NYSAA Bulletin No. 52 — Archaic Sites: Croton Point & Dogan Point — Passage 3 (part 29)

[Various (1971)] Early Woodland pottery styles were diffused into the Northeast late in the Transitional stage. At the O'Neil site we found sherds of Vinette 1 ware (Ritchie and MacNeish 1949: 100) in the upper levels of the Frost Island zone (Ritchie 1965a: 158; Ritchie and Funk n.d.a). A small quantity of potsherds occurred in the Orient habitation and burial sites on Long Island, with paste and surface treatment for the most part bearing a general resemblance to Vinette 1 ware. Some of the pots had elongate oval bodies and lugs and were obviously modeled after the stone vessel prototypes (Ritchie 1959: 37-40, 66-67). Terminologically, the Archaic stage came to an end with the stone vessel-using 10 THE BULLETIN Transitional cultures, but our evidence to date sustains the inference of a continuity in the major activity patterns pertinent to the economic, socio-political, and other aspects of life of the Archaic hunting, fishing and gathering groups, a subject considered in much detail elsewhere (Ritchie and Funk n.d.a).

My chief concern here is to reiterate succinctly and emphatically my belief that the cultures subsumed under the Archaic and Transitional stage categories and indeed, under the sundry subdivisions of the following Woodland stage, cannot properly be comprehended as a simple succession of discrete entities, each representing an instant in time and a definite range in space.