NYSAA Bulletin No. 52 — Archaic Sites: Croton Point & Dogan Point — Passage 3 (part 17)

[Various (1971)] The 163 burials found in the midden covering the island in our several excavations occurred in a wide variety of modes and arrangements, and yielded skeletal remains and grave goods of singularly instructive character. There was one category of flexed burials with skulls of dolichocranic Lamoka form and offerings attributable to the Lamoka culture. Another series of interments held extended skeletons with brachycranic skulls and artifacts, both typical of the Brewerton culture. A third group of burials, all extended, had associated grave goods typologically assignable to both the Lamoka and Brewerton cultures, plus other artifact forms either modified from those of both contributing cultures or not known from either. Where the skulls of this group were measurable, an intermediate mesocranic form occurred.

A number of the skeletons bore wounds of various kin ds, apparently attesting to a period of hostile contact between the two quite different physical and cultural peoples. Eventually, however, the contact situation resulted in a physical and cultural amalgamation, which I have described as the Frontenac phase (Ritchie 1945; 1965a: 103124). The temporal period of the Frontenac phase is apparently late in both of the donor phases, around 2000 B.C., as already noted, or some 500 years after the settlement of the Lamoka Lake site and perhaps equally long, or even longer, than the initial occupation of the Robinson and Oberlander No. 1 sites at Brewerton.