New Investigations of Bone Bed 1, Bonfire Shelter: A High-Resolution Analysis of Late Pleistocene Deposits

Summary

This paper reports the results of new excavations of Late Pleistocene deposits at Bonfire Shelter, a stratified rockshelter in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Val Verde County, Texas. Previous excavations identified three bone deposits. Bone Bed 1, the oldest deposit, yielded a single uncalibrated radiocarbon date of 12,460 +/- 490 BP. Investigators in the 1960s and 1980s argued that the patterned distribution of megafaunal elements associated with large limestone cobbles in Bone Bed 1 suggests human subsistence activity. However, no formal artifacts were recovered. Mounting evidence for earlier than Clovis occupations elsewhere in Texas, combined with advances in dating technology and spatial analysis, catalyzed new research into Bonfire Shelter’s deepest deposits. In the summer of 2017, Texas State University archaeologists excavated a 3x1m2 trench into intact Bone Bed 1 deposits. A three-tiered approach was implemented to identify evidence of human activity: targeted sampling for microdebitage in association with Pleistocene megafauna, a Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry based spatial analysis of faunal remains, and a column sample addressing the depositional environment of the shelter over 12,000 radiocarbon years ago. If human activity is confirmed, these analyses have the potential to elucidate the subsistence strategies of southern Texas’s earliest inhabitants.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21388