A Fabric and Spatial Analyses of the Artifacts Recovered from the Ryan-Harley Paleoindian Site (8JE1004) in North Florida

Summary

The Ryan-Harley site (8JE1004) is a Suwannee point site located in North Florida along the Wacissa River. Ryan-Harley is significant because it is the only archaeological site in the Southeast United States where diagnostic Suwannee material has been recovered in-situ within a discrete geological layer through extensive excavations. A broad faunal assemblage interpreted as dietary remains was also recovered from the same stratigraphic layer as the Suwannee material. Taxa identified include extinct Pleistocene species such as tapir, horse, giant tortoise, and muskrat.This association relatively dates Ryan-Harley to the terminal Pleistocene, most likely between 10,900 14C yr B.P. to ~10,500 14C yr B.P. The association of lithic and faunal material at the site is critical to the interpretation and proposed age of the site. We examine this association through fabric and spatial analyses of artifacts and faunal material recovered at the Ryan-Harley site to test the null hypothesis that the site represents an intact Suwannee campsite. We compare how cultural material accumulates due to post-depositional processes with how intact archaeological deposits are oriented in space to determine which case compares most favorably to the lithic and faunal material at Ryan-Harley.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21597