One Hundred and Fifty Shades of Projectile Points: 10,000 Years of Land Use and Early Agricultural Lithic Technology in the Far West

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We present current and on-going research on ten thousand years of land use through projectile points in the Far Western Region, defined here as the northern Grand Canyon region and the Colorado Plateau-Great Basin transitional zone. The 2023 Kane wildfire on the North Kaibab Ranger District of the Kaibab National Forest burned 2,934 acres of Pinyon-Juniper woodlands exposing dozens of previously unrecorded archaeological sites. One site, AR03070304136, is a roughly 3-acre multicomponent site extending from the late Paleoamerican Period into the Protohistoric period that minimally encompasses 150 identified projectile points and hundreds of bifacial tools. Basketmaker II dart points from the Early Agricultural Period comprise a large proportion of the identified projectile points. This poster characterizes site AR03070304136 and compares the Basketmaker II points with collections from other Far Western Early Agricultural sites. Our preliminary data show similar manufacturing methods and quantitative metrics between Far Western Early Agricultural points and Western Basketmaker II points of northeastern Arizona and southwestern Utah.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53804