Migration Terminus? Late Pleistocene/and Early Holocene Archaeology at Rock Creek Mortar Shelter, Upper Cumberland Plateau, Tennessee

Summary

Rock Creek Mortar Shelter (40Pt209), in Pickett State Forest on the Upper Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee, possesses a more or less continuous 11,600 year occupation history. This history may be consistent with previous ideas of first colonization of upland rock shelter zones at the end of the Younger Dryas with significant climatic amelioration. However, we have not yet encountered culturally sterile deposits and believe the site may be older still. We focus here on the late Pleistocene and early Holocene components paying particular attention to unifacial and blade tool technology, use-wear analysis, and depositional history. Variability in blade production during the late Pleistocene deposits suggests a residentially mobile family group. It could also represent the colonizers’ struggles with adapting a blade tool technology to the locally abundant small, rounded Monteagle chert cobbles. We present our current understanding of the site based in our field work through January 2015.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage