Searching for the Early Archaeological Record in the Big Bend Region of Southwest Texas: A Lithostratigraphic Approach

Summary

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Kirk Bryan and Claude C. Albritton Jr. studied the stratigraphy of late Quaternary alluvial fills in the Chihuahuan Desert of the Big Bend region, southwest Texas. A significant outcome of that work was the recognition of three stratigraphic units that were differentiated based on lithologic properties, especially color and carbonate morphology. They referred to those units as the Kokernot, Calamity, and Neville formations and used them to place the regional archaeological record into stratigraphic contexts. Recently, I reinvestigated and expanded Bryan and Albritton’s work in order to develop a formal lithostratigraphic framework for Holocene and terminal Pleistocene alluvium in Big Bend. The formations established by Bryan and Albritton, plus an additional lithologically distinct body of sediment, are now formal members of a single lithostratigraphic unit: the Lykes Formation. The oldest member is the Neville, which aggraded between 14.1 and 7 ka. Buried paleosols in the Neville represent former stable geomorphic surfaces with high potential for containing Paleoindian and Early Archaic cultural deposits. Hence, the development of a lithostratigraphic framework has created a powerful tool for determining where the early archaeological record is likely to occur in stream valleys of the Big Bend region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37317.0