The Sealey Challenge Day 24: Chesapeake Prehistory (the chapter never ends) by Richard J. Dent

I am pretty sure I read this a year ago for the C.A.T. Archeology Technician Program and now I have the physical copy, flagging and writing copious notes in a logbook and still--yes, it's well written. Yes, I am starting to understand the graphical analysis. 30 pages in and I was getting excited about finishing CHAPTER 3. BUT as it happens, the chapter is over 100 pages. Who does that? In the law of Kim, chapters max out at 20 pages as does her comprehension.

I admit that I have aphasia, so reading is challenging. A lot of people don't admit it. Honey, I gotta admit it--people are gonna know! Or at least they will suspect. So, Dent is good. He describes how the term "Archaic" becomes the "Archaic Period" in the United States, especially in the Cheasapeake region where I live and go on digs. So? How did it become the term and what does it mean? We had Paleoindian, the term used for the oldest indigenous peoples of the Northern Hemisphere. We also had Woodland, term for the latest (think closest to us) indigenous peoples of the Northern Hemisphere and their time period. So, there is about a 7,000-year range between them plus or minus a couple thousand. So, evolution happened. Habits changed based on climate, social structure, social interaction, and change in technology.

The big question was "how do we differentiate between the time periods, and do we use 'evolution' as a basis?" A hot topic! Yet, there had to be a middle period because technology did change. The biface became prevalent instead of the clovis projectile point. There are clusters of varying types of tools found together at sites. Things change and there is some arbitrariness based on outliers but for the most part 8,220 to 3,000 years ago was what we call the Archaic Period. The Archaic Period ends when ceramics are found in early Woodland sites. We can only date and understand technology that survives in the archeological record. What decomposes or is destroyed we can't tell. I cannot and will not claim that prior to the early Woodland Period there were no ceramics. We don't know. They did not survive OR have not been discovered yet.

And now to read the next 50 pages of the chapter...