Using Landscape Learning to Explore Diachronic Change within the Western Stemmed Tradition

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) spanned as much as 5,000 years in the Great Basin. However, due to deflationary erosion, more refined control within this wide temporal range remains elusive. Thus, temporally sequencing WST sites, subtypes, and their diagnostic artifacts is currently difficult, often unattainable, and leaves Great Basin archaeologists with few traditional methods for constructing a WST point chronology. Without a means to date many WST sites, some of the most important questions about the human colonization of, and adaptation to, a vast expanse of the arid west have gone unanswered. To help address these problems, my research explores a new method for the chronological ordering of WST sites and for establishing a WST stemmed point chronology. This research employs models of landscape learning, which consider how human colonizers of a new land collectively acquire and share knowledge about their new environment, specifically regarding toolstone acquisition and usage, and creates new methodologies for quantifying the prominence, or discoverability, of lithic resources on the landscape. This approach should allow the detection of a continuum of landscape learning over time, a continuum that should allow WST sites to be ordered in time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32250