"Red Ocher" Caches from the Michigan Area: A Possible Case of Cultural Drift

Abstract

N RECENT YEARS a number of late Archaic sites have been excavated in the Michigan area. This work has been carried out as part of a continuing research program of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. As a result of these investigations, a body of data on the late Archaic period is accumulating which has meaning not only for the solution of problems specific to the culture history of the Great Lakes region, but the controlled samples provide a corpus of data which can be utilized to attack more general questions about the operation of prehistoric societies and processes of culture change and differentiation. It has been demonstrated (Binford NDa) that at the Pomranky site, a Red Ocher cemetery of the late Archaic period, cache blades of several distinct varieties were included within a single grave. Such diversity, together with the associated information, was used to infer that the several varieties represented goods contributed at the time of interment, possibly by different individuals or group representatives. The first question to be solved in the present analysis is whether or not other Red Ocher burials also exhibit the presence of several distinct varieties of cache blades as part of the burial furniture. Secondly, sites will be compared to determine if there is any recurrence of varieties at more than one site, an observation which, if established, would suggest that the various recognized varieties had separate local origins but were being traded widely within the region. The final question is whether or not the observable differences between the several populations of cache blades indicate any regional patterns, which might serve as a basis for understanding the processes of cultural change and differentiation operative during the time span of the samples. While addressing my interests to the latter problem, I began a search for a general explanatory model which would be applicable to the particular type of detailed observations on differences and similarities resulting from the analysis. Many of the demonstrable differences between samples of cache blades were not of an order that could easily be fitted into an evolutionary model of formal diversification. No obvious selective rationale could be developed for some of the minor and relatively insignificant variations which were demonstrably real between the samples studied. It occurred to me that there was an obvious analogy between the type of variation observable between the populations of cache blades and varia-