The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on
the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight
millennia of hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many
decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been
dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between
humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people
routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America
and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links
to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern
North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was
an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence-an 8,200-year era of
making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in
ritual and performance.