Late/Terminal Archaic Mortuary Practices in the Northeastern United States

Abstract

Late/Terminal Archaic (4000-2500 B.P.) mortuary practices are poorly understood in the Northeastern United States. This current study is designed to evaluate selected mortuary sites in terms of feature categories, grave good diversity, burial types, and associated non-human faunal and botanical remains. The Late/Terminal Archaic was a period of rapid climatic change which coincided with dramatic population increases, resource intensification, settlement system shifts, and highly ritualized burial ceremonialism. Current data indicate that Late Archaic populations throughout much of the Northeast exhibited a complex series of seasonal movements, based upon seasonal availability of resources and highly ritualized cremation burial behavior. Late Archaic groups coalesced in riverine zones in the fall season, where economic activities oriented toward nut harvesting, mammal hunting, and possibly anadromous fishing, coincided with increasingly formal and complex cremation burial ritual; settlement systems during this period broadly correspond to collectors. With the completion of the autumn food harvesting and ritual cycle, groups dispersed into upland zones in the winter months to hunt mammals and coastal zones in the spring and summer to procure aquatic-related resources. Regional climatic changes toward the end of the Late (Terminal) Archaic and the early portion of the Early Woodland (3200-2500 B.P.) may have necessitated higher group mobility more typical of foragers and corresponding changes in cremation burial ritual.