ABSTRACT
About 9500 bce, the climate warming trend that had been halted for a millennium resumed, to reach its maximum between 7000 and 3000 bce. Geologists term our present epoch, beginning with the final melting of continental glaciers, the Holocene. Compared with the preceding Pleistocene epoch, the “Ice Age,” our Holocene has had no extreme global shifts: geographic conditions have been more or less familiar for the past ten thousand years. However, local and regional conditions have indeed changed, necessitating human adaptations again and again. American archaeologists’ Archaic period is the era of slowly stabilizing regional cultural patterns, culminating in economies based on techniques of intensified food production. American landscapes still exhibit constructed monuments from the later Archaic, round and also flat-topped mounds and embankments that rival anything constructed in Europe in those times.
