They were part of exchange networks that extended across the continent.

They were burying their dead with care and ritual attention that reflects a sophisticated cosmological understanding.

They were also, in some ways, managing resources that were still in flux.

The ecosystems they inhabited were stabilizing after the Pleistocene collapse, but they were not yet in the stable configurations that would characterize the middle and late Archaic.

The specific balance of resources available — the populations of deer, the productivity of the rivers, the distribution of plant food species — was still shifting.

The people who navigated this transition successfully — the populations that survived and persisted through the early Archaic — were the ancestors, in the population-level sense, of everyone who came after them in these landscapes.