Bruce Rusch
Telephone: 9784430503
After a successful career as an engineer and CEO in the high-tech hardware and software fields, I chose to embark upon a second career in archaeology and anthropology. The study of Paleo cultures and their settlement patterns has always been an avocational interest. After merging my company in 2006, I chose to embark upon my avocational interest and formally study the field of archaeology by enrolling in a Master’s degree program while participating in excavations and laboratory activities in North America. As a requirement of the Harvard academic program, my thesis focused on the settlement patterns of a Paleoindian site in the white mountains of New Hampshire using quantitative and qualitative lithic modeling techniques.
Eastern North America has one of the largest concentrations of Paleoindian sites found in the United States. Despite this, there have been few broadly documented or published reports of Paleoindian culture and settlement pattern research in the Northeastern region of the country. Based upon my previous research activities at one of the Israel River sites located in Jefferson New Hampshire, I now plan to expand my research activities into a study of the relationship between settlement patterns of a cluster of sites, which I suspect to have been foraging or resource procurement locations, and another large site located 20 to 25 km to the east which may have been the habitation or occupation sites for the foraging expeditions. Because the sites are estimated to be in the occupation date range of 12,500 – 10,000 years BP and the soil acidity a large factor in the decay of organic artifacts, lithic technology framework analysis will play a key role in characterising the sites and developing inferences to guide answers to cultural research questions.
