New Dates for Bonfire Shelter, a Multicomponent Rockshelter in West Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Bonfire Shelter is a well-known but imperfectly understood multicomponent rockshelter site located in a short tributary canyon of the Rio Grande in West Texas. The site is particularly known for three “bone beds” deposited between about 14,000 and 2,500 BP, two of which appear to represent mass bison kills. Three years of renewed investigation by Texas State University’s Ancient Southwest Texas Project has resulted in new observations on the complex shelter stratigraphy including additional radiocarbon dates. This paper combines new and previous dates with stratigraphic observations in an attempt to generate a chronostratigraphic model that goes beyond the bone beds to include lesser known occupations and deposits in the rockshelter, and to provide a more comprehensive overview of depositional history and site formation at this classic site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32135