Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Culture (Précis, Chapter 6)

Given the limited information on Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture all comment can be confined to a précis. The somewhat cumbersome name 'Great Lakes-St. Lawrence' is intended to identify the Lake Erie, southern Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence valley upriver from Québec City as the region occupied by this culture. It is a region of lowlands flanking the Canadian Shield to the north. The vegetation province during the latter part of Period II was Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Forest except for a significant portion of western Southern Ontario where a Deciduous Forest prevailed (McAndrews et al. 1987). Not only does this region today contain the richest farmlands of Ontario and Québec but it is also the area of most dense human population. The proposal of an Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture is more a working hypothesis than a demonstrable entity. In fact, the formulator of the concept of the Laurentian Archaic, here referred to as Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture, would restrict its application to Period III (4,000 to 1,000 B.C.) (Ritchie 1971). While the archaeological evidence for a pre-4,000 B.C. Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture is weak, there is a basis for the assumption that such a culture construct will eventually be demonstrated. This assumption is premised on the following: the association of broad side-notched projectile points with sites dated to approximately 5,500 B.C. (Funk 1965; Wellman 1974); the existence of earlier Middle Archaic complex sites in the region that shared certain chipped stone traits with Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture (Thomas and Robinson 1980); and the fact that the much better known Middle Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture of Period III must have developed out of a local ancestral population as evidence of a population intrusion is absent. Thus, the Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture or, as it is also known, Proto-Laurentian, developed in situ from a Middle Archaic culture base (Funk 1988: 17). Pertinent sites in New York State, dated between 5,500 and 5,000 B.C., contain broad side-notched projectile points, end and side scrapers, biface knives, and rough stone tools but appear to lack ground stone implements (Funk 1988: 26). This simple chipped stone tool kit is widely distributed in eastern North America. As has been noted, within this distribution "...rigid boundaries cannot be drawn for archaeological cultures or complexes" and "In the absence of important geographic or ecological barriers to movements of traits and peoples, individual traits generally vary independently in frequency and distribution outside the territory where the clusters were first observed by archaeologists" (Funk 1988: 34). Like the preceding Middle Archaic complex, the chipped stone tool kit of Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture is not distinctive from that of the early portion of Middle Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture. Some of the regionally distinctive ground stone celts, knives, points, lances and plummets were likely adopted late in Period II. As others have noted (Funk 1988; Tuck 1976), the diagnostic ground stone tools of Middle Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture appears to have actually been adopted from Early and Middle Maritime culture in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Thus, contrary to the poor typological visibility of the simple and widespread chipped stone technology of Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture, the addition of the regionally distinctive ground stone tool categories to Middle Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture technology permits cultural identifications even when materials are removed from an archaeological context. It is probably for this reason that recognized evidence of Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture is so sparse in contrast to the abundant evidence of their descendants who adopted ground stone tools. This difficulty has been further compounded by the fact that many Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture sites are submerged beneath the waters of the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain and are either destroyed by erosion or deeply buried by sedimentary processes.

It is unfortunate that so little is known of this critical period in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley region. Suffice to repeat that Early Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture suffers from the same lack of typological visibility as its Middle Archaic complex predecessor. It was from this archaeologically ephemeral cultural base, however, that the much more detailed archaeological record of Period III must have been derived.