Fig. 10. Anculosa shell necklace with flat pendant of water-worn [stone] from the [Archaic] [period]. Anculosa necklaces were worn by many Illinois peoples probably up to the European contact period.
CULTURES AND CULTURAL CHANGE
Man can live virtually anywhere on the earth’s surface where he can obtain food, water and fuel, and do so without any fundamental change in his physical structure. This is largely because he is easily able to modify his customary ways of filling his basic needs under new or changing conditions of his surroundings. For primitive man to “live better” required an increasing knowledge of the resources in his locality and ingenuity in devising effective means and contrivances for exploiting them.
Because of this ability, the Paleo-Indian wanderers (Big Game Hunters) in Illinois around 12,000 to 10,000 B.C., when confronted with rising temperatures and other regional changes, could choose whether they would follow the mammoth and musk ox herds and familiar subglacial conditions elsewhere or adopt new and strange methods of securing food and other requirements.
As Big Game Hunters they probably lived as a number of families attached to a herd and relatively independent of each other except at hunting times. They had no homes, only temporary camps, and were bound to a moving herd, not to any particular region. The [Paleo-Indian] [culture] consisted of methods of trapping and slaying the great beasts and of filling other simple physical needs; a simple code of social behavior which enabled men and wives to live together with their children and, for brief periods, in gatherings of the families in relative peace and contentment; with religious beliefs and rites suitable to their cultural level that they believed assured them of a continuance of their satisfactory existence.
When the climate changed, those families that chose to remain in Illinois had to develop, perhaps slowly and painfully, a new way of life. The habits and haunts of deer, elk, bear and raccoon had to be learned. Other methods of hunting and of making tools and devices to fit new conditions were invented as a result of the new fund of knowledge assembled. Each [family] eventually acquired a more or less definite piece of land or hunting territory in which it selected certain favorable places to build the temporary [hamlet] at suitable seasons. As the man and his family became better adapted to the land and its resources, he hunted more successfully, and the family or local group grew larger in number.
Probably a number of neighboring families, when food was especially abundant, gathered together for social and religious purposes as peoples living today in the same [status] still do. Religious beliefs and other customs had all this time doubtless been shifting gradually in meeting the needs and dangers of changing conditions to a new way of life we call the [Archaic] [culture].
Every way of life is built on an older, often simpler, [culture] from which it has changed more or less rapidly. Due to important inventions, the group may modify its [economy] (ways of securing and processing food, etc.) and produce a substantially improved manner of living which, from archaeological evidence alone, may be difficult to recognize as a development from its earlier [phase].
On occasion, [people] from another region may invade an area, drive out the inhabitants and bring in a differing way of life. Usually this merely extends, to a desirable region less effectively exploited by others, the range of a vigorous cultural group whose territory has become too densely populated.