From Peopling to Persistent Places: tracking cultural change from the Pleistocene to Early Holocene in the Southeast

The peopling of the Americas took place at the end of the Pleistocene sometime after the Last Glacial Maximum (28,000-19,000 BP), and the earliest evidence of these hunter-gatherers in the Southeast dates to approximately 15,000 years ago. Upon arrival, they explored and settled empty and unknown landscapes, developed new technological adaptations, and, by the Early Holocene, grew into socially connected yet regionally diverse populations. In this presentation, we use the stone tool record to trace early cultural regionalization in Clovis (13,000 BP). We explore Late Paleoindian responses to environmental fluctuations of the Younger Dryas. We show that by 12,000 years ago, Dalton populations had established sacred and persistent places on the landscape, and we track the continued importance of place through evidence of aggregation among Early Archaic Kirk populations (10,000 BP).