Chipped Stone Results from Four Lowland Virgin Branch Puebloan Sites

Summary

The Yamashita sites are four Virgin Branch Puebloan sites in southern Nevada dating between the early Pueblo II (AD 1000-1050) and the Pueblo III period (AD 1200-1300). This poster summarizes the chipped stone tool and debitage data collected from the sites. The goals of this project were to examine what the chipped stone tool and debitage site assemblages revealed in regard to lithic technology organization.  As sedentary settlements with a horticultural subsistence, the expectation was that the chipped stone would show increased expedient technology and a more diversified tool assemblages. Yet, results indicated that persistent chipped stone technological design choices were implemented in tool production, which did not conform to expected patterns of chipped stone manufacture and use. Tool assemblages were overwhelmingly the result of the manufacture and maintenance of biface technology. Debitage data supported this, showing high proportions of biface maintenance and retouch. As bifaces tend to be the main tool type for mobile populations, as tools associated with risk-management, time-intensive to produce but made to be dependable, analysis of these assemblages possibly suggests that social conditioners of tool preference superseded environmental and economic choices involved in tool design regardless of accessible high quality raw material and sedentism.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage