On the Trail of the Stemmed Point: A Circum-Pacific Perspective

Summary

Half a century ago, Alan Bryan proposed that two distinct early Paleoindian traditions occurred in North America—Clovis Fluted east of the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin Stemmed in the far west—and that these co-traditions potentially represented different founding migrations from the Old World, with Great Basin Stemmed potentially being tied to a coastal north Pacific route. Much of the research that Ruth Gruhn and her partner Bryan conducted during the next several decades, certainly into the 1980s, was devoted to further exploring this theory, for example their excavations at Smith Creek Cave and Handprint Cave in Nevada and Wilson Butte Cave in Idaho, as well as Gruhn’s important essays on the coastal-migration route in 1988 and 1994. Given renewed interest in the co-tradition/co-migration theory today, here we consider the current archaeological and genetic record in light of the following questions: What are the space-time systematics of stemmed points in western North America? Did stemmed points of the Great Basin originate from a Pacific coastal source? How do they relate to the Paleolithic records of Alaska and northeast Asia?

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): 14827