These middens represent hundreds or thousands of years of intermittent use — groups returning to the same locations season after season, decade after decade, century after century, building up the debris of their cooking fires into mounds that are still visible on the landscape today.

The people who built those middens were not nomads in the chaotic sense of random wandering.

They were following established seasonal rounds, moving between known locations in a planned sequence tied to the availability of different resources at different times of year.

They knew their landscapes as intimately as any people who have ever lived in them.

They had mental maps of water sources, of plant food distributions, of game movement patterns, of the locations of good flint for tool-making.

They also had social networks that extended far beyond their immediate territories.