Breckenridge Shelter, Arkansas and the Younger Dryas

Summary

Excavations by W. Raymond Wood and then by Ronald A. Thomas first exposed late glacial/early post-glacial archaeology in 1961 and 1962. In 2012 renewed excavations by Arkansas Archeological Survey personnel re-exposed 1960s test units of up to 3m thickness to further evaluate the unusually deep deposit and its stratigraphy; and to collect sediment, associated artifacts, and radiocarbon samples. Compared to Rodgers Shelter and Big Eddy, two well-dated alluvial archaeological sites in the western Ozark Highland of Missouri, Breckenridge Shelter is clearly of similar antiquity but represents a high hill slope setting within the White River drainage. The basal talus cone of Breckenridge Shelter is reminiscent of the one at Rodgers Shelter, is capped by massive roof collapse that sealed artifacts and hearth features from later Holocene colluvium, and supports the earliest of two buried soils. Basal Breckenridge Shelter likely defines a Younger Dryas encampment, or encampments, by people who used two discrete technological systems--Dalton and Packard—that reflect the last of fluted and western stemmed point traditions in North America.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Human adaptations to environmental change during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene - Part 2

Keywords

Spatial Coverage