Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: An Exploration of Lithic Tools and Sources at the Bull Brook Paleoindian Site, Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Summary

The Bull Brook Site in Ipswich, Massachusetts is one of the largest and seemingly most spatially organized Paleoindian sites in North America. The intra-site activity patterning of flaked stone tools helped us to distinguish the site as a large aggregation of inhabitants, as opposed to small occupations taking place over time. The strong pattern of interior and exterior activity differences, or concentric rings of activity, are difficult to explain except by an organized social event. Who then occupied Bull Brook and are different regional groups represented? Analysis of artifact types and lithic materials, together with continued spatial analysis could reveal subtle patterns of rationality. We attempt this question by utilizing the metric attributes of both fluted points and end scrapers and variations in lithic material types as means to identify regional group affiliations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Intrasite Spatial Patterning and the Paleoindian Record of Eastern North America

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16353