Discerning Paleoindian Mobility in the Eastern Great Basin: A Geochemical Analysis of Lithic Artifacts from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter and Smith Creek Cave

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Lithic technological organization studies and geochemical analyses provide a useful way for archaeologists to examine prehistoric forager mobility. In the Great Basin, these methods, when applied to assemblages from multi-component sites, have revealed diachronic changes in lithic raw material procurement patterns between the Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods; less often, however, has there been an opportunity to explore variation in raw material procurement in coeval Paleoindian assemblages from buried and dated contexts in the same region. In the current study, new and existing geochemical data are compiled from the lithic artifacts from the Paleoindian components of two sites in eastern Nevada, Bonneville Estates Rockshelter and Smith Creek Cave. Both of these assemblages contain Western Stemmed bifacial points and associated debitage, and both are associated with hearth features dating in excess of 12,000 calendar years ago. The results provide important information regarding variability in Paleoindian mobility in the eastern Great Basin - not just the differential conveyance of the various kinds of lithic materials transported to the shelters, but also the duration of occupation at the shelters and the organization of Paleoindian technology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25617