Blue Canyon, a Clovis Quarry/Workshop and Camp in Central New Mexico

Summary

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

Opportunities to learn more about Clovis technological behavior at lithic material procurement and workshop sites are rare, particularly in the Southwest. The Blue Canyon site is a rare example of such a site—an artifact scatter covering some 16,000 m2 and consisting of Clovis projectile points and preforms, end scrapers, bifaces, and lithic debitage located on BLM land southwest of Socorro, New Mexico. Remarkably, the site contains only Clovis diagnostics. Testing has revealed that the scatter is exposed on and slightly buried within an alluvial fan situated at the base of the Black Canyon quarry, a source of hydrothermally altered rhyolite commonly known as Socorro Jasper, which comprises over 95% of the artifact assemblage. The most abundant nonlocal material is obsidian, occurring in the form of small debitage and cores, which has been geochemically characterized and sheds light on Clovis lithic procurement strategy as well as procurement range. This artifact assemblage suggests that both tool manufacture and replacement, as well as domestic tasks, occurred here. Current research is focused on chemically characterizing the Black Canyon material to better document Clovis procurement and transport of this material use in New Mexico.

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): 37029.0