has strong connections to the River Plain adaptation of the Terminal Archaic period and may also indicate a prolonged continuum. Rouse (1958) suggested that a criterion for inferring migration into an area was to define the origin of the intrusive element. It is equally critical for the archaeologist to determine the origin of a cultural system when it is identified in a study area. The evidence from the lowest Connecticut River valley suggests an in-place development for the River Plain adaptation.

The research undertaken in the study area of the lowest Connecticut River valley poses some wide ranging consequences for Northeast prehistory. The Great Island phase as defined in the study area was the local expression of a River Plain adaptation that was seen from central Maine to Georgia and has been referred to as the Susquehanna tradition by other eastern archaeologists. As in Connecticut, the adaptation concentrated on the river plains and immediate terraces. There are two major differences between the study area's Great Island phase and the phases farther west and south. First, the habitation sites outside Connecticut appear to be bigger and have greater numbers of occupants. Second, in the area to the south and west, the ceremonial cremation burial grounds are very poorly represented in the archaeological record. I know of none south of New Jersey. I can offer no reason for this apparent divergence.

Felsites and rhyolites are a preferred chipping material throughout the region of the River Plain adaptation. Sources outside Connecticut are strongly indicated by various geological approaches. Trade was an important feature of the local phase of the River Plain adaptation. Basalt, steatite and rhyolites have been shown to be exotics (Pfeiffer 1984, 1990).

The River Plain adaptation in Connecticut has shown a high representation of floral materials in both burial and habitation contexts. This is certainly true inside the study area, as well as in the Quinnipiac valley (Pfeiffer 1984), and in the upper Connecticut valley in Glastonbury (Pagoulatos 1988). I suggest that this information, along with tools for processing such material, indicates a very important gathering component to the adaptation. Settlement, on and along the river plain, positioned the people in direct proximity to these plant resources.

For the River Plain adaptation, there was very little interior upland habitation. The sites from Maine to Georgia are found on river systems below the fall line in deeper, slower water where river gradient is slight (Pfeiffer 1984, 1990). This is the classic River Plain settlement area.

The hypothesis that the Duck Bay phase and the Great Island phase are strongly related is repeated across Connecticut. The pattern at Griffin-Bliss where two cremation burial sites are situated side by side yet separated by approximately 1000-1500 years is not an isolated case. The Toelle Road site in Wallingford (Pfeiffer 1984, 1990) which was excavated in the late 1960's and restudied by myself and Wilson (personal communication 1983), indicated that there were two horizontally distinct loci only meters apart in both burial and habitation contexts. The two components were affiliated with the River Plain and Lake Forest adaptation. Another site in South Windsor, LaRose (Pfeiffer 1984) indicates the same pattern with another added dimension. There is also a Snook Kill-Atlantic component as a distinct locus. This site contains a River Plain cremation burial as well as a Lake Forest cremation burial. At the same site, there is a very early Terminal Archaic burial and habitation locus only 50-60 meters away. Three quarters of a kilometer to the northeast is the Schwartz burial site (Pfeiffer 1984) that is clearly another closely related cremation burial site.

These burial and habitation sites add much credibility to the hypotheses formed within the study area that there is a very close systematic relationship between the Lake Forest and River Plain adaptation. The suggestion here is that when one burial component is found, the potential for others in the immediate vicinity appears high. Careful analysis of this might aid in linking together the Lake Forest and River Plain adaptation in more than just mortuary contexts.

Another feature that can now be discussed are my reasons for suggesting that larger River Plain adaptation sites probably do not exist in southern Connecticut. The sites listed above that have both mortuary and habitation loci lie on terrace outwash formations overlooking the floodplain. This settlement pattern extends at least into south central Massachusetts along the Connecticut River (Pretola 1984 personal communication.) In these regions, the floodplain has not been subject to marine transgression. It is still intact. The Long Knoll site in South Glastonbury (Rignall personal communications 1981) was a habitation site located upon the second flood plain terrace. It had a full assemblage of River Plain adaptation material and was very small, probably between 75 and 100 m2.

In Massachusetts along the Connecticut River there has been a similar difficulty in defining the River Plain adaptation as a cultural system. I suggest the reason for this is that such habitation components have the same archaeological signature as in the study area. They are small, stratigraphically thin, and scattered about the river bottomland. They are therefore difficult to find.

In widening the perspective out from the study area through Connecticut and into New England, I can now respond to Snow's (1980) contention that Mast Forest groups with the added technological and ideological elements intruded into southern and central Maine. There is strong indication from this research that the Mast Forest adaptation in Connecticut did not adopt either the ideological or technological elements of the Susquehanna tradition. The evidence suggests that there was a complete cultural system to which these elements were part. This cultural system has been defined as the Great Island phase and was the local expression of the River Plain adaptation. It is also suggested that the River Plain adaptation in southern New England may have developed in-place from the Lake Forest adaptation. If this were the situation in other regions of New England, migration would not necessarily have been the mechanism that brought about this apparent change. Possibly, in-place development may be a valid alternative explanation.

Prior to this study, a convincing case for the Lake Forest in southern New England had not been made. Because of this new data, it is now difficult to accommodate Snow's hypothetical zone of tension that was oriented about the 20% oak isopol. In this hypothesis the Lake Forest adaptation was envisioned to be north and the Mast Forest adaptation to be south of this loosely defined boundary. These specific cultural systems represented adaptations to different but neighboring environmental zones. In the core regions of each zone the characteristics of the particular adaptation were clearly defined in the archaeological record. However, in the peripheral regions where the two cultural adaptations overlapped the archaeological situation was more complex with the stratigraphic layers recording cultural changes as one adaptation entered a site that had been previously used by the other. This has been interpreted by Snow(1980:227) as at least partially accounting for the "seemingly contradictory sequencing of Lamoka and Laurentian". Ritchie(1969a) and Funk(1976) have alternatively posed that there are temporal and stratigraphic differences between the two Late Archaic traditions, Laurentian and Lamoka. Snow(1980) has alternatively suggested that these Late Archaic adaptations overlap both temporally and spatially.

In Connecticut and the study area particularly a regional expression of the Lake Forest adaptation, nearly 200 kilometers south of the hypothetical zone of overlap has been shown. Simultaneously, narrow stemmed projectile points and the cobble lithic industry, the technological signature of the Mast Forest adaptation, have been shown to sometimes co-occur in the regional expression of the Lake Forest adaptation. This relationship has also been suggested by Lavin and Russell (1985).

The model used in the previous section predicts that co-occurance of lithic materials and tools between cultural systems needs not be considered an especially distinctive cultural feature. This is probably because technological material or information can be freely transported across cultural boundaries through neighbor exchange, trade, and diffusion without indicating other substantial culture subsystem relationships. The evidence of a zone of tension where there are alternating stratigraphic reversals of Lamoka and Laurentian materials has not been shown at any site (Funk personal communications 1992). What has been seen at various sites is some level of variability within an assemblage derived from one component. There are sites where narrow stemmed projectile points co-occur with Brewerton and Vosburg types. Therefore, what may have been interpreted as information suggesting a complex range of cross cultural relationships may be simply the variability within one assemblage.

Variability in the technological subsystem may have also led to the differences that Ritchie (1969 a) and Funk (1983) have suggested as the basis of delineating "Brewerton" and "Vosburg". For the most part, such differences are subtle and pure recognizable assemblages may not exist in Connecticut. McBride (1984a&b) has made a distinction between the "Golet phase" and the "Vibert phase" of Connecticut in a similar fashion. The reason for the distinction is not clear, but I suspect that this was based on the kinds of lithic material used at contemporaneous sites and typological criteria. In either case, the data in my study area suggest that the Duck Bay and the "Vibert" phase are one and the same. Even though there are some technological differences and variability in form or choice of lithic material used to produce tools, the other reconstructed subsystems are the same.

The above discussion brings us back to the theoretical problems outlined in section 1.4. Traditional archaeology has concentrated upon one small part of the cultural system to define a specific group and show particular relationships. This has been through intensive analyses of the technological subsystem and subsequent identification of features that we consider to be diagnostic. However, as the model in section 9.1 and the problems that were outlined above suggest, these diagnostic features are not always the most reliable criteria. The data pertaining to the technological subsystem, specifically lithic materials and tool categories, are often incapable of accurately aiding us in understanding the processes involved in cultural adaptation. This is why I have taken the broader culture systems approach and attempted to rank the subsystems with respect to their ability to demonstrate cultural relationship.

11.0 Concluding Remarks

This study has demonstrated the importance of detailed archaeological investigation at the local level. This research has generated data that are culturally linked and internally consistent. From this research base have come hypotheses that challenge some of the contemporary views held by archaeologists working in the Northeast. Such hypotheses require testing in other study areas to ascertain the range of their viability.

The purpose of this dissertation as stated in section 1.0 was to define the culture system that was associated with the Broad Spear complex and establish the system's adaptive character. This study has achieved and gone beyond these initial goals. This paper has provided: (1) proof of the existence of a River Plain adaptation of which the Broad Spear complex was part and determined its specific adaptive features -section 8.4; (2) the definition and characterization of the Lake Forest adaptation as a significant cultural entity in the study area and in Connecticut - see section 8.1; (3) the modeling of continuity between the Lake Forest and the River Plain adaptations - see section 9.1; (4) the demonstration of the cultural continuity from the Mast Forest adaptation of the Late Archaic to the Cedar Lake phase of the Terminal Archaic period to the Brodeur Point phase of the Early Woodland period see section 8.2; and (5) the production of a model that illustrates the mechanism that permitted the coexistence of two separate cultural adaptations during the Terminal Archaic period - see section 9.0.

This research has also pointed out several potential relationships that need to be further investigated. These are: (1) the horizontal distribution and close proximity of Lake Forest and River Plain burial loci; (2) the identification of hypothesized intermediate phases between Lake Forest and River Plain; (3) the trade of exotic materials and flow of such material through time and space; (4) the delineation of a relationship between the variability of projectile point types and the maintenance of trade networks; and (5) the geographic and cultural origins of the Mast Forest adaptation.

While this dissertation is not a definitive statement or last analysis of any of these topics, the entire process suggests that Connecticut archaeology is steadily evolving. Data are coming forth that are adding to our comprehension of past cultures and their internal and external relationships. This is a direct result of an active and thriving professional community in which local archaeologists work. While we may not always agree, the academic process is definitely expanding our understanding of the area's prehistory. This most enriching professional environment has stimulated us all.

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[Introduction][Chap.1][Chap.2][Chap.3][Chap.4][Chap.5][Chap.6][Chap.7][Chap.8.0][Chap.8.3][Chap.9]
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Dr. John E. Pfeiffer