Prehistoric Lithic Economies at the Spring Lake Site, San Marcos, Texas

Summary

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

The Spring Lake Site (41HY160) in San Marcos, Texas, has been referred to by archaeologists as one of the longest, most continuously inhabited sites in North America. The diversity of hydrological, biological, and geological resources has made Spring Lake an attractive locale for human groups from the late Pleistocene to today. Archaeological investigations in and around Spring Lake have been on-going since the 1970s and have built a body of evidence to support this assertion. Artifact collections generated during these projects, curated at Texas State University’s Center for Archaeological Studies, contain generous lithic assemblages worthy of analysis and interpretation. The 2002-2006 Field School and 2014 Spring Lake Data Recovery collections provided an exciting opportunity to investigate changes in mobility strategies and lithic technological organization at this site through time. This paper will review preliminary analyses conducted on these lithic assemblages, the results of which point towards a more maintainable and curated toolkit associated with collector strategies during the Early and Middle Archaic and a transition to foraging strategies during the Late Archaic. Implications for the larger understanding of past human behavior at Spring Lake will be discussed, as well as plans for new research objectives and analyses of curated collections.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36556.0