Folsom and Goshen Technological Organization at Locality I of the Hell Gap Site

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hell Gap at 60: Myth? Reality? What Has It Taught Us?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Chipped stone tools and debitage from the Hell Gap site offer evidence of a wide range of activities such as procurement, manufacture, and use of stone tools. Several features with multiple pieces of chipped stone (piles) excavated from the earliest Paleoindian components at Locality I appear to show different production trajectories, suggesting that a wide range of production stages were carried on. Analysis of the assemblages from these features provide insight into the nature of technological organization of the earliest peoples of North America. One feature, although not containing dense and concentrated debitage, includes eight Folsom channel flakes and two broken preforms, representing a fluting location. Additionally the presence of carnivore bone (a wolf vertebrae), turtle carapace, and ochre suggests ritual associated with Folsom fluting. The 1960s Hell Gap investigations delineated a number of stone tool production features (flake piles), but individual specimens could not be assigned to a specific feature for assemblage analysis. The advantage of our excavation protocols is that they allow for the selection of specimens contained in piles. In this presentation I compare several production events from early Paleoindian components.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Hell Gap at 60: Myth? Reality? What Has It Taught Us?

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24766