Bear Creek and the Pacific Northwest Western Stemmed Tradition

Summary

The lithic assemblage from Bear Creek (45KI839), a late Pleistocene-early Holocene site in King County, Washington, is representative of the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST), likely the oldest lithic tradition in most areas west of the Rocky Mountains. It is followed in the Pacific Northwest by the Olcott Tradition. Although some argue that Olcott represents an intrusion from Alaska, archaeological evidence supports in situ development from the WST. In the Great Basin the WST is biface oriented, represented by a relatively standardized reduction sequence present in assemblages across that region. On most of the Columbia Plateau, however, the WST appears to be a core and flake/pseudo blade technology, which is well suited to the reduction of tough, coarse-grained materials so prevalent in that area. Biface reduction is only one of several core reduction strategies represented in the Bear Creek assemblage; others include multidirectional unpatterned, centripetal, and unidirectional core reduction. In this poster we demonstrate that the Bear Creek assemblage identifies more closely with the core and flake/pseudo blade strategy of the Columbia Plateau than the biface-oriented strategy of the Great Basin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paleoarchaic Settlement of the South Salish Sea during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene Transition: A View from Bear Creek (45KI839)   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15898