An Overview of the Distribution of Clovis/Great Basin Concave Base Projectile Point Sites at Fort Irwin, San Bernardino County, California

Summary

Fort Irwin is a United States Army installation located approximately 37 miles northeast of Barstow, California, in the central Mojave Desert. Totaling 1,193 square miles in size, this installation has a wide variety of archaeological resources including at least four sites with recorded Clovis/Great Basin Concave Base projectile points and several isolated finds identified as Clovis points. The goal of this study, conducted by Redhorse Corporation on behalf of the Fort Irwin Cultural Resources Program, is to integrate data on these projectile points from a variety of legacy collections, academic publications, and cultural resources management reports with new data from Fort Irwin’s archaeological collections into a GIS layer. In this paper, we will provide an overview of the distribution of Paleoindian points within various landscapes at Fort Irwin, particularly focusing on resource exploitation. Compiling this data into a GIS layer that can be used to investigate a variety of research questions is the first step in Redhorse’s plan to build a geodatabase that features a layer on each of the Mojave Desert chronological periods represented at Fort Irwin with the ultimate goal of providing a tool that can be useful to researchers and land managers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage