A Close Look at the Big Picture

Early Paleoindians were the first people to inhabit the Midwestern United States and exploit its natural bounty, including its lithic resources. The traditional view of early Paleoindians has been that they were highly mobile hunter-gatherers, unrestricted by lithic resource availability. A series of fluted point collections and a set of analytical techniques provided the necessary data to evaluate patterns in Early Paleoindian lithic procurement and settlement mobility in the unglaciated midwestern United States. Because Early Paleoindians in the unglaciated Midwest most likely procured lithic raw material from bedrock sources, detailed petrographic analyses were confined to stratigraphically provenienced bedrock samples. With the resulting petrographic identifications, the geographic extent and configuration of early Paleoindian lithic procurement can be documented for certain Midwestern lithic resources. Given the fact that Early Paleoindians had to directly procure at least some of the lithic raw material displayed archaeologically, settlement mobility may best be measured by the most common material represented in a site&s;s assemblage.

Archaeology · Assemblage (archaeology) · Bedrock · Business · Geography · Petrography · Procurement · Resource (disambiguation) · Settlement (finance) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Computer Science · Geology · Geology and Paleoclimatology Research · Paleontology · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology