Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Shoulderless stemmed projectile points are among the earliest widespread projectile technologies of Far West North America. In this area, stemmed projectile points first appear during the late Pleistocene and may be coeval with, or predate, the fluted points that appear in many other areas of the continent at this time. By the final centuries of the Pleistocene, stemmed projectile points like the forms of the Far West appear across most of North America from Alaska to Mexico and from the Pacific to Atlantic oceans. Despite the continental span of these point forms, this period in the early human history of the continent has received relatively little research effort compared to the fluted-point period in many regions. This session brings together participants from across the continent highlighting both the vast geographic extent and regional variability of shoulderless stemmed point technologies that appear across much of North America by the Pleistocene–Holocene transition. We hope this session will serve as a “call to action” for expanded research effort into this second continental scale technological radiation across North America.