| The Point Peninsula to Owasco transition in central New York represents a critical, but understudied period of prehistory in the Eastern Woodlands. During the A.D. 600 to 1200 period, the thinly scattered, mobile, foraging Point Peninsula populations were replaced by nucleated villages of early Iroquoian maize farmers. There are currently three competing models of this development: rapid in situ development, gradual in situ development, and incursion.; Ceramic collections from Kipp Island, Hunter's Home, and Levanna were used to evaluate three aspects of each model: chronology, subsistence pattern, and technological change. Encrusted food residues were collected from sherds for AMS dating and for stable carbon isotope analysis. A series of experiments suggests that δ13C ratios of encrusted food residues can indicate the proportion of maize (the only C4 plant available in the Northeast) in the sampled meal. X-ray images of ceramic sherds were used to investigate technological change, specifically changes in primary formation technique that might indicate a change in ethnicity.; The results of the project are mixed. The AMS dates show that Point Peninsula and Owasco style ceramics co-existed between A.D. 650 and 1000. The δ 13C analysis shows that Point Peninsula and Owasco diets at Kipp Island and Hunter's Home were isotopically identical, while the single sample from an Owasco sherd from Levanna showed a significant proportion of maize, dating to A.D. 980. There is not a strong discontinuity in ceramic technology between Point Peninsula and Owasco style ceramics, although there does appear to be a trend toward fewer coil joins in Owasco ceramics than in Point Peninsula. These results strongly suggest that the cultural and temporal implications of the existing ceramic typology are flawed, and that any inference of culture change based solely on ceramic stylistic change is also flawed. As a result, none of the models of Iroquoian origins are strongly supported by the existing data. The models of gradual in situ change and incursion are particularly indistinguishable with ceramic data alone. Future studies need to focus on how to identify culturally meaningful units in the archaeological record through a holistic view of material culture. |
