Early Paleo-Indian Foragers of Midcontinental North America
A survey of private and public collections produced information on 410 fluted point yielding localities within a single county in east central Ohio. Analysis of techno-functional attributes of the fluted points resulted in the definition of four general settlement types including large and small workshop/occupations, chert processing loci, and food procurement/processing loci. The distribution of these loci in relation to various features of the local paleoenvironment suggests that Paleo-Indian bands were seasonally exploiting the diverse environments of the Appalachian Plateau. Subsistence activities appear to have focused primarily on dispersed, non-aggregated game species such as white-tailed deer. The dense concentration of fluted points here may simply reflect the high redundancy in the Paleo-Indian land use system in areas with limited loci of availability for critical chert resources.