Stemmed Points from Nevada Caves

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.

The lack of a comprehensive and sound geochronology of Paleoindian sites in the Great Basin has long been a stumbling block for explaining variability in Western Stemmed points and their relationship with Clovis. Open-air sites are often undatable or present conflicting radiocarbon dates, while stratified records from caves and rockshelters are often mixed from biogenic or anthropogenic post-depositional processes. In this paper we present new information on the geochronologies and/or stemmed-point assemblages from three important rockshelter sites: Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, Smith Creek Cave, and Handprint Cave. Bonneville Estates and Smith Creek Cave contain records of Haskett stemmed points that approach and even overlap the age of Clovis elsewhere in the western US, while the previously identified stemmed point from Handprint Cave is better labeled as a middle Holocene Humboldt point form. Details on raw-material procurement, technology, and function of the Haskett points from Bonneville Estates and Smith Creek Cave are presented, and these findings are placed in the broader context of Paleoindian variability in the intermountain west.

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): 24183