THE ARCHAIC OF THE LAKE GEORGE REGION

Dean R. Snow Department of Anthropology

State University of New York at Albany Albany, New York 12203

Lest the title of this paper be interpreted as signaling an elegant seminal synopsis of an important regional sequence, let me assure the reader that it was only a ruse designed to gain his attention. Indeed, not only will I resort to the usual tactic of self defense, which is t o declare all of my observations to be preliminary, I must insist that mine are the most preliminary observations to be offered at this conference. However, what I may lack in hard conclusions I will make up for with heresy, for the project I will describe has involved a significant departure from traditional archaeological epistemology. My approach also departs somewhat from the emerging ethic of public archaeology. I will discuss these and other problems each in its turn.

I became interested in the Lake George region largely as a result of the 1971 reunion of the Friends of the Pleistocene. Gordon Connally and Leslie Sirkin hosted the field trip that dealt with late Pleistocene and early post-Pleistocene phenomena in the region. Their’s, plus a large amount of earlier work in the region, adds up to an unusually well known geological base line for the archaeologist.’ I was also drawn to the region by my interest in discovering an archaeological identity for the late prehistoric Algonquian speakers of the Hudson and Champlain drainages. Historic Iroquois occupied the Mohawk tributary drainage of the Hudson, and an important ethnic frontier separated them from the Algonquians. Iroquoian and Algonquian languages are not related, and the frontier between them in eastern New York appears to have its roots in the Archaic. Nevertheless, neither the frontier nor the Algonquians just east of it yet have explicit archaeological identities.

Athird attractive feature of the Lake George regionb(FIGU R E 1) is its position at the main crossing points between the Champlain and Hudson drainages, which is at the same time the setting for a variety of microenvironments. The area up07 which we are presently focusing our attention is a square block of twelve 7 1/2 U.S. Geological Survey quadrangles, four contiguous north-south columns of three. The Hudson River flows north to south through the westernmost column before veering eastward out of the Adirondacks and into the relatively flat Hudson Valley in the southern rank of quadrangles. A large abandoned channel links the Hudson Valley to the southernmost portion of the Champlain Valley in the easternmost column of quadrangles. The Champlain Barge Canal passes through this natural corridor, and it was once the outlet for a series of late Pleistocene lakes in the Champlain Valley that drained southward into the Hudson. This is the Fort Ann portage, which appears to have been well travelled prehistorically and was also General Burgoyne’s ill-advised choice in 1777.

Between the Fort Ann corridor and the Hudson River lies Lake George, which is more than SO km long and falls almost 70 m into Lake Champlain at its mouth. Lake Champlain lies less than 30 m above sea level, whereas Lake George is more than three times as high. As a consequence, they appear to have been rather different lacustrine environments. Anadromous fish were present in Lake Champlain prehistorically, but there is no evidence that they were ever able to

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432 Annals New York Academy of Sciences

FIGURE 1. The Lake George research area. Igneous bedrock formations lie generally within the Adirondack Park boundary, whereas limestone bedrock formations lie generally outside to the south and east. The drainage boundary between the Hudson and Champlain basins is shown.

climb the falls into Lake George. In contrast, catadromous eels did live in Lake George and were still running downstream to spawn during the last century, when they periodically clogged water intakes at the paper mill in Ticonderoga. Thus the two lakes were quite different in terms of the fish species they supported, and we hope to explore that difference archaeologically, along with its consequences for human patterns of exploitation. Like Lake Champlain, the southern end of Lake George was linked prehistorically to the Hudson by a short portage. In this case, however, there were at least two routes, one of which is now under Interstate 87 and other modern construction. The other has its northern terminus on Dunham’s Bay and passes through relatively undisturbed farmland; I will return to this later. Thus in gross terms we have two major lacustrine environments and one major riverine environment in the area.

The area also offers major contrasts in bedrock composition. The precipitous terrain in the north and west is underlain by various igneous formations, whereas the flatter terrain in the east and south is underlain by limestone and shales. The contrast is repeated by the soil types that the bedrock formations support, and

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the forest types that the soils support in turn. The contrast is particularly striking in the Fort Ann channel, which runs along the boundary between igneous rock to the west and limestone to the east. While driving along it, one sees thin soils and conifers out one side of the car and thick soils and deciduous trees out the other side. The limestone formations contain well-known outcrops of highquality Fort Ann chert, as well as a few rock shelters. We have had some luck locating quarry sites and promising rock-shelter sites in this part of our area.

There are of course many more subtle environmental contrasts as well. We have discovered no simple means of classifying sites according to setting, size, and function, but rather a complex mosaic of microenvironments and sites in an area only about 40 km on a side. Thus the emphasis from the beginning of the project has been areal rather than site-specific. No single site will tell us everything we want t o know about the Lake George region.

We have carried out intensive single-site excavation and will continue to do so as a means of establishing chronology for the area and in order to facilitate certain kinds of intrasite analyses, but our long-term goal is to test the whole range of site types and explore the microenvironmental features of each. This is not something that can be accomplished in a few seasons. Survey alone will take much additional effort. Our present inventory of about 50 sites will undoubt- edly expand many times if we are able to complete the planned 10 years of intensive survey. To my knowledge, no similar intensive survey of a relatively small area is presently planned or in operation in the Northeast, and I believe that one is necessary if we are ever to fully understand prehistoric systems. From a more practical standpoint, we need such surveys if we are ever to develop the predictive capacity that officers of the Environmental Protection Agency wish we had.

As one means of accomplishing our goals for the area, I have made use of materials from the Eros Data Center and colleagues in geography and computer science that are more familiar than I am with its uses. We have imagery from the Landsat satellite (formerly called ERTS), high-altitude NASA aircraft, as well as the more standard aerial mapping photography. The first two types of imagery can be blown up to 1:250,000, a scale that discourages archaeologists intent upon locating sites but will assist us in the definition of microenvironments. Landsat images can be obtained for four color bands. Each can be acquired separately as a black-and-white print, or the four can be printed together as a single false-color image. Images taken at different times of the year are available for the area, so that one can follow seasonal phenomena. All of these data are also available in digital form on computer tapes that are compatible with our computer facilities at Albany, but cost $200 per image in this form. Regardless of the limits imposed upon us by the high costs, it seems likely that we will be able to use this source as a means of defining contemporary microenvironments, which can then serve as a baseline from which to reconstruct extinct micro- environments for the same area prior to 3,000 B.P.

This brings me to the more general issue of the use of environmental data in the interpretation of archaeological evidence. Ecology has made rapid progress in the last few years, and archaeologists are much more attuned to environmental factors now than they once were. The terms “biome” and “association” are heard much more frequently now in archaeological circles than they once were. However, there has been a regrettable tendency by archaeologists to work from the concluding generalizations of ecology rather than directly from the data that were used to formulate those generalizations. Archaeologists are particularly attracted to forest types, units that I think have little heuristic value for the

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archaeologist. Most sources, for example, agree that Lake George is in a transition zone but can agree on little else. One source puts the area at the intersection of three forest types, spruce-fir, beech-birch-maple, and white pine-hemlock-hardwood.2 Another refers to the spruce and fir of the Adiron- dacks as simply coniferous forest and names three additional forest types, maple-beech-hemlock, maple-beech, and oak-che~tnut.~ But even if there were general agreement among botanists, such broad simplified abstractions would have little utility, for while most areas may not be as complex as that around Lake George, few fail to contain a diverse series of microenvironments. Given my skepticism regarding the reality of these units, it should be no surprise that I am appalled by their projection backwards in time as a means of explaining archaeological phenomena from before 3,000 B.P. Even though they may deal explicitly with environmental changes, many articles in the archaeological literature implicitly assume that the boundaries of modern forest types are real and that they have remained geographically stable for thousands of years. Thus while I agree that environmental factors probably played a role in discouraging Early Archaic occupation in the Lake George area, I do not agree with those that suggest that Indians 7,000 years ago were constrained by the northern boundary of a Carolinian biotic province, which among other things has allegedly separated Manhattan from Staten Island then as it is supposed to do now. Even the world’s oldest political boundary must lack such exquisite precision and longevity.

In order t o avoid the pitfalls I have just mentioned, and obtain reliable and useful information on environmental change during the Archaic and other periods in the Lake George area, we have incorporated palynology into the broader program. Core samples have been taken, and students are learning the necessary techniques. My initial goal is to develop an absolute pollen influx diagram for the area. The advantages of this over percentage diagrams have been amply demonstrated by Margaret Davis4 and Ronald Davis5 in company with their several associates. An API diagram from a pond near Lake George will balance well with diagrams from Maine and southern New England in covering the Northeast. However, even API diagrams must be treated with caution by archaeologists, for they offer normative values for large areas and tell us little directly about the microenvironmental variations that were so important to prehistoric populations. Given the microenvironmental diversity of the Lake George area, we will probably have to eventually construct several additional percentage diagrams to supplement a master API diagram, as well as check for local variations in modern pollen rain. Only then will we have enough information to attempt a reconstruction of the heterogeneous environment of the Archaic and other prehistoric periods, and even then we might fail. The work of Davis and Webb6 shows that absolute pollen frequencies vary greatly from site t o site within boreal forests, conifer-hardwood forests, and deciduous forests. But unfortunately, these APF variations do not necessarily reflect purely local microenvironmental variations. Their work confirms a large-scale correlation between pollen assemblages and vegetation, but we are still a long way from the small-scale correlation archaeologists would like t o have.

I return now to the site-specific goals of our program. One of the sites examined during our initial survey of the area during the 1974 field season was the Harrisena site, which lies at the northern terminus of the central portage route linking the Hudson River t o the Dunham’s Bay section of Lake George. Although each is a main artery in its own drainage, the two lie only 15 km apart, and most of the distance can be traversed by way of a series of small streams and ponds. It seems likely that the portage has been important since at least the Early

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Archaic, and although amateur excavation on the Harrisena site yielded only mixed results in years past, it seemed likely to us that the site offered the best single opportunity for the development of a chronology for the area. The site occupies a 200-m-long ridge of water-lain sand, the last hard ground before one enters the swampy margin of Dunham's Bay. The ridge averages about 50 m in width, and archaeological remains appear to be distributed across all undisturbed portions of it. That means that we have about one hectare or 10,000 m2 to concern us. Archaeological evidence has been found down to a depth of 1.5 m, but the site is not characterized by widespread superimposed strata. Deposits of differing ages appear usually to be separated laterally as well as stratigraphically, a circumstance that I prefer. Best of all, the sand matrix is fine, and the topmost 50 cm that has been reworked by wind action is exceptionally fine, such that everything can be efficiently screened with one-eighth inch screens. My present plan is to establish a field station at the site so that we can continue excavation begun in 1975 for about 10 more field seasons. With a field station, data can be quickly and efficiently recorded and stored as they are obtained. We will also be able to reduce paperwork and a variety of transport problems. Only a long-term project on the site will allow us to fully explore intrasite problems, such as changing settlement patterning. At the same time, only efficient computer data storage will permit us t o manipulate the mass of evidence that will surely result. Present plans call for keypunching and perhaps the use of a portable card reader in the field. These data will then be filed on tape at our computer center on campus. Should we wish to search the file for a particular period, artifact type, or whatever, the tape data can be dumped into temporary disk storage. Our system allows us to use space equivalent to over 8,000 cards on short notice, and space up to an equivalent of 100,000 cards under special circumstances. Acquisition from disk storage is not as fast as it is from random access drum storage, but it is cheaper and accessible through our building terminal. Spatial distributions can be plotted by machine directly from such storage, and we have only begun to explore the possible computer analyses such a massive data set will allow.

Evidence for the Early Archaic is still scanty at the Harrisena site but nevertheless offers an improvement in the overall picture for the region. Virtually all of our information pertaining to this period came from a 10 m2 section near the center of the site. The base of a bifurcate-based point was found along with a small stemmed point of unknown type in the fill of a 1.6 m deep pit. The pit may have been a burial pit, but no tooth enamel or bone material was found at the bottom. The two points were found at depths of 88 and 90 cm in the fill ( F I G U R E 2) and appear t o have been associated with another bifurcate-based point that was found at a depth of 66 cm, outside the pit and on what would have been the surface at the time the pit was opened. The two bifurcate-based points are similar to Kanawha Stemmed points, which have been dated to 8 , 1 6 0 t 100 B.P. (Y-1540) at the St. Albans site in West Virginia.7 They are less similar to earlier bifurcate-based point types found at St. Albans. Our own radiocarbon date, which was run on very short notice by Robert Stuckenrath and his staff at the Smithsonian, comes from a sample of 2 g of charcoal gleaned from the pit fill. The sample dated to 7,135 * 200 B.P. (SI-2638), an age that is probably consistent with the undated Zone 2 at the St. Albans site,7 as well as with dates on similar materials from Staten Island.' A point resembling the Kirk Stemmed type, which dates to about 8,900 B.P. at the St. Albans7 and Sheep Rock8 sites, was found at a depth of 68 cm. However, this point was laterally 2 m away from the last, on the other side of the pit, and

436 Annals New York Academy of Sciences

FIGURE 2. North wall profile of Square 1, Unit 2 at the Harrisena site. Stratification still under study. Date of 7,135 * 200 B.P. (SI-2638) derived from charcoal found in area of red stain.

only 2 cm lower (FIGURE 3). I am not confident of either its type or its stratigraphic position. The stratigraphically lowest point found was a basal fragment discovered at a depth of 75 cm. It is unfluted and resembles the basal portions of unfluted Paleoindian points uncovered by Funk at the West Athens Hill site.9 At the other end of the stratigraphic section on this part of the site was found a Snook Kill point. This point was found at a depth of only 10 cm; cross-dating suggests an age of about 3,500 B.P.1°

Thus there is the bare outline of an Early Archaic sequence for the Lake George area. The scarcity of such evidence generally in upstate New York means that we must still take seriously the suggestion that human population was sparse at that time.' Nevertheless, my initial suspicion that if the evidence was anywhere at all in the area it would be in the Harrisena site appears,to have been borne out. Continued excavation at the site should eventually produce a very good chronology.

Thus far we have not identified anything similar to the Middle Archaic remains found at the Neville site. We have, however, a substantial amount of evidence from the Late Archaic. A Vosburg point was found in association with a hearth and other remains, and charcoal from the hearth will eventually be dated. Otter Creek points were found elsewhere on the site, and they abound on sites all over the research area. A few pieces from a destroyed site on the Hudson River that may have been a Moorhead complex-related cemetery site were examined during the 1974 field season. I think that the Harrisena site and the research area generally hold great promise for continued research.

I should like to close with a few comments on the practical difficulties I have encountered in the course of designing and carrying out this research program. I

Snow: Lake George Archaic

5 5

A T I cm

43 7

- D.3 I.

FIGURE 3. Plan of Squares 1, 4, and 5 , Unit 2 at the Harrisena site. Points found relatively deep within the pit feature were stratigraphically related to the point uncovered at 66 cm in Square 4 and the date of 7,135 B.P.

think that we know much less than we sometimes pretend about the prehistory of this region. However, I am also confident that we have the tools at hand to change that, and I have discussed some of those tools. Both the student talent and the material resources are there to carry out the program I have outlined. Indeed, we are expanding the field school role of the project in order t o supply the heavy and still increasing demand for trained personnel that are needed to carry out archaeological survey and salvage ahead of large-scale construction. In this regard, I think that it is time someone pointed out that although projects in public archaeology are necessary and supplement traditional archaeology in important ways, they cannot become an exclusive substitute for projects like the one I have undertaken. Our students are trained in public archaeology, and we attempt to provide all of them with some experience in public archaeology as part of their field schooling. However, such projects emphasize survey with an eye to preservation, and excavation only as required by nonarchaeological considerations. I do not mean to belittle public archaeology, only to point out that the Harrisena site would lie untouched by archaeologists if the preservation ethic were paramount. At the moment, the goals of public archaeology are necessarily rather short-range. But we also need long-range traditionally scientific projects like the one 1 have described if archaeologists hope to do more than preserve valuable sites and salvage the less significant. It is ironic that the most serious problem I now confront in my effort to keep this research program going is that the Harrisena site is on land scheduled to be acquired by the State of New York as wilderness preserve. Should it become wilderness preserve, it cannot be

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used even for archaeological research. The Department of Environmental Conservation has consented to acquire the land for archaeological use if I can find the funds to purchase it through them. However, because of a variety of laws, fiscal problems and regulations, the necessary funds can come only from private sources. If I cannot secure those funds, our best chance to understand the prehistory of this crucial area may well be preserved unknown for a future that forever recedes as we approach it.

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CONNALLY, G. G. & L. A. SIRKIN. 1971. Luzerne readvance near Glens Falls, New

LULL, H. W. 1968. A Forest Atlas of the Northeast. U.S. Dept. Agr. Upper Darby, Pa. SHELFORD, V. E. 1963. The Ecology of North America. Univ. of Illinois Press.

Urbana, Ill. DAVIS, M. B. 1969. Palynology and environmental history during the Quaternary

period. Amer. Scientist 57: 317-332. DAVIS, R. B., T. E. BRADSTREET, R. STUCKENRATH & H. W. BORNS. 1975.

Vegetation and associated environments during the past 14,000 years near Moulton Pond, Maine. Quaternary Res. 5: 435-465.

DAVIS, R. B. & T. WEBB. 1975. The contemporary distribution of pollen in eastern North America: A comparison with the vegetation. Quaternary Res. 5: 395-434.

BROYLES, B. J . 1966. Preliminary report: the St. Albans site (46 Ka 27), Kanawha County, W. Va. West Va. Archeol. 19: 1-43.

MICHELS, J . W. & I. S. DUTT. 1968. Archaeological investigations of Sheep Rock Shelter. Penna. State Univ. Occas. Pap. Anthropol. No. 5. University Park, Pa.

FUNK, R. E. 1973. The West Athens Hill site (Cox 7). In Aboriginal Settlement Patterns in the Northeast. W. A. Ritchie & R. E. Funk, Eds.: 9-36. N.Y. State Mus. Sci. Serv. Albany, N.Y.

RITCHIE, W. A 1969. The Archaeology of New York State. 2nd edit. Natural History Press. Garden City, N.Y.

RITCHIE, W. A. & R. E. FUNK. 1971. Evidence for Early Archaic occupations on Staten Island. Penna. Archaeol. 41 45-59.

York. Geol. SOC. Amer. Bull. 82: 989-1008.