Long-Distance Logistic Mobility as an Organizing Principle among Northern Hunter-Gatherers: A Great Lakes Middle Holocene Settlement System

Abstract

Concepts of residential and logistic mobility are applied to survey assemblages from multiple decades of research along the interior drainages of central lower Michigan. Drawing on the ethnographic record of boreal hunter-gatherers and archaeological interpretations of long-distance logistic mobility from the Mesolithic of northern England and continental Europe, it is argued that the importance of logistic mobility is underrepresented in summaries of northern hemisphere hunter-gatherers. Reconstruction of Middle Holocene environments suggests that the resource structure of the central Michigan uplands was one that fostered use of logistic mobility, and that interior Middle Archaic assemblages and site structures reveal special function activities systemically tied to residential and other special function sites at lower coastal elevations, as well as currently submerged under Lake Huron. We conclude that rising levels of Lake Huron ca. 4500 B.P. resulted in decreased land area, population packing, and a consequent shift to residential mobility by the Late Archaic. Further, the results of this analysis can serve as a comparative framework for recognizing the role of logistic mobility in the evolution of hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies in other regions.