New perspectives on Native American occupation of the Puget Lowlands of Washington during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene transition from the Bear Creek Site (45KI839).

Summary

The Bear Creek site (45KI839) in Redmond, Washington has yielded important information about Native American settlement, subsistence, and technology in the Puget Lowlands during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene transition. This poster presents new data on radiocarbon and optically-stimulated luminescence dating, paleoenvironmental reconstruction, and lithic analysis conducted as part of the 2013 data recovery investigation. New dates contribute to an age model that places the initial archaeological component prior to 10,000 cal BP. Occupation of this lacustrine shoreline ended by the early Holocene as the position of the shoreline shifted and the local environment became a wetland. The lithic assemblage, comprising over 5,000 artifacts in all, is dominated by an expedient flake technology, but also contains bifaces, retouched tools, and associated debitage. Analysis focuses on procurement strategies of local volcanic and metasedimentary cobbles and extra-local materials, production sequence of flake tools, and technological comparisons of the Bear Creek stemmed and concave-base points with Paleoarchaic technologies of Western North America including Clovis, Western-Stemmed, and Olcott traditions. Microwear and residue analysis of a portion of the assemblage suggest potential functions of the site occupants’ toolkits.

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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