The two seasons of excavation at the Clampitt site produced a substantial amount of archaeological information relating to Oliver phase lifeways during the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries A.D. in southern Indiana. To date, the Clampitt site is the most completely documented Oliver phase settlement on record and, after the Bowen site, the most thoroughly tested. Yet, much remains to be learned from the work at Clampitt. The information derived from these excavations has provided the first detailed "glimpse" of Oliver phase settlement in the East Fork White River Valley. What can be concluded at the completion of these preliminary analyses is as follows.
The Clampitt site was the location of a permanent settlement which was occupied sometime between A.D. 1280 and 1400. The village was a minimum of one acre in size and was completely surrounded by at least one wooden post stockade. Evidence of a second or outer stockade line (or ditch) indicated that either multiple defensive enclosures were used simultaneously or at least one episode of rebuilding took place during the period of occupation. The remains of domestic activity areas in the form of pit clusters and post molds were confined to an approximately twenty meter wide band or ring located just within the stockade lines. The central area of the village was nearly devoid of features and artifactual debris which suggested the presence of an open plaza or "dance ground" used for ritual or ceremonial purposes. The presence of one primary human interment as well as scattered (i.e. plow disturbed) fragments of human bone within the stockade enclosure point to the deliberate burial of at least some of the village inhabitants within the limits of the settlement.
Subsistence remains were dominated by maize and supplemented by a few native cultigens. The ubiquity of food crops provided evidence of a subsistence economy focused on horticultural production. Lesser amounts of wild nut and seed remains, as well as a poorly preserved sample of a few species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, documented, at least part-time, involvement in hunting, fishing, and collecting activities.
Seasonal indicators derived from these subsistence remains point to a minimal occupation of the settlement from the late spring through late fall. The construction of below-ground storage pits, if used for concealment of foodstuffs, may indicate periodic (i.e. seasonal?) abandonment of the site by some, or all, of the inhabitants after the growing season.
Material remains recovered from the Clampitt site exhibited a range of forms and functional types that were typical of many late prehistoric societies of the Midcontinent. Globular ceramic cooking and storage vessels, triangular knives and arrow points, stone endscrapers, groundstone manos and celts, and bone hide and woodworking tools of the kinds recovered from the Clampitt site excavations revealed a technology adapted to a mixed hunting, gathering, and farming lifeway not unlike that recorded for settled village populations from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi Valley and beyond.
The primary utilization of relatively local sources of lithic raw material, as well as the lack of obviously "exotic" materials like copper or marine shell point to the absence of interregional trade connections of the kind that flourished between contemporaneous Middle Mississippian societies of the lower Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. Nevertheless, selected stylistic attributes of Clampitt site pottery and lithic technology appear to document some form of "cultural" (and perhaps non- material) exchange with Fort Ancient Tradition populations to the southeast and, to a lesser degree, with Late Woodland "Iroquoian" societies in the lower Great Lakes region.
The nature of the apparent cultural relationships between the Oliver phase
and these two expansive cultural expressions has been a topic of speculation
ever since the Oliver phase was first recognized (Householder 1941, 1945; Dorwin
1971; McCullough 1991). So far, the work carried out at the Clampitt site has
done little to answer these "larger" questions of interregional cultural dynamics.
Even so, new light has been shed on the ways in which one population of late
prehistoric farmers successfully adapted to a sedentary lifestyle in the East
Fork White River Valley of southern Indiana.