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Early Cultures in Northwestern America1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Earl H. Swanson Jr.
Earl H. Swanson Jr.*
Affiliation:
Idaho State College Museum, Pocatello, Idaho
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Abstract

The major problem in studying Early Man in northwestern America would appear to be the definition of adequate criteria for the identification of cultures. What is needed is recognition of cultures rather than technological tool-making traditions. A useful approach is to establish a model of relationships between environments and cultures. A basic assumption is that both environment and culture are continuous and that present environments permit recognition of past cultures. The identification of multiple environments in northwestern America permits the deduction that there were also multiple early cultures. Some proof of the models is to be seen in the presence of archaeological continuums rather than in layer-cake sequences. In the Northwest the layer-cake sequences should be expressive of intercultural relationships, and such relationships should occur on the margins of environmental areas. As a consequence of the models, three basic early cultures have been defined, with one potential culture as yet undefined. These are: (1) Old Cordilleran culture, (2) Mountain-Plains culture, and (3) Bitterroot culture, which may have been antecedent to the Desert culture. All three cultures are virtually equal in geologic time, though not necessarily in absolute time. A number of problems remain, but the approach is suggested as a means of recognizing that there are cultures probably equivalent in time to any previously recognized elsewhere in the New World.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , October 1962 , pp. 151 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1962

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Footnotes

1

This paper was presented at the symposium entitled “Early Man in Western North America,” held at the 1961 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I am indebted to B. Robert Butler for his thoughtful criticism of this paper both in terms of its content and its style.

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