4 Cultural Features

Extract

It should be pointed out that, in general, cultural features are types of facilities representing a major investment of a social unit and as such are extremely important indicators of the nature of the activities conducted at a given location. For this reason we planned our recovery program so as to obtain as much information about cultural features as possible. The following analysis has been conducted with the aim of maximizing information on functional and temporal differences between the formal variants of the recovered sample.

One of the most significant aspects of the 1963 field season in the Carlyle Reservoir was the discovery of a housetype previously unknown in the Middlewest. There were four such structures located in the southernmost end of the West Field of Hatchery site. They were “keyhole” in shape, and consisted of a round, semi-subterranean floor and an extension, subrectangular in shape, which angled off toward the east-southeast.

A detailed description of the structures follows. The description will in turn be followed by a comparison between and an interpretation of the four structures. The order of description does not proceed on the basis of feature numbers or inferred chronology of occupancy. The descriptions follow the order of completeness of information, beginning with the structure about which the most data was obtained and ending with the least well known.