Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives on Folsom Households

Summary

Over the few decades, households have been identified in a handful of Folsom sites. Although it should surprise no one that the Pleistocene inhabitants of North America built, lived in, and used domestic structures, it may be surprising we know relatively little about how those household spaces were organized. This problem is hardly unique to Folsom. It could be argued that this is true of hunter-gatherer household archaeology as a whole. Part of the difficulty we encounter in interpreting intra-household spatial patterning is that relatively little research has focused on the factors that govern the spatial organization of human behavior within households in nomadic contexts. Inspired by Folsom household archaeology, the Dukha Ethnoarchaeological Project was designed to examine the general factors affecting where people choose to do things in a modern setting, and how decisions people make regarding spatial positioning should be reflected by material residues in the archaeological record. In this paper, we examine some of the factors affecting the spatial organization of human behavior in the households of nomadic Dukha reindeer herders in northern Mongolia, and how understanding this phenomenon can provide insight into the household archaeology of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• New Perspectives in Folsom Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage