Paleoindians Beyond the Edge of the Great Plains: The Water Canyon Site in Western New Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Paleoindian Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Preserved in the complex cut-and-fill stratigraphy of an alluvial fan, the Water Canyon site represents one of the most notable and rare Paleoindian sites in the American Southwest west of the Pecos River for having an in situ, stratified multi-component Paleoindian record. Paleoindian cultures currently represented at the site include Clovis, Folsom, Cody-Eden, probable Allen-Frederick, and an unnamed Late Paleoindian. In addition, the preservation at the site of an extensive buried wetland deposit provides a robust proxy archive for the reconstruction of the paleoenvironment over the terminal Pleistocene-to-early-Holocene transition (~13,100 - ~8300 cal yr BP). Archaeological remains within this deposit currently include two Cody-Eden Bison antiquus bone-beds – one the remnants of a kill with an associated in situ Eden point and the second an open-air processing locale - and an Allen-Frederick era Bison antiquus bone bed (processing area) with associated flaked and ground stone artifacts and an ephemeral hearth. Research challenges include accurate determination of age for Eden kill bone bed in Locus 5 and nature and extent of Clovis processing area in Locus 6.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23670