Materials and Methods
The first task by hunters after making camp at a caribou water-crossing site and awaiting the herd was making tools (knapping) of local quartzite for hunting, butchering and hide preparation. I combine and compare three palimpsests of ancient Chipewyan culture, each from a sequence of three stratified levels, resulting from the above tasks that span almost three millennia. Ethnographic analogies with early historic Chipewyan hunters by Samuel Hearne in 1770-2 (Hearne 1958) permit assigning and orienting male and female roles to each task, e.g., women for butchering, marrow-extraction, hide working; men for knapping (stone tool making), and woodworking.
The compact layer of artifacts and bones that form a palimpsest appear as a confusing accumulation of seemingly random fragments of the prehistoric record – all on one living floor. Perhaps, an analogy may explain palimpsest formation and avoid the confusion of defining it as layering, which it is not. Sprinkle pepper lightly in a saucer. Then sprinkle salt and then sugar. When the salt is added, it begins to fill the spaces between the pepper grains, but remains distinct and is separable visually. When sugar is added, so is confusion because the sugar and salt appear the same. By filling the interstices of the previous substance(s), all three remain in one level. They are not micro-stratigraphic levels, yet are separable. In our analogy, water will dissolve the salt and sugar, leaving only the pepper. Adding silver nitrate will precipitate the sodium of the salt, while boiling the water will concentrate the sugar. Archaeological palimpsests form in the same way and may be separable in special circumstances. After many tasks are performed on the same floor, any detritus from these tasks, even if they are a century apart, will be mixed through human trampling into one layer. In this manner, we have been able to define the tasks in the palimpsest from the type and location of specific artifacts, but we cannot assign these tasks to different years. As dense remains on what was once the active ground surface, archaeologists usually accept them as undecipherable, and attack them by stating that certain tasks occurred, based on simple tool presence. I have previously shown that there is a method for deciphering single palimpsest components where gender-related tasks on a single campsite floor were carried out seasonally for several centuries (Gordon, In Press, a, b).
As the annual killing of caribou at water crossings and the subsequent processing of their carcasses repeatedly in the same place resulted in palimpsests in all buried levels, I selected three levels of only one culture. I compared individual tasks in the 2450-1800 year-old Early Talthelei palimpsest with those in the 1800-1300 year-old Middle Taltheilei and the 1300-200 year-old Late Taltheilei palimpsests, all with radiocarbon-dated ranges. The Middle or densest palimpsest occurred under a warm stable climate when the range had its largest number, variation and distribution of artifacts and sites (Gordon, 2006). I use our customized, web-based program to separate and compare core reduction, lance production and repair, butchering, meat roasting, marrow extraction, hide preparation and woodworking in ancestral Chipewyan Early, Middle and Late Taltheilei archaeological floors.
I deciphered single tasks in the same manner as individual palimpsests by different intensities of gray fill in the symbols used in the figures. My objective was to determine if people performed the same repetitive tasks in the same spot in a camp not only over a generation like modern humans, but over millennia. Just as modern hikers using the same trail, like to camp in spots they find most comfortable and convenient, ancient hunters did the same. We place our tents out of the wind, our campfires away from bushes but near water, with both firewood and our hiking trail easily accessible. So did our ancestors. The absence of tent rings and organic debris made tent locating difficult, but I believe they pitched their tents in the same spots that we used – flat, wind-protected and tree-shaded.
Assuming some artifact patterning remained after many years of use, I plotted quartzite core reduction, the first task before herd arrival. With most finished tools removed for use elsewhere, the remaining flakes, broken unused knives and core fragments were plotted, along with any hammerstones that may have been used in their production. Hammerstones may be any colour because they remain intact and do not produce flakes. As the number of quartzite hues was in the hundreds, I assumed flakes, broken knives and core fragments of the same precise hue came from the same core.