Exploring Open-Air Western Stemmed Sites in the Harney Basin, Oregon: A Technological and Chronological Analysis

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.

Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) studies in the Great Basin often emphasize results from cave or rockshelter sites; however, these sites present a very specific occupation type. Studying open-air sites provides a different line of evidence used to expand interpretations of WST lithic technology and subsistence. Several Paleoindian open-air sites with buried WST components have been discovered in the Harney Basin, Oregon, including Weed Lake Ditch, Nials, and Biting Fly; however, initial efforts by the University of Nevada Reno (UNR) in the late 1990s and early 2000s to precisely date these sites were unsuccessful. Since 2017, the Center for the Study of the First Americans has begun efforts to reinvestigate these sites with the goal of establishing their ages, as well as describing and interpreting the geoarchaeological and lithic materials. The research presented here focuses on Weed Lake Ditch (35HA341/35HA342), from which seven Haskett points, six crescents, a bone needle, a stone pendant, a bone bead preform, over forty bifaces and other non-diagnostic tools, and thousands of pieces of debitage and bone were recovered from buried deposits. New radiocarbon dates and lithic technological analysis will be presented as a way to further explore the WST in Oregon.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24864