Public Lecture Series - Pee Dee Prehistory
The Florence County Museum is proud to partner with the newly formed Archaeological Institute of the Pee Dee in hosting a series of lectures with focus on Pee Dee Prehistory. On March 24, 2022 at 6:00 PM, Dr. I. Randolph Daniel, Jr. will provide a lecture focusing on the Paleoindian and Early Archaic Periods.
Dr. I. Randolph Daniel, Jr., is Professor and Chair of the anthropology department at East Carolina University. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include the archaeology of Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Southeastern United States including how prehistoric foragers created stone tool technologies to solve their adaptive problems. Dr. Daniel is considered one of the foremost authorities on the Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods in the Southeastern United States.
His books include Hardaway Revisited: Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast (University of Alabama Press, 1998); Harney Flats: A Florida Paleoindian Site (Florida Museum of Natural History, 2017); Time, Typology and Point Traditions in North Carolina Archaeology: Formative Cultures Reconsidered(University of Alabama Press, 2021), and has contributed to such works as The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast (University of Alabama Press, 1996) and The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age (University of Alabama Press, 2022).
Dr. Daniel’s lecture will focus on the arrival of the first humans in what is now the Southeaster US, which is generally accepted to have taken place some 13,000 years ago. These “Paleoindians” are traditionally understood to have practiced a lifestyle that carried them far and wide in search of large game species that became extinct as the modern environment took form. Mastodons, bison, sloths, species of camel, horse and tapir were present at that time. As our climate warmed with the advent of the Holocene Epoch (around 11,700 years ago) different flora and fauna began to populate our region, and hunting and gathering practices of prehistoric people living here began to change, becoming more local in the Early Archaic period (roughly 10,000 to 8,000 years ago). The human population of the Southeast as a whole increased significantly during this time.
This lecture is open and free to the public. Seating is limited with refreshments starting at 5:30.