KS: One thing that crossed my mind thinking about it last week I guess was that often we use Eskimo analogues and boreal analogues for PaleoIndian and then for the temperate forest of the Holocene period, turn to groups like the Kung. And if we look at the gender values of those two ethnographic societies, the sorts of generalizations you get in introductory texts, that women in Eskimo society have very little status compared to women in hunter/gatherer society like say the Kung we have very different models. Is there anything to draw from that that can be used to infer gender relations at P/H boundary? Is there anything from the ethnographic record, traditional or revisionist, that's going to tell us about the Pleistocene/Holocene transition?

AK: Why don't we start out with the original ethnographic record that people don't read anymore. To supplement a reading of the original material, I would like to recommend several papers in this book (Sarah Nelson and Alice Kehoe 1991, Powers of Observation: Alternative Views in Archaeology. American Anthropological Association, Washington.)
This other thing will come out in the Archeology of Gender, the 1989 Chacmool Conference. So I have two versions of the same thing. I have been trying to get people to look at the ethnography that was done on the Canadian hunting groups in the first part of the century when we had professional ethnographers, people who had all the background, training and experience, familiar with anthropological premises and so on and were consciously testing anthropological premises. This is a contrast to 19th century travelers and so on who were not consciously testing anthropological premise. There were several excellent ethnographers who spent months living in the bush communities. The one who probably did the best work was Cornelius Osgood. Cornelius Osgood has two volumes in the Yale Publications in Anthropology, 1940, number 22, Ingalik's Material Culture and Ingalik's Mental Culture. Osgood was particularly interested in what the men do and what the women do and he was very much aware that what they were doing in the end of the 20s, 1928, 29, was not necessarily what they did at contact which would have been the first half of the 19th century. He asked the elderly people to tell him about differences between then and now. He asked the elderly people to actually make him the objects that were no longer being made, the snares, the bone tools. And they made him examples and they showed him how, they showed him all the things that were being replaced at that time by manufactured goods from outside.

KS: Was flake stone technology a part of that?

AK: No, because they were using bone. It was almost all bone and wood and fiber. Two-thirds of all their manufacture involve fiber products. Ingalik lived in interior Alaska. When looking at [prehistoric] hunter-gatherers, the only literature available that even begins talking about people living in that kind of universe is Canadian forest material. And there's no point in looking in contemporary ethnography because those people have had the impact of colonialism...you have to get back before the 1940s before you begin to get even relatively autonomous. Julius Lips particularly was interested in hunting technology and he did cross-cultural studies by doing ethnography on different continents himself. He and his wife Ava, his collaborator. He's got a series of publications, including a general book, The Origin of Things, 1947. He tries to work out what basically Paleolithic, Early Neolithic manufactures would be on the basis of a very subsistence-technology-oriented analysis of ethnographic status. He also has earlier straight ethnographic stuff published in Sweden in 1936. Movius had a seminar running in the late 50s where he made us all look into these old ethnographies that nobody looks at anymore so we would get some generalizations that could be applied. It convinced me certainly that without a solid grounding in participant-observer ethnography and close as possible to the period where colonialism was thrust upon these people, you had nothing to stand on in interpreting at least the late Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic.

JL: It seems to me Alice, that on the one hand these kind of ethnographic data that you've been describing are invaluable, obviously. And then that of course leads us to the very difficult general question for all archaeologists: what are we going to look for in an archaeological case that will help us decide whether a particular ethnographic case or some combination of several ethnographic cases, is useful in illuminating what we're doing. One of the things about the cases you've been describing, well I'm not sure about the Labrador ones, is they are very inland kinds of situations.

AK: We do have coastal material - if you use the Northwest Coast material very carefully.

JL: Alice, one of the things that bothers me about the ethnographic stuff, makes me think there's really some other steps here, is that these are all boreal forest kinds of situations. It seems to me the key thing about those places where there are major cultural changes at the Pleistocene/Holocene transition, is that these are places where the boreal forest goes away.

AK: In terms of what's happening in a transition, you still have got to get your baseline upon which the transition is happening so that that would be a second reason to look through the boreal forest, even if you weren't interested in the Paleolithic itself. You still want it for your terminal Pleistocene baseline even for America. The other main reason is that these are of all peoples in the world, in the 20th century, late 19th century, people who at that time have the most autonomy and were living off hunting. It is as close as we can get to something that can be shown to be comparable on a number of factors. I wish could have persuaded Paul Bond to come here to have him remind people so forcefully as he does, that what we generally see as the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary of 10,000 years ago is actually the end of a five or six thousand year period of what really should be called the Early Holocene.

JL: Whatever you call it, it's certainly an extended process of ups and downs and fluctuations in climate before we reach something that resembles what we're used to today. That's pretty clear.

AK: In Europe, we ought to consider Magdalenian as the early Holocene rather than terminal Pleistocene.

JL: What do you think of that Larry [Kimball]?

LK: There is no such thing as a unitary homogeneous Upper Paleolithic cultural complex. My research is with Gravettian or Upper Perigordian culture - emerging from lithic studies is that site structure and to some extent settlement patterns by Gravettian times we have culture as we know it. There is something about Aurignacian that doesn't exactly make sense - when using ethnographic analogies. So we look at Gravettian as one case, Solutrean as another and Magdalenian as a third. Nor can you say Mesolithic equals Early Archaic.

AK: If you're looking in geological time, then the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary is not 10,000 years ago but several thousand years earlier when the major glaciation has begun to end. And then you've got several thousand years of climatic variations in which the trend of those variations is towards the present conditions. But to think that 10,000 years ago was the end of the Pleistocene is to assume that the few thousand years before that was Pleistocene and it really wasn't.

LK: There is that aspect and also the greater number of people who are looking at Magdalenian as a social system which is becoming complex - like the Hopewell. Social complexity is emerging by Magdalenian times.

AK: You solve an awful lot of controversies if you simply call Magdalenian a earliest Holocene or proto-Holocene or something like that instead of Pleistocene. I mean all kinds of "how can this be because they are..." dissolve.

LK: On this side of the Atlantic there is another problem to solve. We in the southeast are dealing with Pleistocene/Holocene transition in a temperate environment. We have very few good hunter/gatherer ethnographies.

JL: Also, maybe the boundary is less marked. In some ways that makes the question much harder because when you go from being glacial to being warm and rich plant foods, you change what you're doing, so that's easy. But if very little changes in your environment, why did you change what you were doing?

AK: If you really want to think about it in central Canada, northern central Canada, the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary is only 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. It was glaciated up until then or getting actual glacial melt.

KS: I'm really uneasy with this terminology because the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary as a chronostrategraphic thing was established outside of archaeology. It exists in the terminology of climatologists.

JL: That's part of the problem. People who look at the ocean cores or the ice cores, put it in one historic place and people who look at the moraines put it in another historic place.

KS: Why should it bog us down? It's just a label.

LK: Same reason why people are hung up about fluted points. They are missing the larger percent of tools used.

KS: Oh yeah, and people reconstruct entire settlement systems and stuff based on that.

LK: The difference between Late PaleoIndian and Early Archaic is the way they made their bifaces.

KS: Al Goodyear just finished a 200 page paper, it's coming out in the Orono volume where he reviewed all the geoarchaeological work done on deeply buried sites. He's identified from that synthesis a Pleistocene/Holocene stratigraphic boundary throughout the southeast for the purpose of explaining why we don't have very many buried PaleoIndian sites from erosional to depositional regime at this time.

AK: There it's useful in explaining the taphonomy.

LK: Just because it's Pleistocene doesn't mean it equals Paleolithic. But I think the point Alice is making is that we need to remember these people came equipped to deal with life in northwest North America before they mapped onto the southeastern US environment which was changing. North America and Australia would have had a similar kind of entry. South America is another story.

JL: When we talk about the Pleistocene/Holocene transition we are talking about the development of, eventually, cultivation or intensification or horticulture or, in the Old World, also the domestication of animals. I mean, that's the issue, fundamentally. It doesn't happen instantly but that's the issue. To look at the horticultural stuff, one of the things that we frequently accept and utilize is this idea, and it can fit in with a complementary kind of approach to sex or gender roles as well as anything else, that on average or in general without absolute separation, we find women dealing with wild plant foods more frequently and men dealing with wild animal foods more generally. The step from that is that horticulture then is probably going to grow out of women's activities because they're people who really work with plants. Is this good in the ethnographic record, is this useful?

KS: That wouldn't be the conclusion you get from reading archaeological literature.

JL: I know that. I'm building on other people's work.

AK: Charles Bishop and I have submitted a session for next November's AAA we're calling The Forager Model: Genuine or Spurious? It comes partly out of dissatisfaction. I imagine you know that Charles Bishop has been doing ecologically sensitive ethnohistory for a long, long time. After studying Algonquians in the northeast from Canada, Bishop deliberately moved his research to the northwest in order to get some comparisons in ecologically different areas, test some of his hypotheses of the factors that would produce certain kinds of societies among the eastern Algonquin and he was gradually pushed toward giving greater and greater prominence to the role of trade. I'm not saying exchange, I'm saying trade. And he would now focus on trade as one of the strongest factors influencing social structure, technology, including subsistence technology and so on. He was really pushed to this by his data. He didn't want to talk about trade that much. But he got into fur trade and the more he got into fur trade, the more he began to get out of fur trade and see trade. It seems to us that the importance of trade throughout North America has not been appreciated.

KS: Prehistorically?

AK: Prehistorically and at contact.

KS: Trade, not exchange.

AK: Right. People who are making a living as traders.

KS: Commodities.

AK: Right. And there are various things going into it. My husband [Tom Kehoe] published in 1973 and he was arguing it for a couple of years before that, that if you excavate a series of bison drives stratigraphically, that is a temporal series, over two or three thousand years in the northwestern plains, you see what he's calling the industrialization of bison hunting. And because, particularly noticeable in the late prehistoric period when we know we've got the middle Missouri towns out there as trading centers. Middle Missouri towns are part of the expansion of Mississippian. We know that they were engaged in transcontinental trade because in the North Dakota late prehistoric towns, there are both Pacific coast and Atlantic coast shells. Those are the kind of data you just cannot deny.
So you cannot deny that the middle Missouri towns are places that are making their living out of transcontinental trade and you realize how important trade was at least in the late prehistoric period among North American Indians. And then if you look at what is your archaeological evidence for this transcontinental trade, then you see how much like it, not entirely like it, but much like it the Middle Woodland period, particularly Hopewell. Of course, Hopewell is not anywhere that extensive but it certainly gets there. And before Hopewell of course there was Poverty Point trade.

KS: I think it's trade.

AK: I absolutely agree.

KS: You do. Schamback didn't. We argued about it for an hour. He sees it as ceremonial exchange.

AK: I was a student aid to James Ford.

KS: Did you work there?

AK: I begged him to take me along on his last excavations of Poverty Point and he decided he really didn't think he could take a girl along. And I said, but your wife is going to be along and he hesitated and then he came back and he told me no, he decided he couldn't take a girl along. I would happily have dropped out of college for a semester or whatever you know, no problem there. I don't know whether if I had been a young man he would have taken me along. What he told me was, he didn't think he could take a girl along. So I didn't actually dig there. But I heard him and I much admired him. My respect for Ford went very, very deep and I would not presume to challenge their interpretation of the site they know so well.

KS: I'd like to talk to you more about it later because it is a hot issue about whether it's trade or exchange.

AK: The question becomes whether Poverty Point as Ford and Webb interpreted it was a new thing in America or whether there was comparable pre-Poverty Point trade.

JL: There is certainly stuff moving for PaleoIndians but is there a place like Poverty Point? Not that we know of. I'm not prepared to develop a theory based on something we don't know of.

KB: I wanted to get away from the environmental stuff and maybe get back to the engendering half of this equation and I thought that's where you [Cheryl] were going a couple of times when you brought up artifacts and you brought up some of these other things and then we kept getting away from it. I'm curious to hear what you were going to say if you had gone on.

JL: Did anyone else besides me hear Bruce Smith on the development of agriculture in the eastern US in New Orleans? He built on the coevolution stuff which he has developed and which I find rather intriguing and kind of neat. But he was forced to say, of course now that there is Kennedy and Watson's (1991, Engendering Archaeology, Gero and Conkey editors.) paper in which they argue that women knew the most about plants and they manipulated plants, he said, I do have to, of course, acknowledge that of course people had something to do with this.
That brings up a number of potential archaeological things. Can we see something in the archaeological record which suggests that that general dichotomy of women associated with plant activities and men associated with animal activities is pretty good in a number of different cases? Is it different in different climatic zones, that's a possibility. What else is going on? One of the things about the Old World at the Mesolithic, just to use the traditional term which kind of locates us, we all know where we're talking about more or less, is you start getting cemeteries, not burials. Obviously you had burials back to Neanderthal, but cemeteries, more or less planned, a group came back again and again to use the same place. And that thought seems to suggest what? Territoriality. Does that have something to do with shifting focus on food resources that stay in one place, i.e. plants, as opposed to, although in Scandinavia it could also be shellfish.

LK: Or anadromous fish, but not ungulates. They're getting away from that.

JL: Really, that I don't know about. But there are certainly big ones in Zvelebil's report of them in the Ukrain or somewhere where all the publications are in some language, you know, you have to trust Mark that he's telling us what's going on because he's the only one that can read it. But there are the well known cemeteries in southern Sweden and also in Denmark which are all associated with these coastal shellfishing.

AK: What dates are we talking about?

JL: 5,000 to 4,000 probably, so later. Those are the Scandinavian ones. How about Lepenski Vir?

AK: Lepenski Vir is on the border of Neolithic agricultural polities. Do we have any cemeteries that are absolutely so much older than early Neolithic in...

SL: What about the Middle Archaic mounds?

KS: We've got Dalton cemeteries - the Sloan site.

JL: I've never entirely believed that one because they didn't find a single bone.

CC: What about maritime archaic?

AK: Janet made the point of the difference between cemeteries and just burials. There are no cemeteries in the maritime Archaic I've ever heard of.

KS: What about the [inland, freshwater] shell mounds?

JL: A set of mounds could be a cemetery in my mind. But the shell mound Archaic is already late, that's why.

CC: Eva starts at 8,000. But the dates on the bodies are problems.

JL: All those Eva dates. I mean all those dates are so old. You may be right Cheryl.

KS: Yeah, but there's a lot of artifacts associated with them that have dozens and dozens of dates that since have been, you know, they've verified that.

AK: In contrast to let's say Indian Knoll, at Eva for example, how confident would you be that those bodies were all interred close enough in time together that there was this major consciousness that this is a cemetery on the part of... In contrast to Indian Knoll. Indian Knoll is late.

CC: Well, that's a question.

JL: I don't know about Eva. I mean, the Indian Knoll sites, the thing is that they're not just cemeteries, unless you buy Cheryl's argument (Claassen 1991, Engendering Archaeology, edited by Gero and Conkey).

KS: They're living there.

CC: Well, I don't know.

JL: But that's another story. If the density of burials at the Eva sites is comparable to the density of burials in the Indian Knoll and associated sites, then I think you would have to be, it would be pretty amazing if you didn't know that there were other burials there.

CC: I can go get you the dates, I'll be right back. The number of bodies and the dates.

AK: The number of bodies would be good.

JL: They took something like 900 skeletons out of Indian Knoll. It's enormous.

AK: I've never been there and I don't know the...

KS: There's more than one, almost two bodies per cubic meter. That's a lot of people. They probably weren't purely sedentary at that site either.

LK: But how much time is represented?

KS: Oh lots, but that's a lot of people.

LK: There may be more than one site, more than one camp contributing bodies.

JL: That's true.

LK: A group recognizing its territory.

AK: This is relevant to the gendering thing, the trade, because you might say professional traders apparently don't take their families with them.

KS: So that assumption that I made in my paper is safe, that Poverty Pt. traders didn't. And that they tend to be men?

AK: Yeah. Not exclusively. There are Iroquois women who went out peddling pots to nearby Iroquois towns. But when you're talking about transcontinental trade, you seem to be talking about parties of male leaders with male porters. Sometimes mixed sex porters, but certainly predominantly men and that comes up again and again and again in the ethnohistorical literature. And this is why if we're trying to engender the early Holocene, we have to think about whether we're having the same kind of trade that we know from Poverty point times onward or whether this was lacking. I mentioned Brad Lepper because he's thinking, he's doing PaleoIndian data surveys, trying to get some feel for how much of this was high mobility of people using quarries here and there, how much might have been trade in the sense that we're using it now.

KS: I think it's an exciting thing to look at because there may be some neat analogues with hunters and gatherers in contact situations looking at how gender relationships do get altered. Men entering in the market base relationships. We always look at these ethnographic records and say they're tainted because of European contact and all that but I can imagine Poverty Point traders coming into contact with my folks living in Middle Savannah River Valley, having the same sort of impact on them [as did contact with Europeans].

AK: Remember Ford and Webb's argument? Part 1. They believed that [Poverty Point] is a Olmec trading depot and part 2, they believe it was only men, they addressed this back in the 60s, they believed it was only men traders because there are no Olmec domestic artifacts or anything that would lead you to think that Olmec households were replicated in Poverty Point, therefore they saw these traders taking local women just like the fur traders of the historic period. So they were engendering archaeology back then.

CC: [returns to room] Just for your information, I guess the cemeteriness of these shell mounds could still be debated but the Anderson site, 6700 BC - 73 bodies, the Eva level at the Eva site - 17 bodies for 5/10,000th of a body per square foot. And then you get to the 6000-4000 year ago Indian Knoll - 1178 bodies, Carlston Annis - 400. Carlston Annis has 1.2 bodies per square meter.

AK: So the time factor is critical there.

KS: Do you have Perry site from the Middle Tennessee River Valley? Webb and DeJarnette's work?

CC: No.

KS: Pretty high density there for 5500 BP I'd say. Benton phase, Middle Archaic. The Benton stuff is incredible. Whatever the hell is going on in the Benton in the Middle Tennessee River Valley is a precedent for what's going on at Poverty Point I think. Not that they have earth works, but they have some pretty long distance exchange going on.

AK: If you have platform mounds and you had what is obviously commercially produced blades and you were quite a number of kilometers to the south, you'd have no trouble thinking about how this fits into the early MesoAmerican classic, which you'd be checking to see whether those were Teotihuacan blades or where they were coming from and so on and so on. But as soon as you get into Anglo America you've got to act like the Gulf of Mexico was more like the Antarctic Ocean. Jim Ford put it very simply. He said, either we are going to think about trade across the Gulf of Mexico or we're going to believe in the psychic unity of mankind. That was the subtitle of his monograph. And if you use the principle of actualism (the principle of actualism which is explaining the past by processes of observing the present and weighing them by how often certain processes are observed in the present versus others that are observed much less frequently), then you must refute intersocietal contact before you can claim independent invention. That, of course, is not done in Americanist archeology. I'm sorry because Americanist archeology is doing 19th century cultural evolutionism. It is not doing historical science.

CC: I wonder what might happen in terms of fertility rates or birth rates or death rates or anything like that with this Holocene/Pleistocene change. There are so many variables it'd be hard to even start.

LK: Maybe look at the frequencies - population must have really gone up by Kirk times and raw material studies say PaleoIndian and Early Archaic peoples were moving about a lot.

CC: How do we think that would come about then? Are we talking about greater birth spacings or...?

LK: Nutritional changes. By 7000 BC people were very effectively exploiting in a "rational manner." Hickory, oak, probably chestnut, aboreal crops with hundreds of names for every other edible plant out there.

AK: That's why Bishop and I wish people would quit using the term foraging because it's totally inappropriate and it's one of those subtle things that denigrates what these people are doing. Charles has a term which I hope will come to me before very long. Any way, it's management strategy, the term includes management strategy, I can't remember the term.
Instead of denigrating these people as if they're going out hoping they'll find something to eat, poor slobs that they are, we're talking about managers. The opposition in ethnographic data, I'm thinking particularly of course of the Lowell Bean, Tom Blackburn, Florence Shipek group on the west coast, have been arguing so extremely effectively in our estimation that what the California Indians were doing was a form of agriculture which however was not recognized because they were using indigenous plants rather than alien plants which were far less reliable.
And then of course they were also managing the deer as in deer parks. And of course they had elaborate fishing trap systems and all that sort of stuff. And the oaks are all planted and in southern California they plant the saguaro cactus and the prickly pears; Florence has photos. The prickly pear cactuses are planted around the village so not only can you hop out the door and pick this delicious fresh fruit when it's in season, but it also forms a living fence.

CC: You two are very quick to say that it was nutrition, but there are lots of ways the population could have gone up.

KS: It was a founder population.

AK : Yeah.

KS: There wasn't anybody living in the southeast where I worked before 12,000 years ago.

CC: Have you all seen that thorium-uranium article on what's wrong with the radiocarbon dates stating there's another atmospheric blip back there? The radiocarbon sequence as we see it is actually artificially compressed and if you correct with thorium-uranium you can spread those 12,000-11,500-11,000 year old dates out to between 14,000 and 11,000.

AK: Where is this?

CC: It was in Nature, May 1990. Janet's brought me a copy of it.

AK: Oh, this is just what we needed. Nobody's talked about this before.

KS: Has anybody read David Anderson's thing on the colonization of eastern North America by PaleoIndians, a staging area idea where he has folks coming in real rapidly to the Middle Tennessee River Valley, Ohio River Valley?

LK: This is all convenient. When you say, we jump on nutrition, it's because we have to deal with a lot of incomplete information. Early Archaic is the data base. I don't consider a bunch of measurements on PaleoIndians a data base.

KS: I don't either. But there's a neat theoretical insight into that, the conditions, the social economic political conditions for rising population then changes.

LK: But PaleoIndian is not necessarily the best place to build that type of theory. That's all I would say about it, nice theory Dave, wrong culture.

KS: I agree with you. I don't think we have any business even talking about PaleoIndians.

AK: Even if we're saying 14,000 instead of 12,000, it's still a founder population if this is indeed virgin soil.

KB: What about Europe then?

AK: That's just it. Europe has had people for 200,000 years, so 2,000 don't make any difference in terms of this kind of perspective.

CC: Was there a population burst?

LK: We don't have reliable demographic data. What do you want us to count, sites? We only have a few hundred skeletons.

KS: Was it so easy in North America to make the statement that we obviously have a big demographic. . .

LK: Because we're compelled by the new archeology to blame population pressure or attack population pressure because of the fact of human evolution.

KS: And that was the source of the data?

CC: You mean lack of data, that's the source of the hypotheses.

LK: When you have very little data, very little control, you can build up nice models that explain everything. In coming up with demographics - you look at the density of sites in the Upper Paleolithic and distribution within particular regions ...fluctuations in population and in territory when looking at raw materials. Pleistocene/Holocene interface here in the Eastern US is in the way the floodplains are being laid down. We have lots of evidence from the Early Archaic on but little from PaleoIndian so it looks like the PaleoIndian population is smaller. Could be we have never excavated [the PaleoIndian surface].

KS: Of course we got all that submerged stuff off the Atlantic and Gulf coast too.

AK: Something that has got to be factored in in any kind of global type of explanation has got to be acknowledgement of how much of the critical data is unobtainable because it's on one or the other submerged coasts.

KS: We're starting to get at it though. The technology's there and the money.

HM: I have a question for the North Americanists, what about degree of sedentariness for this time period, Pleistocene to Holocene, increased sedentariness at certain sites. You've been talking about population increase, but maybe you're seeing more people simply because of greater accumulation because say they're hanging around certain spots longer.

LK: I would tell you that they're revisiting locations more regularly in the Early Archaic than they are in the Middle Archaic.

CC: Binford said in ever more constricted areas. So the smaller area you have if you're going to move, you're going to have a greater density of sites too.

LK: Sedentism - how to see it. Better investment in architecture -- fixed-post construction seems to be restricted to late Middle Archaic or 5000 BC. It seems to correlate with heavier ground stone implements to clear forests.

KS: I agree with everything you say. It's important to point out too that at least in my experience, that it isn't unidirectional though, that there are these fluctuations.

LK: During the Middle Archaic there are experiments with sedentism for various places.

KS: In Middle Tennessee, the greasy midden sites are real good clues to sedentary living with Middle Archaic. You worked in eastern Tennessee, you don't have any midden sites in the Early Archaic do you, organic middens?

CC: Well Eva's around 8,000, west Tennessee.

LK: Eva - Late Archaic, Early Middle Archaic.

AK: You shouldn't know because it has not been published. It was deliberately not published by Kent Flannery, Schoenwetter's preferred interpretation of the data from Guila Naquitz which is the rockshelter in the Oaxaca Valley where the earliest maize and cucurbits were found. Schoenwetter's original chapter sent into the monograph ended by his conclusion that the best explanation for data given both the macrofossil and the pollen date from his valley-wide pollen studies is that at 9,000 BP the Oaxacans started clearing the river bank thickets, presumably to plant crops. He considers and rejects the idea that the climate did it. He doesn't see anything in the climatological data that would suggest that change in climate was clearing the river bank thickets. Therefore, given human occupation in the Oaxaca Valley, he interprets the clearing as being done by human agency. And then next question, why were the humans doing it? He suggests because they were using these river bank fields for planting crops. It didn't fit the computer simulation model which occupies about 1/3 of the Guila Naquitz monograph (Flannery 1986 Guila Naquitz, Academic Press), which was done by Kent's prize graduate student at the moment which has a cultural evolutionism thing . . .blah, blah, blah, you know. And so Flannery edited out Schoenwetter's conclusion. And Schoenwetter protested and Flannery said, I'm not publishing that, I don't agree.

KS: There are two lines of evidence that could support it or refute that, rates of sedimentation may increase and there should be charcoal.

CC: Jack Golson made a similarly surprising argument for New Guinea at 10,000: huge irrigation ditches. He stood beside them in his photographs; they're giant.
I'm afraid this is the end of our time for this workshop. I think some ideas of worth have been aired, particularly the use of appropriate analogous ethnographic cultures, and the role of trade. Several of the papers tomorrow will further explore some topics we have raised here-I am thinking of Ken Sassaman's, and Christi Mitchel's papers.