Paleoindian and Early Archaic Hunter-Gatherer Landscape Use: A Case Study from the Brier Creek Drainage in Burke County, Georgia
Connally, Quinn
Citations
Abstract
Artifact collections in museum repositories and those held by private individuals are numerous. Often these collections are analyzed and then reshelved by curators. In the case of private collections, the artifacts are assembled through purchase, avocational field work, or by hobbyists and can have limited or provenience. Despite this, these collections are valuable to current and future scholarship in archaeology. In this thesis I investigate and summarize three different legacy collections and groups of data that have limited and disparate information known about them yet were all sourced from the same general location of Burke County, Georgia. Each collection contains artifacts dating to the Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods (13,400-8,900 ca. BP). By investigating these artifacts and the details of their procurement locations in the context of existing theoretical models of hunter-gatherer mobility strategies, I can better contextualize Burke County, Georgia’s place in the larger Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast.