The great Pleistocene megafauna were gone or going.

The climate was stabilizing into something closer to modern conditions, though still in flux.

Human communities that had organized their lives around hunting large and now-extinct animals were developing the diversified subsistence strategies that would characterize the Archaic period.

In the eastern United States, the Early Archaic is characterized archaeologically by specific projectile point types — stemmed and notched points that differ from the lanceolate points of the Paleoindian period — and by evidence of increased use of plant foods and aquatic resources.

The communities of the period were mobile but not nomadic in a strictly random sense; they followed established seasonal rounds, returning to productive locations at the appropriate times of year.