A nearly 4,000-year-old burial site found off the coast of Georgia hints at ties between hunter-gatherers on opposite sides of North America, according to research led by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

A research team led by Matthew Sanger, assistant professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, analyzed human remains, stone tools and a copper band found in an ancient burial pit in the McQueen shell ring on St. Catherine's Island, Georgia. The burial at the shell ring closely resembles similar graves found in the Great Lakes region, suggesting an exchange network between the Great Lakes and the coastal southeast United States. Similarities in mortuary practices suggest that the movement of objects between these two regions was more direct and unmediated than archaeologists previously assumed.

Matthew C. Sanger, Brian D. Padgett, Clark Spencer Larsen, Mark Hill, Gregory D. Lattanzi, Carol E. Colaninno, Brendan J. Culleton, Douglas J. Kennett, Matthew F. Napolitano, Sébastien Lacombe, Robert J. Speakman, David Hurst Thomas. Great Lakes Copper and Shared Mortuary Practices on the Atlantic Coast: Implications for Long-Distance Exchange during the Late Archaic. American Antiquity, 2019; 1

DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2019.59

El análisis de restos humanos y una banda de cobre que se encontraron en el centro de un anillo de concha del Arcaico Tardío (ca. 5000–3000 cal BP) demuestra una red de intercambio entre los Grandes Lagos y la costa sureste de los Estados Unidos. Las similitudes en las prácticas mortuorias sugieren que el movimiento de objetos entre estas dos regiones fue más directo y sin mediación que las suposiciones pasadas basadas en modelos de intercambio “en línea”. Estos hallazgos desafían las nociones prevalecientes que consideran que las comunidades Nativas Americanas pre-agrícolas vivían relativamente aisladas unas de otras y, en cambio, sugieren que las redes sociales abarcan una gran parte de América del Norte miles de años antes del advenimiento de la domesticación.

Analysis of human remains and a copper band found in the center of a Late Archaic (ca. 5000–3000 cal BP) shell ring demonstrate an exchange network between the Great Lakes and the coastal southeast United States. Similarities in mortuary practices suggest that the movement of objects between these two regions was more direct and unmediated than archaeologists previously assumed based on “down-the-line” models of exchange. These findings challenge prevalent notions that view preagricultural Native American communities as relatively isolated from one another and suggest instead that wide social networks spanned much of North America thousands of years before the advent of domestication.