Hot Spots of Cobblestone Tool Reduction Incidents and Potential Chronological Staging of the Technology along California's Lower Colorado River Shorelines

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Spatial autocorrelation software for the Moran I statistic in ArcGIS v10.6 was used to combine archaeological site location data with “intensity” or weight defined by the number of artifacts in each of the 280 loci contained within an 80-acre portion of CA-SBr-1456 along the California side of the Lower Colorado River. That data was then processed to create a spatial weight matrix to determine any non-random distribution of similar loci defined by types of prehistoric features and artifacts, 254 of which represent one of four stone tool manufacturing technologies, likely from different time periods. The “Local Moran’s I” (Anselin et al. 1996) cluster and outlier analytic tool was then applied to determine any existence of “hot spots” or clusters. The analysis revealed clustering of cobblestone tool reduction remains that may be used to define site boundaries and that also revealed a patterned distribution of this prehistoric technology. The observed patterning hints at chronological staging on various benchmarks of the river shoreline. The findings are limited by the project acreage; future studies/assessments involving similar analysis could build evidence and a chronology of Paleocoastal human expansion into North American’s interior via the Colorado River.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36266.0