Favored Places and Focal Networks in the Early Archaic Social Landscape

Presented at 75th Annual Southeastern Archaeological Conference

Albert Goodyear was among the first to examine the regional distribution of hafted unifaces known as Edgefield Scrapers, a tool form strongly associated with the Early Archaic period occupation of the Atlantic Coastal Plain. This analysis compares variation in samples of Edgefield Scrapers from the Savannah-Ogeechee and the Ocmulgee River drainages, to samples from the Aucilla-Suwannee and Tampa Bay drainages. Traditional ecological explanations are reevaluated. While trends in hafted unifaces may be related to environmental constraints, social networking analyses of these data point to a social boundary located along Florida’s Gulf Coast, as well as throughout north and north-central Florida.