The Ages of Stemmed and Fluted Points in the Northwestern Plains and Rocky Mountains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While the relative and absolute ages of fluted and stemmed points remain unclear in the Great Basin, particularly in the earliest periods of prehistory, to the northeast in Wyoming the archaeological record is unambiguous. Fluted points are consistently older than stemmed points, an observation supported by both absolute and relative dating of multiple localities. In this paper, I review the archaeological evidence for the chronology of stemmed and fluted points in the Northwestern Plains and Rocky Mountains, but ultimately argue that patterns we see in neighboring areas may not be relevant to the culture history of the Great Basin. Therefore, this problem in Great Basin prehistory may be one where sample sizes are not yet sufficient to provide a clear answer.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23849