Smith Creek Cave Revisited: An Analysis of Western Stemmed Tradition Raw-Material Procurement Strategies and Lithic Technological Organization in the Bonneville Basin

Summary

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

At the time of its initial discovery by Alan Bryan nearly fifty years ago, the Mount Moriah occupation at Smith Creek Cave was one of the oldest in the Great Basin and played a critical role in establishing the terminal-Pleistocene age of stemmed-point technology in western North America. Today, what is now known as the Western Stemmed Tradition has been dated to this interval at several sites, and much attention has now been turned to the behaviors this technology represents, with particular emphasis on how early peoples in the Great Basin settled and operated within the region. In this effort, Smith Creek Cave still has much to contribute. As part of an on-going reinvestigation of the curated Smith Creek Cave assemblage, this study examines the lithic materials, incorporating approaches from raw-material and lithic-technological analysis to inform on the settlement strategies employed by the site’s earliest occupants, and helps further contextualize emerging patterns of mobility distinguished at a growing number of sites in the local Bonneville Basin and broader Great Basin at large.

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): 37437.0