Stemmed Points and ‘Expedient Stone Tools’: early post-glacial archaeology on the BC coast.

Summary

Over 35 years ago Al Bryan and Ruth Gruhn were promoting the concept of a very early ‘Stemmed Point Tradition’ associated with ‘simple’ flake and core tools. They saw this ‘Far West’ area construct as being of similar age to Clovis and possibly even older. Al and Ruth were keenly interested in the assemblages of stemmed points and ‘expedient stone tools’ recovered by Fedje and others from a series of sites in the Eastern Slopes region of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in the 1980s, an interest Fedje carried on to the BC Coast.

Over the past decade we have been finding increasingly strong evidence for an early ‘Stemmed Point and expedient tool’ technology, with many elements in common with Al and Ruth’s ideas, at a number of locations along the West Coast of British Columbia. This presentation provides a brief synopsis of the results of some of these investigations, including recent work in Haida Gwaii, the Central Coast and the South Coast.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Alternative Perspectives on the Peopling of the New World: A Symposium in Honor of Ruth Gruhn, the "First Lady" of First Americans Studies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16396