Plants and Subsistence during the Fluted-Point Period of the Northeast

Abstract

The role of plant foods during the fluted-point period (FPP) of North America is contested. Central to this debate is whether the scarcity of FPP macrobotanical materials stems from poor preservation of archaeological features and the macrobotanical remains they might contain or from the limited use of plants during the FPP. Employing summed probability distributions of radiocarbon date frequencies in northeastern North America, we find that FPP hearths are as common as expected, given the small number of well-dated FPP sites in the region. A second comparison shows that northeastern FPP hearths contain macrobotanical remains at a higher frequency than hearths from a region with better preservation and where small seeds formed a part of the diet. The macrobotanical materials so far recovered from FPP hearths in the Northeast show that plant foods contributed to diets during the FPP but that the plant diet breadth was relatively narrow, consistent with a specialized caribou hunting lifeway.

Scale Matters

“…In fact, plants were probably not an important part of diet as the tools for their processing, such as grinding stones, show up a few thousand years after Clovis. The few traces of plant foods recovered from Clovis-age sites are mostly snack foods, such as berries (this is likely not a function of preservation; Kitchel and Mackie 2022).…”