Abstract
The North American archaeological record is everywhere marked by sequences of internally static economic strategies separated by chronologically brief episodes of innovation and emergence of new forms. This chapter develops ideas about the relationships between resource management strategies (RMS), the forces that maintain stasis and permit RMS change at a variety of levels, and the evolutionary independence of RMS and the sub-strategies that compose them. Examples are provided of macroevolutionary change at two levels. At the level of technologies, the markedly different histories of plant-processing technologies in western North America and the expansion of bow-and-arrow technology across the continent are discussed. At the level of the complete RMS, this chapter focuses on the emergence and rapid expansion of the Missippian, an agrarian-based hierarchical system that dominated the Southeast from 950 cal B.P. until European contact.
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Chatters, J.C. (2009). A Macroevolutionary Perspective on the Archaeological Record of North America. In: Prentiss, A., Kuijt, I., Chatters, J. (eds) Macroevolution in Human Prehistory. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0682-3_8
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