William G. Haag

Archaic of the Lower Mississippi Valley

No archaeological remains which the majority of specialists will accept as Archaic have been found in the Mississippi Valley from the mouth of Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico. Despite this, the literature reflects a general acceptance of the belief that the Archaic stage is well represented in the Lower Valley. The presence of concentrated Archaic populations in northern Alabama and western Tennessee and Kentucky has given comparative support to these expectations and has provided part of the source for some of the hypothetical statements in the literature of what the Lower Valley Archaic ought to be like. Although the failure of writers to agree on a definition of Archaic which will satisfy the evidence in all of the areas of Eastern United States has contributed to the problem of identifying Archaic materials in the Lower Valley, the lack of these remains can best be explained by the geology of the region. The cutting and filling of the Alluvial Valley during the Pleistocene changes in sea level have removed or buried all of the surfaces that might have been occupied by Archaic peoples. The surface of the Alluvial Valley is everywhere less than 5000 years old. Possible Late Archaic sites are located on old stable beach ridges or near enough to the Pleistocene terraces not to have been included in the general pattern of Recent coastal subsidence. It is concluded that Archaic or earlier materials are absent in the Lower Alluvial Valley of the Mississippi River. Neither Tchefuncte nor Copell are accepted as Archaic; Poverty Point is viewed as transitional from an Upper Archaic tradition to some phase of the Formative stage. Poverty Point materials may not be expected to be found in quantity along the Gulf Coast of the Mississippi Delta region.

Astronomical Alignments at Poverty Point

the same time the direction from the center to Mound B would define the setting point of Arcturus. Table 2 also shows that the azimuths 239 0, 290 , and 305 ? might be members of a tetrad (248 being absent) marking the lunar extremes in 1000 B.C. The obvious difficulty is that there is apparently no marker for the direction of midsummer full moon setting when the lunar excursions were at minimum (18.67?). The conjecture is further weakened by the fact that the 239? and 305 ? alignments, symmetric about the east-west direction and marking maximum excursions of the moon, are not marked in the same fashion. For a variety of reasons, then, the hypothesis of astronomical sight lines of Poverty Point must remain speculative. What is clear, however, is that there are no obvious solar alignments.

Twenty-Five Years of Eastern Archaeology

Archaeological research in the Eastern United States is reviewed from the period of large-scale excavations sponsored by federal relief agencies to the present period of trend toward interdisciplinary approaches. An early interest was the identification of the archaeological ancestors of historically and ethnographically known tribes. The need for objective and descriptive classifications led to the development of the McKern or Midwestern Taxonomic Method. Recent developments include the use of functional and evolutionary concepts experimentation with statistics to validate analytical and classificatory techniques, discovery of stratigraphic evidence and the perfection of seriational techniques, emphasis on the value of geological and biological data and the combination of these with archaeological information to produce an ecological approach, and attempts at broad culturehistorical synthesis. The introduction of radiocarbon dating, which exposed the extremely conservative time estimates of Eastern archaeologists by greatly lengthening the chronologies, is seen as the major contribution of the past 25 years.