Investigating Prehistoric Land Use History and Place Use Variability with Low Density Surface Scatters of Stone Artifacts in the Oglala National Grassland, Northwestern Nebraska

Summary

The USDA Forest Service National Grassland System consists of 20 individual native and restored prairie grasslands. While the scale of these areas allows landscape survey, this ‘sea of grass’ is a challenge for artifact and feature discovery due to vegetation cover, meaning archaeologists must use surface visibility created by erosion, deflation, and other natural and anthropogenic processes. Here we report on a collaborative student-training project between the Forest Service and the University of Nebraska on the Oglala National Grassland in far northwestern Nebraska. A record of low-density lithic scatters permits assessment of movement and land use history in different locations throughout the grassland. Using raw material variability, measures of reduction intensity, and cortex proportions, we assess in-flow of non-local and out-flow of local materials, and discuss the implication of this pattern for understanding the organization of lithic technology in this environment, and how spatial variation in this process relates to a deep history of landscape structure and land use.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22185