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.
Sometimes newcomers essay to live peaceably with the natives and a new
cultural blend is developed. If fundamental changes are made in the
economy by internal development or by imitating another culture, social
and religious customs are very likely to change too, though usually at a
slower pace.
As time went on, the Archaic way of life slowly changed and finally
disappeared, but probably not so suddenly as might at first appear; for
many Archaic customs, tools, and weapons continued to be made and used
in the “new” culture by the descendants of rugged earlier people or were
adopted by newcomers to the region. Other changes were added through new
inventions and incoming people from other regions producing a new
culture now generally known as Woodland.