Researching and understanding maritime archaeology is at once fascinating and difficult. Archaeologists are drawn to it because of the richness of the complex record of ecological relationships it offers. But that is also what makes it so challenging. The Atlantic maritime edge environment of eastern North America is 6,300 km long, and its archaeological record varies considerably by (60°–24°) latitude. In addition to this, researchers must also accommodate several other independent variables: eustatic sea level, isostatic sea level, glaciated landforms, local topography, climate, sea temperature, weather cycles, food resource availability, technology, human preferences, and more. That is why the goals of a book like this one are so challenging.
Like other volumes of this kind, this book is necessarily a summary of the current state of research and a platform for the development of future research. But data aggregation by itself does not equal synthesis. The effort in this case is at once daunting for the editors and authors, welcomed by their readers, and promising. The success of Robert MacArthur's work on island biogeography comes to mind as a model for archaeologists. Analogous research is mentioned in several chapters in this volume.
The book also demonstrates that the field has reached a stage at which we no longer need to spend a lot of time trying to force choices between contending untestable hypotheses by means of endless debates. There is enough evidence in hand, there is enough cooperative effort available, and there are enough testable hypotheses for it to be otherwise.
Another way to simplify is to look at the linear maritime province at large scale. The book is divided into eight chapters that span Labrador and Newfoundland in the north to southern Florida in the south. This structure allows authors to simplify their coverage to variables relevant to their geographic domains. It also allows readers to see both qualitative contrasts and quantitative clines over the 6,300 km covered by those domains. There is little or no evidence of Paleoindians in Labrador, and what we call the Maritime Archaic does not begin there until 8000 BP. The sequence of Early, Middle, and Late Archaic stages is variably expressed in the six coastal regions lying between Labrador and the southernmost region of south Florida. Expressions of Woodland culture also appear in the six chapters between these bookends but on a cline that begins earlier in the south than in the north. The Woodland culture type never appeared in south Florida, where Glades is the temporal equivalent. Similarly, Paleo-Inuit and Dorset cultures appeared north of Woodland in Labrador and Newfoundland. All of this tells us that the culture types of McKern's Midwestern Taxonomic System have long since lost their utility, except as an easy set of first approximations that might still have some functionality at the local level.
By now, we have enough radiocarbon dates to scale time independently and study the spread and interactions of cultural systems over time and space rather than assuming them for chronological purposes. But here, the authors run into our common problem of a mix of legacy dates, some of dubious accuracy, and others being recent high-precision AMS age determinations. Little wonder that the editors had to stipulate the simultaneous overlapping usage of cal BP, BP, and RYBP in this volume (p. 9). At least two contributors were prompted to stipulate at the beginning of Chapter 7 that they were reporting only calibrated dates—and at 2-sigma standard error. To this can be added the perennial problem of uncertainties in sample associations. We can trust the authors to standardize radiocarbon-date reporting and to continue cleansing the database of legacy 14C measurements that are subject to questionable associations or are rendered useless by large standard errors.
They can also move their research forward by refining not just the concurrent use but the integrated use of multiple cultural variables. More recent efforts to understand demography—more specifically the units, sizes, and movements of past human societies—have significantly improved the integrated use of genetic, osteological, archaeological, and linguistic variables. There is much more attention being paid these days to the testing of alternative hypotheses such as cultural diffusion as opposed to demic expansion in order to explain the spread of things over time and space. This is explicit in several of this book's chapters.
Books like this one are always period pieces, resting as they do on incomplete current knowledge and pointing the way for future research. New field research, reanalysis of legacy 14C dates, improvements in the accuracy and precision of radiocarbon dating techniques, progress in integration with other historical fields, improved recovery techniques, and analytical techniques not yet imagined will all shape the new understandings to come. We do not know where the authors will take The Archaeology of Human-Environmental Dynamics on the North American Coast going forward, but the evidence indicates that they are up to the task.
