The Blue Canyon Site, A Clovis Quarry and Camp in Central New Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 1" session, at the 90th 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 the surface of 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 percent of the total 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.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52365