NYSAA Bulletin No. 52 — Archaic Sites: Croton Point & Dogan Point — Passage 7 (part 4)

[Various (1971)] There were also important changes in his older classifications of some cultures, descriptions of newly defined complexes, and finally a concise discussion of the data favoring the in situ evolution of Iroquoian culture. A revised edition of the book, incorporating new data, was printed in 1969. As the settlement project was phased out, another grant-supported enterprise was started in 1964; a study of coastal ecology and adaptation, based on his four seasons of excavation of stratified shell middens on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. This research, completed in the summer of 1968, was reported in the volume, The Archaeology of Martha's Vineyard, Natural History Press, Garden City, New York (1969). Using data from his own and others' researches, Ritchie had produced a statement on southern New England prehistory which clearly superseded all earlier efforts. Crossties with eastern New York and the Mid-Atlantic coast were evident. There was also a pattern of improving adaptation through time of successive inland traditions to a coastal environment. But even this was not to be his last major opus. In the fall of 1970 we finished work on our collaborative effort, Aboriginal Settlement Patterns in the Northeast, of which the present writer is junior author.