This beautifully produced three-volume boxed set on the Indigenous Americans of Pennsylvania is a milestone in North American regional archaeology. A six-member team of editors organized, solicited, acquired, reviewed, and edited chapters written by 21 leading professionals in the field—one of whom, the late Barry Kent, died while the volumes were in preparation, and the volume set is dedicated to him. Together, they synthesized and summarized Pennsylvania archaeology from early settlement by the first Indigenous peoples through the era of European colonization. The work is encyclopedic, foundational in nature, and characterized by internal consistencies that are the mark of close collaboration and good editing. This will be a standard reference for regional professionals, advanced students, and serious lay readers for years to come.
Modern state boundaries are relevant to the conduct of archaeology but largely irrelevant to its subjects. The team that wrote and edited the volumes sensibly defined archaeological boundaries by three major river basins: Ohio, Susquehanna, and Delaware. Up to 20 sub-basins were broken out as needed. Although coverage largely concentrates on Pennsylvania, the use of drainages expands the relevance of their work to its six surrounding states and beyond.
Frank Vento, Anthony Vega, and Harold Rollins set the scene in a lead chapter on environments from the Late Pleistocene through the Holocene in Part I. Chapters about the earliest peoples of Pennsylvania by Kurt Carr, James Adovasio, and Christopher Bergman cover periods prior to 6000 cal RCYBP and consider the region as a whole, including the famous Meadowcroft Rockshelter site, which was excavated and dated with such care and precision that it has withstood repeated criticisms by skeptics better than other pre-Clovis candidates. Later Paleoindian sites, including Shoop, Shawnee-Minisink, Wallis, Nesquehoning, and several others, provide for a comprehensive exposition of technology, settlement pattern, and (inferentially) social and adaptive trends through the Paleoindian, Early Archaic, and Middle Archaic periods.
The earliest radiocarbon data from Meadowcroft were initially met with skepticism, but age determinations were consistent with stratigraphy. There is today no apparent reason to reject the conclusion that “humans were definitely present in the Commonwealth by ca. 15,950 BP” (Volume 1, p. 63). Very recent research at Lake Otero in New Mexico has revealed numerous human footprints that could date to at least 21,000 years ago. In both cases, the data are difficult to discredit on scientific grounds. Although they might be inconvenient in the context of current operating hypotheses, they cannot be simply shrugged off as absurd.
Later chapters are organized chronologically in Parts II to V. These are divided along the familiar traditional lines of Late Archaic, Woodland, Late Prehistoric, Protohistoric, and Early Historic periods. The regional treatments are divided into the three major river basins. For the most recent millennium, the Upper Ohio is further subdivided into three subregions. Small portions of the Lake Erie and the Potomac basins lying in Pennsylvania are added for some later periods.
Standard subheadings facilitate the ability to follow topics such as environment, subsistence, technology, settlement, and architecture across chapters. The evolution of Early and Middle Archaic people—10,000–6000 BP—is rich and seemingly well understood. However, that richness promises that as new evidence continues to emerge, and as new research techniques are deployed, our understanding is bound to deepen, become more complex, and become more interesting as a consequence. Those trends are likely to be even greater for later periods. Like all milestones, this one marks both progress so far and promise for the future.
The chapters of Part II, focused on the Late Archaic, are authored by Vera Cowin, Sarah Neusius, Patricia Miller, and Roger Moeller. Chapters covering the Early and Middle Woodland periods (Part III) are written by Mark McConaughy and Moeller. The increasing complexity of late prehistory is reflected by the four chapters written by William Johnson, Bernard Means, Stanley Lantz, Kenneth Burkett, Neusius, and Beverly Chiarulli for Part IV. Part V, by Robert Wall, Moeller, James Herbstritt, and Kent, is given even more space. This last part illustrates the difficulty of connecting archaeology with the ethnohistories of Pennsylvania's Indigenous peoples through the time of devastation and relocation that accompanied the awful epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The chapters of these three volumes focus on the pragmatic tasks of standard archaeological research. There is little space conceded to transient interpretive trends, and there is a resolute insistence on the importance of empirical evidence. The authors’ shared unpretentious view is that “archaeology is a science, and accordingly, data must be collected and analyzed in a systematic fashion” (Volume 1, p. 8).
The volumes synthesize a century of research, and they necessarily perpetuate some of the legacies of past practice. Key artifact types are still used for chronological first approximations: Paleoindian, Archaic, and Woodland. However, more and better radiocarbon dating allows researchers to discover chronology rather than infer it from key types or (worse) their morphological analogues. This still-emerging reality has been accompanied by the protracted demise of the notion that typological cross dating is a reliable heuristic exercise. An appendix in Volume 3 provides a database of approximately 900 radiocarbon dates, enough to allow the authors lay out an independent chronology in each chapter. This will continue to improve with the proliferation of ever more numerous and more precise age determinations.
The contributors know as well as other professionals that the connections between their data and the past cultures that produced them are numerous, indirect, and inferential. Working through that process is what challenges them now and what will continue to do so into the future. Archaeologists tend to be detail people, a proclivity that allows us to deal with the complexity of the processes such as innovation, exchange, mobility, and subsistence, which constitute the human-mediated process of cultural evolution. A problem with our focus on content is that it more often leads to voluminous syntheses such as this 900-page set than it does to concise generalizations. Fortunately, the editors have provided a brief summary statement of research issues and recommendations. They remind us that a primary goal is to “describe culture through time and explain change,” and that “calendar years before the present . . . are the best approach” (Volume 2, p. 688). They have done their best to leave behind the legacy of culture history and to define six major topics for research going forward: material culture, subsistence, community patterning, social organization, settlement patterns, and changes in adaptive strategy. A scan of the bibliography for recent citations serves to identify the people most likely to get it done.
There remains an inherent problem with any comprehensive synthesis of current knowledge. It always necessarily catches an active discipline in mid-stride. Each chapter in this set of volumes is, of course, both an end and a beginning. Consequently, as we move forward from 2020, these seminal volumes will lose their immediacy, and new research will gradually leave them behind. How can the discipline take best advantage of an encyclopedic synthesis such as this one and continue to use it as a foundation for future growth? One solution is to continue to produce accessible summaries such as Carr and Moeller's First Pennsylvanians (2015), which enjoys rave reviews on Amazon. Another is Michael Stewart's very recent work in the Upper Delaware Valley. These incorporate new data as they emerge from current research, providing a bridge to another future major synthesis. However, by itself, this is an expensive and infrequently exercised option. There is a faster and cheaper option available.
This is a very strong team, and it would be wise to keep it together. There are young professionals to recruit as senior scholars retire, and there is an existing structure to carry the project forward as an online program once the hard-copy foundation finds its way into research and private libraries. Revised and replacement chapters could be offered through open access or by subscription as new evidence prompts them. A searchable and growing electronic version of the radiocarbon database in Volume 3 could be made available along with the electronic chapter updates. Continuing corrections, additions, and access to color images and other features too expensive for print publication would secure the persisting importance of this work.
Other innovations will suggest themselves going forward. Many of the authors have made suggestions for future research, but none of us can see very far over the horizon. The lesson for us all is that the fine work summarized in this publication should not be an end for its authors, but it can and should be a continuously evolving foundational starting point for future research and reporting.
How do archaeologists deliver the results of their work going forward in an era that is seeing speedy electronic delivery systems replacing expensive traditional print options? Although waiting another generation for a new team of authors to pull together data and conclusions from an ever-growing corpus of publications would be the traditional best practice, we have a much better solution at hand. As of this writing, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions has 95 full members, all of them leading academic institutions. There are 26 affiliate members, including the publisher of these volumes, the University of Pennsylvania Press. Most affiliates are likely to eventually become full members. These are all large research universities, and many of them also support cooperating university presses. Open electronic access meets research needs better than print publication. Although there will always be a need for double-blind peer reviewing, formal print publication, and preservation of archivable research records, for many immediate research purposes, open access is better than slower and more expensive print publication.
News of the changing landscape of scholarly publication was contained in a letter to all SAA members from President Deborah Nichols dated July 26, 2021. Hardcopy versions of SAA journals will henceforth be optional, and electronic delivery is now primary. My then-complete personal run of American Antiquity was shipped to Cambridge University Press nearly a decade ago, there to be converted to the online archive that all members can now access quickly.
To return to content, these volumes, however delivered, raise several important questions for the future of archaeology in North America:
(1) How do researchers address findings (such as those from Meadowcroft) that cannot be casually discredited but nevertheless run counter to what seem to be well-established working hypotheses? This is the central preoccupation of any historical discipline, where the newest determination of the oldest case generates both wonder and skepticism. It is a domain where evidence and critical thinking are indispensable.
(2) We are in an era in which descendant Native American communities are increasingly interested in their archaeological ancestries. How do archaeologists connect the archaeological record to descendant communities in regions where catastrophic epidemics beginning in the sixteenth century produced widespread depopulation and wholesale dislocations? From Pennsylvania west and south across much of the Eastern Woodlands, abandonment led to the regeneration of wilderness as devastated surviving populations moved and merged, the processes of ethnogenesis producing new communities with new identities. Unlike the continuity between ancestral and descendant Puebloans in the Southwest, or between ancestral and descendant Northern Iroquoians in the Northeast, there is a huge temporal gap across much of the interior of the Eastern Woodlands. What became of the people responsible for what archaeologists term Clemson Island and Monongahela cultures? They have an archaeological identity through the fourteenth century, but who their historical descendants (if any) might be remains a mystery. Coming at it from the opposite direction, what were the archaeological roots of the Massawomecks, who were regionally so important in the seventeenth century but whose archaeological roots and fate remain uncertain? These questions beg the larger question of how the proper articulation of the attenuated evidence and the incommensurate taxonomies of archaeology and ethnohistory should be accomplished. The volume and coverage of the evidence that is presented in these volumes potentially facilitates the formulation of alternative hypotheses and provides the data needed to choose the most probable of them.
(3) How, in the era of big-data technology, do researchers take advantage of the detail orientation of archaeology to solve big problems of general interest as well as the small problems that necessarily engage day-to-day activity? How do we move beyond the endless discussion and solution of minor technical problems and convincingly resolve higher-level problems, such as concisely describing and explaining the spread of agriculture at continental scale?
(4) Today's archaeologists tend to be topical specialists. Geoarchaeology, rock art, lithic technology, CRM, etc., can be studied almost anywhere, but almost all of us have permanent addresses and regional foci. A state such as Pennsylvania has a community of archaeologists, but many of them also conduct topical research as members of dispersed ad hoc electronically connected research teams. Research centers will continue to exist, but research collaboration now often features networks of specialists working at different institutions and communicating by electronic means. Carr and colleagues have found ways to serve them both going forward, if the profession has the will.
Many archaeologists are bibliophiles, as a visit to the exhibit hall at any SAA meeting will confirm. However, this is evolving. The younger generation of archaeologists does not appear to collect books as assiduously as older generations have. However, a milestone boxed set as wonderful as this one is likely to enjoy a permanent place in many public and personal libraries, large and small. If it also finds future life as a growing set of evolving electronic versions, so much the better. It does much to define what the profession has accomplished as of 2020, and it sets the stage for what it can accomplish going forward.
