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The desert peoples of the Southwest
The Archaic is the archaeologists' name for the period between the big-game hunters and the first farmers, in North America from around 8000 to 1000 BCE. The Archaic period is often presented as an interlude between big-game hunting and farming, but it lasted eight thousand years — longer than all of written history — and it developed a detailed knowledge of an arid landscape that later farming cultures built on directly. Ground stone and milling equipment show an economy that was stable precisely because it was broad-spectrum.
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