[wind whooshing]

(Describer) At dusk. Light glows over water.

(narrator) With sea levels stabilizing, reducing the need to keep moving, these coastal dwellers continued to adapt and innovate.

(speaker) The Middle Archaic forebears had a reasonable amount of stone, even in coastal situations. We've seen this at other sites. But by the Late Archaic, these people along the Lower Atlantic Coast are not getting stone. They don't need it, essentially, anymore. They have so adapted their toolkit to a coastal lifestyle that they are essentially eschewing any kind of trade that would have brought the stone to the coast.

(narrator) Finding a stone tool in a place like Pockoy is very rare. The nearest source is a hundred miles away. Yeah, so it's an interesting tool. It's got a little spoke shave-like notch chipped into it right there for scraping a shaft or debarking something, making something round. Steep edges all around that could be used for working bone or hard materials without shearing that edge off. So we've got lots of stuff here that tells a story in that piece of churn right there. It's an unassuming tool, but it's certainly, in the context here where there isn't much stone to begin with, it carries a lot of weight.

(narrator) Reverse engineering tools from artifacts shows a large mollusk, the knobbed whelk, became the rock of the coast, An all-purpose kind of digging tool, sledgehammer, pick, made out of a whelk. And the handle goes in so that the working ends of this thing sit more or less at right angles to the handle, so you can dig, process stuff, crack things,

[whelk hammering]

(Describer) He swings the tool, splintering wood.

(narrator) A tiny mollusk, the periwinkle marsh snail, also had its purpose.

(Describer) Hands poke dents in clay with a shell.

Recreating utilitarian items-- crocks, pots, and bowls-- revealed that many of the vessels' designs were impressed using the periwinkle.

[ethereal music]

(speaker) Pottery is such a malleable medium. You can decorate it in a variety of ways. You can form it in a whole bunch of different ways. And each one of those is a really specific decision being made by an individual in the past. And while there's a lot of reasons why you make different types of decisions-- there might be functional reasons, or political reasons, or social reasons-- a lot of what you're doing is you're just doing it similar to what everyone else around you is doing it, or you're creating the pot in a similar way as your mother or your father created a pot. So there's a level of cultural continuity that you can often trace out through pottery. And if you have a wide enough view of pots and vessels being formed across a large space, you can start drawing those lines much more distinctly than almost any other object.

(speaker) There are very few different design motifs that aren't shared across a really large area, and I'm not the first person to make that observation. There's a great deal of design homogeneity across hundreds of miles.

(Describer) Hands turn over a nail made of bone.

[archeologists chattering]

(narrator) The bone pins from the ring sites also tell a story, about creativity.

(Describer) Nails are engraved with spiral designs.

[droning music]

These carvings took practice and time. They may have been important personal items for fastening clothing of deerskin, as needles for weaving, or decoration for the body.

(Describer) Bags are labeled for each bone nail.

(speaker) We've got a couple of bone pins from Spanish Mount that are very distinctive in their design. That distinctive style has shown up at other sites, other Late Archaic, shell-bearing sites on the Atlantic Coast. It's an amazing piece of artwork, really, that's 4,000 years old. These decorations, they're learned, they're passed on from generation to generation. I think it indicates that we're really dealing with related people.

(Describer) Accessibility Provided by the US Department of Education.

[birds warbling]