Pleistocene Horses in the Archaeological Record: A Focus on the Great Basin

Summary

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

There is a long history of horse exploitation throughout Eurasia; for instance, the Boxgrove site, England (500 kya), the Schöningen site, Germany (350 kya), and numerous Late Pleistocene sites spread across Eurasia (from the Aurignacian thru the Magdalenian 45 kya–15 kya). The evidence suggests that horses were only second in line of importance to reindeer as an animal food source. Yet the only site in North America with definitive evidence of horse hunting/butchering is at Walley’s Beach, Alberta, Canada (blood residue on Clovis tools). Horses proliferated in the Americas during the Pleistocene but vanished from North America 13,100 years ago. There are many instances where horse remains create a background noise in Great Basin rockshelters and caves but with only minimal evidence of human intervention. Is there enough evidence in the Intermountain West to confirm the presence of horse hunters in the west during and possibly before Clovis times? I wish to review the evidence from several sheltered sites in the northwestern Great Basin, particularly Fishbone Cave on the shore of ancient Lake Lahontan, for the importance of horses to the Paleoamericas.

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): 37282.0