High-Tech Foragers? - Springer Link

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Journal of World Prehistory [jowo]

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Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

C 2002) Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2002 (°

High-Tech Foragers? Folsom and Later Paleoindian Technology on the Great Plains1 Douglas B. Bamforth2

Archaeologists generally argue that early (ca. 11,000–8000 B.P.) populations on the North American Great Plains moved over very large areas, relying on sophisticated, biface-based flaked stone technology and on extensive resharpening and recycling of tools to cope with unpredictable access to raw material sources. This paper reviews the development of this reconstruction and considers the degree to which data from assemblages of Paleoindian flaked stone tools support it. Published information implies that patterns of raw material use vary greatly over the Plains, that bifaces were not the centerpiece of Paleoindian technology, that there are no published efforts to document an unusual degree of resharpening or recycling, and that the data that are available on these topics do not suggest that either was important. Detailed analysis of one assemblage, from the Allen site in southwestern Nebraska, carried out with these issues in mind, shows similar patterns. The great difference between what the literature says about Paleoindian technology and the documented character of that technology suggests that Paleoindian lifeways were far more variable than current discussions suggest. KEY WORDS: Paleoindian; Folsom; lithic technology; Great Plains; mobility.

North American archaeology is substantially hunter–gatherer archaeology: food production came late to the continent, and in some areas did not appear until European contact. Of the range of hunter–gatherer ways of life documented in North America, though, that dated to the earliest, 1A

very short version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Philadelphia in April 2000, in a session entitled “From Coups de Poing to Clovis: Multiple Approaches to Biface Variability,” chaired by Harold Dibble and Marie Soressi. 2 Anthropology Department, University of Colorado, CB 233, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0233; E-mail: [email protected]. 55 C 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation 0892-7537/02/0300-0055/0 °

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or Paleoindian, period (11,800–8000 radiocarbon years B.P.; Holliday, 2000) is the most widely recognized. The archaeology of this period has received perhaps the greatest attention on the Great Plains, where the early human occupation of North America was first identified. Sites dated to the earliest portion of this period on the Plains, the Clovis period (11,800–10,800 B.P.), are extremely rare, but later parts of the period are better documented. Archaeological research into post-Clovis Paleoindian ways of life on the Plains is dominated by studies of flaked stone tools and faunal material (particularly bison bone). This paper focuses on the first of these, arguing that widely accepted interpretations of the organization and adaptive significance of Paleoindian lithic technology are inconsistent with the character of Paleoindian assemblages and that recognizing this has important implications for understanding Paleoindian ways of life on the Plains. To address these issues, I first briefly summarize the current synthesis of these ways of life and the development of current perspectives on Paleoindian flaked stone technology that are integral to this synthesis. I then discuss the currently available data from the Plains on this topic at two levels. First, I examine published assemblage-level data from Paleoindian sites on the Plains. Second, because these studies often report important information incompletely, I consider one specific assemblage, from the Allen site in southwestern Nebraska, in more detail.

CURRENT VIEWS OF PALEOINDIANS ON THE PLAINS Our current understanding of Plains Paleoindian ways of life rests primarily on analyses of faunal remains and flaked stone tools, the two major classes of cultural material recovered from Paleoindian sites. Because these two classes of material have played very different roles in the development of this understanding, I consider them separately here.

Post-Clovis Plains Paleoindian Lifeways Paleoindian faunal analysis has particularly emphasized detailed studies of bison bone beds that appear to represent cooperative efforts to take entire herds of animals. Such bone beds are known throughout the western Plains, and tend to share a number of distinctive features (see Bement [1999], Frison [1982a], Hill [2001], and McCartney [1991] for summaries; also see Frison [1974], Stanford [1978], Wheat [1972]). For example, Paleoindian hunters appear to have rarely reused specific localities for their large kills:

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in contrast to recent periods of time when kill sites were used over and over for centuries (i.e., Kehoe, 1973; Reher and Frison, 1980), Paleoindian bone beds tend to represent single kills or very small numbers of kills. In keeping with this evidence for rare reuse of kill locations, corrals and drive lines like those used in recent times to control bison herds during communal drives are also unknown in Paleoindian kills. In addition, studies of tooth eruption and wear indicate that most Paleoindian kills, and particularly those on the Northwestern Plains, were carried out most often in the winter. Furthermore, these kills show no evidence for intensive processing of carcasses: frequent finds of large unbutchered parts of animals (often of entire articulated skeletons) imply that Paleoindian hunters left substantial portions of the animals they killed unused. An absence of evidence for patterned bone breakage also indicates that Paleoindian butchers did not make any substantial efforts to obtain marrow or bone grease (Todd, 1987). Paleoindian research also relies heavily on studies of flaked stone tools. Paleoindian stoneworking is marked by extremely finely made, large, lanceolate projectile points, and many other Paleoindian tools, particularly bifaces, exhibit similar degrees of technical sophistication and aesthetic quality; in contrast, more recent stone technology on the Plains generally lacks this sophistication (Bradley, 1991; Hayden, 1982). As Goodyear (1989) pointed out, Paleoindian flintknappers often selected homogeneous, fine-grained, easily flakeable stone and neglected less workable material even when it was locally available and widely used in later periods of time. Most Paleoindian sites contain at least some stone from distant raw material sources, and Paleoindian archaeologists have emphasized transport of such stone over long distances (Hofman et al., 1991; Wilmsen, 1974). Paleoindian tools, particularly projectile points, also sometimes show evidence of resharpening and of recycling from one form to another (Wheat, 1979; Wilmsen and Roberts, 1984). Kelly and Todd’s synthesis of the character of early Paleoindian (on the Plains, this period is referred to as “Clovis”) ways of life in North America in general drew extensively on these patterns, as well as on data from other regions (Kelly and Todd, 1988). Plains archaeologists typically extend Kelly and Todd’s arguments to the entire Paleoindian period. This synthesis sees the presence of exotic stone in Paleoindian sites as evidence of group movement over very large territories, and interprets the lack of reuse of kill sites as evidence for an unpredictable pattern of land use in which specific locations were rarely occupied more than once and residential groups shifted their ranges very frequently. Incomplete use of kills is taken as evidence for continuous movement from kill to kill, with a search for a new herd to attack commencing as soon as a successful kill was made. The concentration of large kills in the winter (Bement, 1999; Frison, 1982a; McCartney, 1991)

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is difficult to accommodate to this argument, and Todd et al. (1990) suggest that it may result from taphonomic factors, although no such factors have been identified. A more straightforward inference is that communal hunting was primarily a cold-season activity throughout the Plains (also see Bement, 1999), although such an inference does not fit well with the prevailing synthesis. The remainder of this paper thus summarizes current views of Paleoindian technology linked to this interpretation of the overall pattern of Paleoindian land use and briefly considers the development of these views over the latter half of the twentieth century. It then turns to assess these views against what is known about Plains Paleoindian assemblages, first considering the published data and then turning to focus on one specific site, the Allen site in southwestern Nebraska.

HIGH-TECH FORAGERS Most current research argues that Paleoindian technology was designed to economize raw material in the face of uncertain access to quarries by extending the use lives of tools and designing tools for multiple uses: for example, bifaces are widely argued to have been used as cores as well as tools. Drawing on Goodyear’s (1989) arguments, archaeologists generally link the sophistication of Paleoindian stoneworking to the production of long use life, multifunctional implements designed to be recycled from one form to another. Many Paleoindian stone tools are thought to have been manufactured near raw material sources and transported as essentially finished pieces, while bifaces are argued to have been partially reduced for transport and used first as cores and later as blanks for finished knives or projectile points. This pattern—often referred to as “segmented” (or “serially segmented”) reduction (Ingbar, 1994; Lothrop, 1989; Nelson, 1990)—is seen as a way to reduce the weight of the transported toolkit while ensuring access to tools in the face of uncertain access to raw material sources resulting from unpredictable movements within very large territories. In this view of Paleoindians as “high-technology foragers” (Kelly and Todd, 1988, p. 239), these three characteristics (reliance on easily flakeable stone, extension of tools’ use lives by careful design and recycling, and reduction of the weight of the transported toolkit by producing tools in advance of use and relying on bifacial cores as sources of new tools and for later reduction into finished tools) form a fairly tightly integrated set of responses to very low human population densities and to the unusual circumstances of the Late Pleistocene/early Holocene North American environment.

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The Development of the High-Tech Forager Hypothesis This view of Paleoindian technology grows substantially out of work on sites in the northeastern part of North America; for much of the twentieth century, Paleoindian research on the Great Plains focused more on problems of chronology and typology than on higher level synthesis. Witthoft’s work at the Shoop site in eastern Pennsylvania (Witthoft, 1952) and MacDonald’s work at the Debert site in Nova Scotia (MacDonald, 1968) have been particularly important in this context. Witthoft’s analysis contains the seeds of much of the high-tech forager hypothesis. Shoop is a surface site that was intensively collected by both amateurs and professionals over a number of years, producing a collection of some 900 artifacts, including nearly 50 fluted points and hundreds of end and side scrapers. The great majority of this collection is made from Onondaga chert that occurs naturally in western New York, more than 300 km from the site. Witthoft suggested that this could reflect the occupation of the site by the earliest migrants into the area, prior to their discovery of local flint sources (although the presence in the collection of a small number of fluted point preforms made from more local stone is inconsistent with this argument). His analysis also documented, albeit impressionistically, great differences between the Shoop assemblage and later assemblages from eastern Pennsylvania in raw material use, technology, and typology. He also argued that the tiny size of the unmodified flakes from the site and the high rates of apparently used and retouched pieces indicate intensive use of raw material. Finally, Witthoft identified clear typological similarities (clear, at least, by the standards of his day) between Shoop and other eastern sites in Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia, and argued for partial typological similarities between the Shoop collection and the early collections from Cape Denbigh, Alaska, and Lindenmeier, Colorado. His discussion of other eastern sites also notes the presence of nonlocal stone—often of unknown origin—in all of the assemblages he examined. At Debert, MacDonald (1968) confirmed a number of Witthoft’s observations, modified some of his arguments, and added several important interpretations. As at Shoop, the Debert assemblage was made almost entirely from nonlocal material, obtained in this case approximately 50–100 km to the west of the site. Debert also showed strong typological similarities to Shoop, particularly in scraper types. However, MacDonald also identified “pièces esquillées” (splintered pieces) as a major component of the collection, and argued that Witthoft had mistaken similar artifacts at Shoop for the exhausted remnants of blade cores (although Meltzer [personal communication, 2001] notes that there are true blades in the Shoop assemblage). Pièces esquillées at Debert appear to have been made on several

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kinds of blanks, including flakes, core fragments, and exhausted end scrapers. MacDonald also argued that a small number of large bifaces at Debert were used as cores and that the flakes driven from them were commonly used as blanks for side scrapers, with the bifaces themselves ultimately being reduced into fluted points or knives. He suggested that such a pattern was wellsuited to lifeways involving extensive movements away from raw material sources. Witthoft’s and MacDonald’s work thus outlined much of the basic framework for the modern synthesis. This work reconstructs a pattern of long-distance transport of high-quality raw material and similarities in artifact style and technology over large areas, possibly the entire continent. The basic technology that many archeologists have inferred from these data involves fairly efficient use of raw material, with this efficiency evident in heavy resharpening of at least some tool categories, examples of tool recycling, and use of bifaces both as cores and as blanks for tools. Goodyear (1989) drew much of this evidence together by arguing that exotic stone in Paleoindian assemblages implied movement over very large territories, that the efficient use of stone was a response to this, and that reliance on highquality raw material reflected a need for easily flakeable stone to ensure that it would be possible to craft well-designed tools and recycle them from one form to another. Goodyear particularly focused on pièces esquillées as evidence of recycling, viewing them as exhausted tools reduced by bipolar percussion into small cores. Finally, Goodyear explicitly extended this reconstruction to the Paleoindian period in all of North America, relying, in part, on observations of exotic stone in Plains Paleoindian sites. Kelly and Todd’s synthesis (Kelly and Todd, 1988) grew naturally from these arguments. At least some subsequent studies, though, paint a somewhat different picture of eastern Paleoindian technology. First, Meltzer (1989) examined raw material frequencies in 29 eastern assemblages and found that, with the exception of Shoop, evidence for long-distance transport of significant quantities of stone is limited to the glaciated portions of the northeast (Witthoft [1952], in fact, noted that the pattern of raw material use at Shoop is profoundly different from that represented in collections of fluted points from the region around the site). In unglaciated areas of the east, there is little or no evidence that more than very small quantities of stone moved any great distance. As Meltzer showed (also see Ingbar, 1994), interpreting raw material frequencies is not straightforward, but, at minimum, the pattern he documents indicates that there was substantial regional variation in important aspects of Paleoindian ways of life. More recently, Tankersley (1998) documented substantial variation in the frequencies of nonlocal raw material among eastern fluted point sites.

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Second, Lothrop (1989) systematically assessed patterns of tool production and recycling at the Potts site in New York, and presented data on these issues from five other sites as well. Lothrop’s analysis documented a pattern of production of bifaces for use as tools, not as cores, and predominant reliance on nonbifacial cores. He also noted that pièces esquillées, the class of artifact that is most often argued to represent tool recycling (i.e., Gramly, 1982), are rare or absent on many northeastern Paleoindian sites. Interestingly, all of Lothrop’s sites are located in the glaciated region of the Northeast where exotic stone tended to be transported long distances; even in this area, where long-distance movements may have been particularly common, bifacial cores were not widely used. The different patterns outlined by these studies highlight two distinct approaches to examining Paleoindian assemblages. On one hand, the studies that are most central to the development of the high-tech forager model tend to rely on selective evidence pertaining to the most distinctive aspects of Paleoindian technology and rarely make systematic assemblage-level intersite comparisons. This approach to Paleoindian technology follows a common pattern in which archaeologists emphasize the differences between Paleoindian and later ways of life and tend to highlight the most distinctive aspects of Paleoindian technology as part of this; Witthoft (1952) exemplifies this very clearly. For example, neither Witthoft nor Goodyear drew any distinction between sites like Shoop, whose assemblage is overwhelmingly composed of exotic stone, and sites with mixtures of local and exotic material; implicitly or not, these authors simply cite the presence of exotics as evidence of group movement over long distances. The increasing technical sophistication of lithic analysis over the past three decades also has implications for many early studies, as MacDonald’s argument (MacDonald, 1968) that Witthoft failed to recognize pièces esquillées illustrates. Similarly, MacDonald’s bifacial cores are difficult to distinguish from midstage biface rejects, and it is not clear how he identified the uses to which flakes struck from such “cores” were put. Goodyear (1989, p. 8) also notes the absence of systematic studies of tool recycling, but subsequent research has continued to rely on his arguments without making any significant attempt to address this gap in the literature. In fact, pièces esquillées are not necessarily recycled tools in all cases: many archaeologists interpret them as wedges rather than as cores (Meltzer, 1988). In contrast, Meltzer’s and Lothrop’s more detailed syntheses of data from whole assemblages outline a richer and more variable picture of Paleoindian technology than previous analyses have provided and indicate clearly that the eastern data do not uniformly fit the expectations of the hightech forager hypothesis. Data from the Great Plains yield similar conclusions.

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PLAINS PALEOINDIAN ASSEMBLAGES Most analyses of Paleoindian flaked stone technology on the Plains are rooted in the high-tech forager perspective, and it is useful to contrast these analyses with work on Paleoindian faunal material. We may debate the interpretation of the patterns in the data from bison bone beds, but it is clear that these data derive from detailed, systematic studies of whole collections of bones from substantial excavations. In contrast, characterizations of Paleoindian technology and raw material use rest on relatively few analyses of whole excavated assemblages, and on no assemblage-level analyses that systematically test the reconstructions at issue here. Instead, Plains Paleoindian lithic analysis focuses extensively on the technically most sophisticated artifacts available, particularly projectile points and large (and extremely uncommon) bifaces, and devotes correspondingly less attention to other classes of tools. Furthermore, many Paleoindian sites are known only as surface scatters of artifacts, and the absence of clear context in such sites limits analysis at any level; this problem is most severe for analyses that rely on surface collections of isolated artifacts. To an even greater extent than in the east, then, widely accepted descriptions of Paleoindian technology rest on incomplete data: for example, assertions that Paleoindian tools were often recycled from one form to another derive from anecdotal evidence rather than systematic attempts to examine this issue using whole assemblages. In contrast, this paper focuses on the published assemblage-level data from the Plains. Table I lists the sites that have contributed information to the discussion below, distinguishing between Folsom and later sites; Fig. 1 shows the locations of these sites within the Plains. Although I sometimes rely here on data from bison kill site assemblages as sources of information on some aspects of Paleoindian technology, I exclude such sites from other sections of the discussion, particularly the discussion of raw material use. Bison kill sites represent a very limited portion of the range of activities in which Paleoindians made and used tools, and this is reflected in the domination of assemblages from such sites by a single class of artifacts: projectile points. In contrast to the great majority of Paleoindian sites, which in most cases represent the aggregate results of multiple occupations on a living surface, large bison kills often also represent single events or very small numbers of very closely spaced events. One implication of this is that the assemblages from such sites are very likely to represent the work on a very small number of flintknappers, probably the most skilled knappers in a community, as I discuss elsewhere (Bamforth, 1991a). Comparing such a site with more general activity sites can thus be problematic. This is particularly true because, as the later discussion documents, projectile point collections from more general activity sites

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Table I. Sites Providing Information for This Paper (See Fig. 1 for Site Locations) Site Folsom or Contemporary 1. Adair–Steadman 2. Agate Basin 3. Allen

Culture-historical association Folsom Folsom none

4. Blackwater Draw

Folsom

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Folsom Folsom Folsom Folsom Folsom

Bobtail Wolf/Big Black Carter/Kerr–McGee Cooper Elida Hanson

10. Hell Gap

Folsom/Goshen

11. Lake Theo 12. Lindenmeier 13. Lubbock Lake

Folsom Folsom Folsom

14. Mill Iron 15. Shifting Sands Late Paleoindian 2. Agate Basin 3. Allen

Goshen Folsom

4. 6. 16. 17. 10. 18. 19. 20.

Blackwater Draw Carter/Kerr–McGee Cherokee Sewer Dempsey Divide Hell Gap Horner Jurgens Lime Creek

13. Lubbock Lake 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

MacHaffie Packard Plainview Pumpkin Creek Ray Long Red Smoke

27. Rex Rodgers 28. Ryan’s Cache

Key references Tunnell, 1977 Frison and Stanford, 1982 Bamforth, 1999 Bamforth and Becker, 2000 Boldurian, 1990 Hester, 1972 Root, 2000; William, 2000 Frison, 1984 Bement, 1999 Hester, 1962 Frison and Bradley, 1980 Ingbar, 1992 Irwin-Williams et al., 1973 Sellet, 1999 Harrison and Smith, 1975 Wilmsen and Roberts, 1984 Bamforth, 1985 Johnson, 1987 Frison, 1996 Hofman et al., 1991

Agate Basin/Hell Gap none

Frison and Stanford, 1982 Bamforth, 1999 Bamforth and Becker, 2000 multiple Hester, 1972 Agate Basin/Hell Gap/Cody Frison, 1984 none Anderson, 1980 multiple Thurmond, 1990 Cody Knell, 1999 Cody Frison and Todd, 1987 Cody Wheat, 1979 Cody Bamforth, 1999 Davis, 1954, 1962 Plainview/Firstview Bamforth, 1985 Johnson, 1987 Cody Knudson, 1983 Agate Basin Wyckoff, 1974 Plainview Knudson, 1983 multiple Wyckoff and Taylor, 1974 Angostura Wheeler, 1995 none Bamforth, 1999 Davis, 1954 none Hughes and Willey, 1978 Plainview Hartwell, 1995

Note. Culture-historical designations rely primarily on published projectile point typologies. Sites that lack a clear culture-historical association are noted as “none”; such sites are included on the basis of Paleoindian-age radiocarbon dates. Sites with more than three such associations are noted as “multiple.” Numbers correspond to site locations in Fig. 1.

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Fig. 1. Locations of sites that provided data for this paper. Numbers refer to sites listed in Table I.

often show significantly different patterns of raw material use than other components of such collections, often because they tend to be made from stone from distant sources even when the rest of the assemblage is not. This suggests that kill site assemblages, and collections of projectile points in general, may overrepresent both the overall level of flintworking skill manifest

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during the Paleoindian period and the degree to which Paleoindian groups relied on distant sources of stone. A later section of this paper considers some possible implications of different patterns of raw material use in points and other classes of tools.

Implications of the High-Tech Forager Hypothesis The high-tech forager hypothesis has a relatively straightforward set of implications for patterning in assemblages of stone tools, although operationalizing these expectations can be difficult. First, if the argument that Paleoindian groups ranged over exceptionally large areas is correct, raw material from distant sources should be common in Paleoindian assemblages, or should occur in a form that indicates it was once common (e.g., worn out tools discarded at or near raw material sources should be made from exotic stone; cf. Gramly, 1980). Similarly, design of tools for multiple uses should have implications for microwear analysis (individual tools should show traces of more than one use and of multiple used edges) and for technological studies (tools should often show evidence of having been reworked from one form to another). Use of bifaces first as cores and subsequently as blanks for tools also implies that many tools should be made on biface-struck blanks. In addition, nonbifacial cores and debris from the reduction of such cores should be rare or absent. Finally, an emphasis on conserving raw material by extending tools’ use lives should also produce assemblages of heavily resharpened tools. Published descriptions of Paleoindian assemblages provide a partial basis for assessing these expectations, although not all such descriptions include information on all of the topics just noted. One particularly important aspect of any discussion of these issues is distinguishing between bifacial cores and unfinished blanks and preforms for bifacial knives. Standards for distinguishing between bifacial cores and bifacial tools are rarely made explicit (but see Wyckoff, 1996), and the possibility that a single object can be both obviously complicates this problem. Ultimately, identifying an object as a core depends on demonstrating that flakes from it were used as tools, and I discuss data relevant to this issue below. However, the distinction between core reduction, which is designed to produce useful flakes, and bifacial tool reduction, which is designed to produce a useful tool, provides general guidelines that also help to solve this problem. In general, production of a bifacial tool requires attention to plan-view and cross-sectional symmetry, regularity of edge angles, and carefully and regularly spaced flakes. Cross sections should be thin relative to their width, and more regular and closely spaced flake scars should be associated with

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relatively thinner pieces. Particularly in the later stages of reduction, such production produces relatively large numbers of flakes. Considerations like these are always important to successful biface production, but they are particularly critical in production of fluted points (where the configuration of the fluted surface strongly affects breakage rates) and of very thin bifaces. In contrast, bifacial cores should show an overall bifacial pattern of flaking, but should bear large flake scars that do not carefully shape surfaces. Such cores should also show irregular edge angles and configurations, may show striking platforms that are not centered in the midline of the piece, and will often be thick relative to their width and asymmetrical in plan view and/or cross section.

Bifaces as Cores and /or Tools The central theme of archaeological discussions of Paleoindian bifaces is the argument that these artifacts served both as cores and as tools (i.e., Bement, 1999; Boldurian, 1991; Hofman, 1991, 1992; Ingbar, 1992; Kelly and Todd, 1988). Bamforth (in press-b; also see LeTourneau, 2000) discusses Paleoindian use of bifaces in more detail, and this section briefly summarizes that analysis. Any pattern of reduction will occasionally produce flakes that are potentially useful as tools, even when it is not directed toward that goal. However, unfinished Paleoindian bifacial tools are argued to have served systematically as cores prior to being reduced into finished form themselves. This argument can be addressed both by identifying the kinds of cores present in Paleoindian assemblages and by examining the kinds of blanks used to make the retouched pieces in these assemblages. Neither of these lines of evidence supports the bifaces-as-cores argument. The great majority of cores in Paleoindian sites are nonbifacial. For example, only two of 19 cores at the Allen site are bifacial (see below), as are only 22 of 254 cores from the Bobtail Wolf site (Root, 2000), and Frison and Bradley (1980) identify only discoidal and amorphous cores at the Hanson site. All three of the cores identified at the Mitchell Locality at Blackwater Draw are bifacial, but Boldurian (1991, p. 292) specifically notes that flakes tools found at that locality were driven from expedient cores. Furthermore, the handful of bifacial cores that are known do not show evidence of any attempts to make them into tools; instead they show the flaking patterns and irregular cross-sections characteristic of discarded production debris. This could, of course, be the result of the reduction of such cores into bifacial tools, which would make their original form difficult or impossible to identify. However, patterns of bifacial tool production, particularly near raw material

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sources (e.g., Root, 2000; William, 2000), uniformly indicate that implements were reduced to intermediate reduction stages prior to being carried away (also see the Allen site data presented below), making them too small to serve effectively as cores. Detailed analyses and published illustrations indicate that retouched Paleoindian tools (including bifaces and projectile points) were made on two kinds of blanks: large flakes and, when suitable material was available, thin tabular slabs of stone (Amick, 1995; Boldurian and Cotter, 1999; Boldurian and Hubinsky, 1994; Bradley, 1982; Flenniken, 1978; Hester, 1972; Hughes and Willey, 1978; Knudson, 1983; Root et al., 2000; Tunnell, 1977; William, 2000). Folsom points, which are often cited as exemplars of Paleoindian efficiency, appear to have been made predominantly on flake blanks that were less than a centimeter thick (Flenniken, 1978), making it essentially impossible for Folsom point preforms to serve as cores without ruining them for subsequent reduction. Data on the dimensions of finished retouched pieces are rare, but the limited available information, and illustrations of such artifacts, indicate that retouched tools made on flakes are far too large to have been struck from the overwhelming majority of known Paleoindian bifaces in any stage of production. Furthermore, it is often possible to identify the general pattern of reduction that produced a given flake blank. When analysts do this, it is clear that a great many, and, where specific tabulations are available, often the great majority, of Paleoindian flake blanks were not struck from bifaces (Boldurian, 1991, p. 292; Bradley, 1982, pp. 184–185; Frison and Bradley, 1980, p. 30; Root et al., 2000, pp. 248–249). It is also likely that the available data overestimate the frequency of retouched pieces and utilized unmodified flakes made on biface flakes. Many Paleoindian assemblages, and most Folsom assemblages, have been recovered from buried soil surfaces, indicating that they were exposed on the ground surface for extended periods of time prior to being buried. The fragile edges of biface-struck flakes are particularly easy to damage accidentally, and the kinds of tools that are commonly identified on such flakes (e.g., gravers, raclettes, used flakes, denticulates, notches: Boldurian, 1990; Bradley, 1982; Bradley and Frison, 1996; Hofman, 1992; Lothrop, 1989) correspond exactly to the classes of “tools” that are most readily formed by such nonuse forces as trampling (Bamforth, 1998; McBrearty et al., 1998). Microwear analysis of “gravers” from the Mill Iron site in Montana (Akoshima and Frison, 1996, p. 77) illustrates this problem particularly clearly. The Mill Iron assemblage was recovered from a buried soil (Reider, 1996), and detailed analysis of the faunal collection indicates that it was exposed on the ground surface for an extended period of time (Kreutzer, 1996). Direct evidence of surface exposure in the lithic assemblage can be seen in fire damage and patination on many artifacts (Akoshima and Frison, 1996;

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Bradley and Frison, 1996). Two of the three artifacts classified as gravers at Mill Iron show no use traces of any kind; both of these are tiny (roughly 2.0 cm in maximum dimension) fragments of biface thinning flakes. The projection identified as a graver on the third item appears to have been left accidentally at the intersection of two retouched edges, and bears use traces that seem to have formed incidentally while these other edges were being used. This third piece likely represents a finished tool, although not one that was designed or used for graving, but the other two show exactly the pattern that results from accidental damage to fragile flake edges exposed on the ground surface. Discussions of bifacial cores in Paleoindian sites have tended to emphasize a small number of exceptionally large examples from probable Paleoindian contexts. The best known of these is “Frank’s biface” (Boldurian, 1991; Boldurian and Cotter, 1999), recovered from the surface of the Blackwater Draw site in eastern New Mexico in the vicinity of a buried Folsom level. This artifact can be neither dated reliably nor placed in a clear assemblage context; in fact, LeTourneau (2000, pp. 164–185) argues convincingly that there is no strong evidence at all that this artifact is actually Paleoindian in age. However, cores like it appear to have produced at least some of the flakes used as blanks for Folsom points at the site (Boldurian and Hubinsky, 1994). Similar cores also appear to have produced a small number of flakes recovered, also from a chronologically mixed surface assemblage, at the Shifting Sands site in West Texas (Hofman et al., 1990). Frank’s biface shows no evidence of any attempt to reduce it into a finished tool; instead, the irregulararity of its edges and its overall pattern of flaking suggest that it is probably an exhausted core. The unpublished and as yet undated Busse cache from western Kansas (D. Busse, personal communication, 2000) also includes spectacularly large, probably Paleoindian, bifaces, along with other tools and large, useable unmodified flakes, some of which can be fitted back onto the bifaces. Other Paleoindian caches of large bifaces, sometimes including possible cores, are known from several locales in the western United States (Frison and Bradley, 1999; Gramly, 1993), but these include very large Clovis points and thus pre-date the period of time relevant here. Paleoindian knappers thus sometimes produced bifacial cores, although they seem to have done so relatively rarely. Paleoindians sometimes also certainly used and retouched flakes struck from unfinished bifacial tools, a habit they shared both with other North American groups, including nearly sedentary groups, and with premodern humans (Bamforth, 1991b; Keeley, 1980). However, there is no evidence anywhere on the Plains supporting the argument that Paleoindian groups predominantly used bifacial cores or that they systematically first used bifaces of any kind as cores and later reduced

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them into finished points or knives. Instead, Paleoindian tools, including projectile points and other bifaces, appear to have been made predominantly on flakes struck from nonbifacial cores (and evidence is increasing that Clovis knappers often relied on true blades; Collins, 1999). The low frequencies of any kind of core in Paleoindian sites are surprising in light of this, but debitage from core reduction is often common in sites where cores are rare or absent (Boldurian, 1991; Frison and Bradley, 1980; Hemmings, 1987; Ingbar and Larson, 1996). This suggests that cores were often flaked at sites where they were not discarded, a pattern that is particularly clear at the Allen site, as is discussed below.

Raw Material Use Any consideration of patterns of raw material use by any group of stone tool users needs to take into account the natural distribution of such material. On the Plains, flakeable stone is unevenly distributed and varies widely in quality. Bedrock sources of stone (obviously) occur where bedrock containing flakeable material is exposed, and the overall lack of topographic relief on the Plains tends to limit such exposures. Regions with more relief (e.g., the Hartville Uplift and Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming or the Flint Hills in eastern Kansas) often have sources of high-quality raw material, and erosion that cuts into the bedrock can also expose such sources (e.g., in the region of the Alibates agate quarries along the Canadian river north of Amarillo, Texas, or in the exposures of Smoky Hills jasper in drainages in southwestern Nebraska and northwestern Kansas). Secondary gravel sources are more widely distributed, and are most commonly exposed in river or stream beds, or (as in parts of the Colorado Piedmont) on eroded ridge tops. However, flakeable stone in these contexts tends to occur in small fragments and can be highly fractured. One result of this uneven distribution of material is that large parts of the Plains lack immediate access to adequate material for stone tool production. This is most clearly the case for much of the Southern High Plains of west Texas and eastern New Mexico, a region whose interior has virtually no exposures of any kind of stone (Holliday and Welty, 1981), but it is true to a lesser extent in other areas as well. This pattern contrasts rather sharply with the more ubiquitous distribution of resources like bison, implying that stonetool–using groups moving in response to the availability of food would have had to transport stone in many regions throughout the pre-Contact period. Given this, we should expect to find nonlocal raw material in many times and places, and it is not difficult to find examples of this in non-Paleoindian contexts (i.e., Holen, 1991). This implies that it is necessary to document

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that rates of use of high-quality exotic stone in Paleoindian sites differ from those in sites dated to other periods. In fact, as is true in much of the eastern United States, there is great variability in the proportion of nonlocal stone in Paleoindian assemblages in different parts of the Plains, and Paleoindian assemblages do not uniformly show greater amounts of such stone than later sites. Paleoindian assemblages in many areas of the Plains contain almost no evidence for long-distance transport of significant amounts of raw material. For example, all three of the Medicine Creek sites in southwestern Nebraska, including the Allen site that I discuss in detail below, produced assemblages in which material other than the locally available Smoky Hills jasper makes up less than 1% of the total. Virtually all retouched artifacts of nonlocal stone in these sites are projectile points (Davis, 1954, 1962). The Hell Gap assemblage from eastern Wyoming contains almost no stone available outside of the immediate site area (Knell, 1999; Sellet, 1999), and 95% of the Hanson site assemblage is made from stone found within 25 km of the site (Frison and Bradley, 1980; Ingbar, 1992). Further north, the Bobtail Wolf and Big Black sites, located in the Knife River source area in North Dakota, show almost no material other than Knife River flint (Root et al., 2000; William, 2000), and Mill Iron and MacHaffie in Montana are dominated by stone available no farther than 70 km distant (Francis and Larson, 1996; Knudson, 1983). Raw material identifications at the Ray Long site in western South Dakota are imprecise, but Wheeler’s descriptions (Wheeler, 1995) suggest that nearly 90% of the retouched pieces are made from quartzite and chalcedony available close by. More confidently, 95% of the very late Paleoindian assemblage from the Cherokee Sewer site in western Iowa is made of locally available and generally fairly low-grade stone (Anderson, 1980). Sites in eastern Colorado, where easily flakeable stone is uncommon, show somewhat more complex patterns. Raw material identifications at Lindenmeier are vague, but, despite the presence of a handful of artifacts from very distant sources (i.e., Hofman et al., 1991), Wilmsen and Roberts (1984) argue that the bulk of the assemblage comes either from local sources of chalcedony and quartzite or from jasper sources 150 km away. Different areas of the site show different rates of use of these: roughly 70% of the Area 1 assemblage is made from the local material, while a similar proportion of the Area 2 assemblage is made from the more distant stone. Distinct activity areas at the Jurgens site to the east of Lindenmeier also show varying patterns of raw material use (Wheat, 1979). Over 60% of the retouched tools from this site are made from stone available in two areas, one roughly 100 km away and another roughly 200 km away. However, the debitage from

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Area 1 here is dominated by the first of these, while over 80% of that from Area 2 is of relatively low quality locally available material. On the Southern Plains, non–High Plains sites in the eastern Texas Panhandle and adjacent areas of Oklahoma (e.g., at Lake Theo [Harrison and Smith, 1975] and in the Callahan Divide [Thurmond, 1990]) are dominated by locally available stone. Exotics are similarly rare or absent at Paleoindianage sites farther east in Oklahoma (Wyckoff, 1964; Wyckoff and Taylor, 1971) and south in central Texas (Tunnell, 1977), although the wide availability of Edwards Plateau chert in this last area makes “exotic” stone difficult to identify: similar forms of Edwards chert can be found over a large area, and stone transported over considerable distances may be similar or identical to stone found locally. In contrast, sites on the Southern High Plains of west Texas and eastern New Mexico (including Lubbock Lake [Bamforth, 1985; Johnson, 1987], Blackwater Draw [Boldurian, 1991; Boldurian and Cotter, 1999; Hester, 1972; LeTourneau, 2000], Elida [Hester, 1962] and Shifting Sands [Hofman et al., 1990]) produced assemblages containing high proportions of nonlocal raw materials (in Texas these most commonly include Alibates agate from the northern Texas Panhandle and Edwards chert from central Texas). Nonlocal materials, particularly Edwards chert, do occur in non–High Plains Paleoindian contexts elsewhere on the Southern Plains (i.e., Hofman, 1991, 1992), but analyses to date have focused largely on projectile points, often from sites known only as surface scatters. Importantly, many assemblages show a substantial discrepancy between raw material frequencies among projectile points and other classes of tools. For example, at Mill Iron, 50% of the points, but almost none of most other classes of artifact, are made from nonlocal stone (Francis and Larson, 1996, p. 93), and I note a similar pattern at the Medicine Creek sites above. Similarly, although virtually none of the Hanson site collection is made from stone from distant sources, relatively more distant (but still fairly local) material is far more common among the points than among other tool classes (Frison and Bradley, 1980). In the Agate Basin period assemblage from the Agate Basin site, the two most distant sources of stone (Knife River flint and porcellanite) comprise 35.2% of the points (86 of 158) but make up only 7.1% (20 of 280) of the remainder of the collection (Frison and Stanford, 1982). At the Horner site, there are even different patterns of raw material use among different types of points (Bamforth, 1991a, p. 315). Discrepancies in raw material use between points and other kinds of tools can also be counterintuitive: at the Jurgens site, relatively granular (and locally available) quartzite is more frequent in the points than in the remainder of the assemblage (Wheat, 1979, pp. 126–127).

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Resharpening and Recycling Maximizing tool use lives by designing them for multiple uses, extensively resharpening them, and recycling them from one form to another lies at the heart of the inference that Paleoindian technology is designed to make efficient use of raw material. However, only projectile points have been extensively analyzed with these issues in mind. There is no doubt that Paleoindian points were often, although not always, resharpened (Bradley, 1982; Hofman, 1991, 1992; Knudson, 1983; Wheat, 1979; Wilmsen and Roberts, 1984), although Tunnell (1977, pp. 143–144) points out that certain kinds of knapping errors that are fairly common in Folsom point manufacture can mimic patterns that are often interpreted as resharpening. Wheat’s analysis of the Jurgens site collection is perhaps the most detailed study (Wheat, 1979) of this: many of the Jurgens points were clearly resharpened. This study also identifies wear traces on the edges of the Jurgens points that suggest that these tools were sometimes used as butchery tools as well as weapons. Anecdotal observations (i.e., Wilmsen and Roberts, 1984, pp. 172–174) also indicate that points were sometimes converted into other forms, although some of the artifacts identified as examples of this at Lindenmeier are production failures rather than tools broken in use. Pièces esquillées, the class of artifact most often cited as evidence of tool recycling in eastern Paleoindian assemblages, are rarely identified in Plains assemblages. When they do appear on the Plains, pièces esquillées appear to have been wedges, not cores (Bradley and Frison, 1996; Frison, 1982b). The blanks for these artifacts have not been identified (but see the Allen site data below). It is difficult to draw more holistic assessments of the degree to which Paleoindian tools were maintained and recycled. Tools like hafted end scrapers were certainly resharpened regularly, but tools like these were resharpened on the Plains until they fell out of use during the post-Contact period. Retouched, possibly resharpened, tools are common in Paleoindian assemblages, but, again, there is nothing particularly distinctive in this observation. However, Frison and Bradley (1980) and Bradley (1982) classified the assemblages from the Hanson and Agate Basin sites according to Fran¸cois Bordes’ Middle Paleolithic typology (Bordes, 1961; Debenath ´ and Dibble, 1994), and these classifications offer a means of at least tentatively assessing overall degrees of assemblage resharpening. Dibble (1984, 1995) argues that, at least for side scrapers, resharpening of worn edges is one important factor structuring Bordes’ typology. In Dibble’s view, the first stage of resharpening is manifest in single-edged scrapers (Types 9 through 11); somewhat more extensive resharpening produces double-edged scrapers (Types 12 through 17), and maximal resharpening produces convergent, transverse, and déjeté scrapers (Types 18

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through 24). The Bordes typology was designed to describe a technology that was almost certainly organized in very different ways than was Paleoindian technology and I refer to Dibble’s work here very cautiously. Furthermore, Kuhn (1992) has argued that, in at least some cases, blank morphology is as important or more important in determining Middle Paleolithic scraper typology than degree of reduction and Close (1991a) argues that resharpening does not account for typological variation in at least some Middle Paleolithic assemblages (but see Close, 1991b; Dibble, 1991). However, bearing these issues in mind, the side scrapers in the Hanson and Agate Basin assemblages (tentatively) show two patterns. First, all of the three assemblages for which data are available (the Folsom-age Hanson collection, the Folsom-age collection from the Agate Basin site, and the Agate Basin–age collection from the Agate Basin site; Table II) show low frequencies of the most heavily retouched categories of tools (convergent, transverse, and déjeté scrapers). If Dibble’s arguments are relevant here, the side scrapers in these three assemblages tended to be discarded well before they were exhausted. Second, though, there is a fairly clear dichotomy between the Hanson assemblage, with nearly 70% of the tools in the least-resharpened category (single-edged scrapers), and the Agate Basin assemblages, with more tools in the other categories. As the previous section notes, Agate Basin is somewhat more distant from raw material sources than Hanson is, and the difference between these two sites in degree of resharpening may reflect this. More direct evidence of the overall intensity of resharpening derives from the locations of microscopic use traces. Even on retouched artifacts, such traces may be on unretouched edges, and use traces on such edges or on entirely unretouched flakes clearly indicate an absence of attention to rejuvenating tools. Systematic high-magnification use-wear studies have been carried out at Mill Iron (Akoshima and Frison, 1996), Hell Gap (Bamforth and Becker, 1999), Lubbock Lake (Bamforth, 1985), and Allen (discussed in a later section). At Mill Iron, Akoshima and Frison (1996) illustrate 49 used edges on tools other than bifaces or end scrapers (which are retouched Table II. Frequencies of Retouched Pieces at the Hanson Site and the Folsom and Agate Basin Levels at the Agate Basin Site Classified Into the Three Basic Groups of Bordes’ Middle Paleolithic Tool Types Agate Basin site Tool class

Hanson site

Folsom

Agate Basin

Single scrapers Double scrapers Convergent/transverse/déjeté scrapers

61 18 9

16 9 3

16 19 8

Note. Data from Frison and Bradley (1980, p. 15) and Bradley (1982, p. 184).

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by definition), and 35 (71.4%) of these edges are unmodified and thus unresharpened. The sample examined at Hell Gap is dominated by end scrapers (Bamforth and Becker, 1999), but the other classes of tools studied show a higher percentage of retouched used edges: 7 of 11 (63.6%). Lubbock Lake appears to represent a series of small bison kills rather than a residential site, but the collection is significant nevertheless: despite being located in an exceptionally raw-material–poor part of the Plains, only 40 of the total of 107 used pieces discarded at the site were retouched, and, again, many of the retouched pieces are scrapers, which often require steep and regular working edges that can be difficult to find on unmodified edges. These 107 used pieces also included a total of only 123 used edges, and only 3 showed traces of more than one kind of use; 2 of these 3 are projectile points that bore traces of use as butchery tools (Bamforth, 1985, and unpublished data). Two factors may account for some of the intersite differences in these data. First, Akoshima and Frison (1996) examined almost all of the potentially used pieces at Mill Iron, while the sample from Hell Gap represents a small portion of the collection and was taken more to assess the potential of the assemblage for further analysis than to characterize the full range of variation in it. Second, dry hide working appears to be very frequent at Hell Gap (Bamforth and Becker, 1999), and this task dulls tool edges quickly, resulting in relatively high resharpening rates. Regardless of these possibilities, though, the Mill Iron and Lubbock Lake data make it clear that Paleoindian groups, including groups moving over areas long distances from raw material sources, often made minimal attempts to extend the use lives of their tools through resharpening.

Summary There are several clear patterns in these data, although in some cases these patterns need to be interpreted cautiously. Bifacial cores are certainly present in Paleoindian assemblages. However, they are uncommon; flakes stuck from any form of biface do not dominate as blanks for tool production, and no artifact from any Paleoindian site has ever been shown to have been made on an exhausted bifacial core. Instead, such cores occur as discarded pieces recovered with other discarded production waste from habitation or workshop areas. Preforms for bifacial tools, a class of artifact that is often thought to have been used as cores, appear to have been transported in a form that is poorly suited to such use: fluted point preforms in particular were almost certainly too thin to reliably have produced useful flakes. Where specific kinds of cores have been identified as sources of tool blanks, a variety

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of forms, including unpatterned or amorphous forms, are present; bifacial cores do not dominate. Furthermore, nonbifacial core-reduction debris, if not the cores themselves, appears to be a common and often substantial component of Paleoindian debitage assemblages. Evidence for extensive resharpening is limited to large hafted tools, primarily points and end scrapers, and Indian people on the Plains resharpened this latter class of tools well into the 1800s. Several lines of evidence indicate, albeit tentatively in some cases, that Paleoindians tended to discard their tools without extensive resharpening, and often without any resharpening at all. There are very few examples of tools recycled from one form to another, and most of these take the form of projectile points reworked into such tools as end scrapers; pièces esquillées on the Plains appear to be wedges, not cores. Finally, the frequency of exotic stone in Paleoindian assemblages varies substantially across the Plains, tending to be low in areas where stone is locally available and high in areas where it is not. Differences within assemblages between raw materials represented in points and in other classes of tools also imply clearly that we cannot reconstruct raw material usage by looking only at points. Relatively little of this accords well with the high-tech forager hypothesis. However, it is important to bear in mind that there are no studies from the Plains that have attempted to test the accuracy of this hypothesis, and many analyses therefore do not provide the specific kinds of information such a test requires. Some of the gaps in the data thus are likely to be the result of a lack of attention to these issues, and additional work will likely identify patterns that better fit this reconstruction. However, even bearing this in mind, a number of lines of evidence are strongly discordant with traditional expectations, and additional analyses are unlikely to alter this. I thus turn to one specific site, the Allen site in southwestern Nebraska, with these issues in mind.

THE ALLEN SITE The Allen site was one of three Paleoindian sites excavated between 1947 and 1954 on Medicine and Lime Creeks, in Frontier County, Nebraska, as part of the River Basin Salvage Project (Davis, 1954, 1962; Holder and Wike, 1949). Although Wedel (1986) observes that there were problems with the initial dating of these sites, more recent stratigraphic and chronological work (May, 1999) indicates that all three of the Medicine and Lime Creek sites (Allen [25FT50], Lime Creek [25FT41], and Red Smoke [25FT42]) were occupied repeatedly between 11,000 and 8000 B.P. (Bamforth [1999a] discusses all three of these sites in detail).

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Bamforth Table III. Frequencies of Worked Stone at the Allen Site Blank type Artifact category

Material

Recycleda

N

Flake

Tabular

?/other

Jasper

Other

N

%

2 46 40 10 9 20 19 1 19 82 5 9 18

0 3 5 0 2 4 8 0 0 59 3 3 2

1 7 1 1 0 1 2 0 0 3 0 0 4

1 36 34 9 7 15 9 1 19 20 2 6 12

2 46 40 10 6 20 19 1 19 82 5 9 18

0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 6 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 n/a 0

0.0 13.0 2.5 0.0 11.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

Bifacesb Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Points Point preforms Beveled toolsc Bevelled tool preform Cores Edge-modified Perforators Pièces esquillées Other

0.0

Note. These frequencies differ from, and supersede, those presented by Bamforth (1991a,b); earlier totals were derived from preliminary analysis of the assemblage. “Jasper” refers to Smoky Hills jasper. a See text for details. b Biface totals do not include five pi` eces esquillées made on fragments of midstage bifaces. c Holder and Wike (1949) and Bamforth (1991a,b) refer to these as “trapezoidal scrapers.”

The lithic assemblage from the Allen site includes 259 retouched pieces and approximately 11,000 unmodified flakes (Table III summarizes the overall assemblage content, along with data relevant to the topics addressed below). The excavations there also recovered 12 hammerstones, 8 fragments of grinding stones, 76 bone tools, approximately 3600 bones that could be identified at least to the genus level and thousands of additional bone fragments; field records also identify 20 hearths. My discussion here focuses on the lithic assemblage. I discuss the bifaces from the site in detail elsewhere (Bamforth, 1999b), and I briefly summarize that discussion here.

Allen Site Bifaces There are two basic classes of bifaces in the Allen site assemblage: bifacial cores (n = 2) and unfinished or discarded bifacial tools (n = 114), with these two categories distinguished following the criteria discussed above. Both of the bifacial cores (Fig. 2) show relatively extensive reduction but no attempts to transform them into any other form. The other bifaces represent Stages 1 through 4 in Callahan’s classification, with Stage 4 being the finished tool (Callahan, 1979). Only 7 of the 114 fall into this last stage, suggesting that bifaces were reduced on site to Stage 3 and transported in that form for

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Fig. 2. Bifacial cores from the Allen site.


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Bamforth Table IV. Mean Dimensions (mm) for Stage 2, 3, and 4 Bifaces From the Allen Site (Complete Measurements Only) Stage

Length Mean SD N Width Mean SD N Thickness Mean SD N W/T ratio

2

3

4

63.5 18.0 15

68.1 15.3 11

82.9 4.5 2

48.8 7.9 23

43.1 9.3 34

40.9 10.9 5

20.0 6.0 43 2.40

14.7 4.6 42 2.93

11.3 4.0 8 3.62

Note. W/T: Weight/thickness.

completion elsewhere. Table IV presents summary data on biface sizes and width/thickness ratios by stage.

Allen Site Cores The assemblage also includes 17 nonbifacial cores, and these can be divided into a group of 6 larger pieces (mean weight 252.9 g) and 11 smaller pieces (mean weight 52.7 g). While the larger cores show a pattern of single platform/polyhedral block core reduction, the smaller cores show no clearly defined reduction pattern, and often bear traces of bipolar flaking. Although all of these cores are made from locally abundant Smoky Hills jasper (see below), the smaller cores are uniformly made from more homogeneous, finer-grained varieties of this stone, while most of the larger cores are made from more granular material.

Blanks for Bifaces and Other Tools As is true in other Paleoindian sites, most tools in the assemblage (89 of 109 [81.7%]) whose original blanks are identifiable are made on flakes; the remainder (20 or 18.3%) are made on thin tabular pieces of jasper. Among bifaces, the proportion of tabular blanks is higher (10 of 18, or 55.6%, of identifiable biface blanks are tabular). Although bifaces from all stages of reduction are present on the site, they are uniformly too small to have served

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as the parent pieces for the tools made on flake blanks. The mean width for retouched pieces that were definitely made on flakes in the Allen site collection is 47.1 mm (SD = 15.5, N = 75), mean length is 58.4 mm (SD = 17.0, N = 56), and mean thickness is 13.7 mm (SD = 7.4, N = 91). These artifacts are nearly as large as the discarded bifaces in the collection (compare with the values in Table IV). Only 19 of the retouched pieces retain their striking platforms, but 15 (78.9%) of these show flat, unfacetted platforms with exterior platform angles in the vicinity of 90◦ . These pieces thus appear to have been made on blanks struck from cores like those recovered from the site, not from bifaces (cf. Lothrop, 1989).

Resharpening and Recycling The program of sampling for microwear analysis of the Allen site collection focused on retouched pieces and included very few unmodified flakes: unmodified but used edges are thus certainly underrepresented in the sample. Even so, data on the kinds of edges bearing use traces in the Allen site assemblage fall midway between the patterns noted above for Mill Iron and Hell Gap. Of 32 used edges identified by high-magnification microwear analysis on tools other than those that are retouched by definition, 18 (56.3%) are unretouched. Furthermore, very few of the used edges that are retouched show patterns of retouch that suggest the kinds of extensive modifications to the tools that would result from multiple rounds of resharpening: most retouched edges appear simply to have been straightened or otherwise minimally accommodated to use. Use of a single edge for more than one purpose can be obscured by resharpening and by superposition of one set of use traces on another. However, no tool of any kind in the Allen site sample showed either evidence for multiple distinct uses of a single edge or of use of different edges for distinct tasks, although 4 of the overall total of 42 used pieces (9.5%) showed evidence of use of more than one edge for the same task. Evidence for artifact recycling is rare in the Allen site assemblage (Fig. 3). Most clearly, there is a single projectile point base reworked into an end scraper. More ambiguously, the assemblage includes a total of nine pièces esquillées, the category of artifact that, as Lothrop (1989) points out, provides the only evidence for systematic artifact recycling in eastern Paleoindian assemblages. However, it is difficult to view many of the Allen site pièces esquillées as the result of extending the use lives of finished tools. Seven of these artifacts have a wedge-like cross section. Three of these seven were made on unmodified flakes, three were made on thin unfinished biface fragments, and one was made on a piece whose original form is unclear.

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Fig. 3. Refitted biface reject from the Allen site, probably reused grooves to abrade tool edges during manufacture.

These artifacts are morphologically suitable for use as wedges. There are over 100 bone tools in the Allen site collection, including needles, awls, and more amorphous forms, and wedges might well have been important in the production of these items. An additional two pieces, both made on fragments of unfinished bifaces, have a blockier cross section that would not be suitable for wedging. These pieces may have been used as cores, although the flakes removed from them appear to be too small for use. Seven other fragments of broken, unfinished bifaces were also put to other uses. Two such fragments are scored with deep grooves and were probably used to scrub biface or other edges during tool production, while three others show battered and/or worn corners produced from hammering, pecking the surfaces of grinding stones, or burnishing some unknown object(s). Two others have flakes driven either down a broken edge or from a broken edge, although none of the flakes so driven appears to have been large enough for use. Other than these, no artifacts in the collection show evidence of any form of recycling.

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With the exception of the reworked point, though, it is difficult to see these examples as recycling in the sense in which this term is widely used. They certainly do not represent use of a finished tool for one purpose and then reuse of that tool for another purpose in order to extend its useful life. Rather, they are primarily examples of the occasional use of bifacial production waste for a variety of purposes, with such use occurring at the production site. It is even possible that such pieces were at least sometimes scavenged from the debris left behind in earlier occupations of the site: evidence for such scavenging, in the form of retouch through patinated surfaces, is clear on several artifacts. Although none of these are bifaces, scavenging of unpatinated artifacts would be essentially impossible to recognize.

Raw Material Use Flaked stone tools at the Allen site (and at Lime Creek and Red Smoke nearby) were made from Smoky Hills jasper (also referred to as Graham jasper [Wedel, 1986] and Niobrara jasper [Stanford, 1978]). This stone outcrops in abundance within a kilometer of the site, as well as in many of the tributaries of the Republican River in southwestern Nebraska and northwestern Kansas. Exotic stone, including Madison chert from eastern Wyoming, Alibates agate from the Texas Panhandle, Nehawka chert from eastern Nebraska, several kinds of stone from secondary sources in the Platte River gravels north of the site, and a few pieces of stone of unknown nonlocal origin, is also present. However, this material comprises much less than one percent of the collection, and is most common in the debitage (fewer than two dozen flakes out of the total of over 11,000). It is found among the retouched pieces only among the finished projectile points (three of the nine finished projectile points from the site are made of nonlocal material, including the only object in the collection made from Alibates agate).

Refitting, Debitage, and Reduction Strategies Despite the frequency of bifaces in the overall assemblage, refitting of the Allen site material reveals a very different pattern of production and transport. The ratio of cores (including bifacial cores) to finished and unfinished bifaces in the retouched portion of the collection is 0.15. However, refitted core-struck sequences outnumber refitted biface-struck sequences from the site by 1.17 to 1. More cores thus passed through the site than were discarded there, making it clear that the groups who inhabited the

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Allen site transported cores rather than only finished or partially finished tools (Bamforth and Becker [2000] discuss this in detail). In passing, the difference between the frequencies of cores in the assemblage and of corestruck sequences in the refitted material suggests that the site tended to be occupied for periods of time that were shorter than the use lives of the cores that were worked there.

Discussion The Allen site assemblage thus shows few of the patterns predicted by the high-tech forager view of Paleoindian technology. It is made almost entirely on locally available stone; tools were made predominantly on blanks struck from cores (particularly block cores), not from bifaces; nonbifacial cores were clearly systematically transported off-site; bifacial reduction appears to have been directed toward the production of nearly finished tools rather than large bifacial cores; resharpening of used edges seems to have been minimal; and virtually no tools, transported or not, were recycled from one form to another to extend their use lives, although production waste was sometimes used as needed. The absence of exotic stone is particularly striking. However, as Ingbar’s elegant model (Ingbar, 1994) shows, it is dangerous to interpret raw material frequencies directly as evidence for territory size: by holding territory size and raw material source locations constant and varying rates of tool depletion and speed of movement across the landscape, it is possible to change raw material frequencies in an assemblage. As Ingbar points out, it is necessary to consider how raw material was used to move beyond this dilemma. Identifying the transported component of an assemblage is one way to do this. At the Allen site, refitting makes it clear that, at minimum, cores and bifaces were both carried away. Projectile points, finished bifaces, and “bevelled tools” (plano-convex pieces that appear to have served as hide scrapers; Bamforth [1999a,b] discusses this last category of artifact in more detail) probably represent the discarded blades of hafted implements that were carried into the site and retooled there. In addition, as noted above, the cores recovered on the site fall clearly into two classes by size. Although the larger cores are likely to have been used and discarded on site, the smaller, apparently exhausted, cores are likely to have been brought to the site from elsewhere. Although exotic raw material is extremely rare in the collection, all but one of the tiny number of nonjasper flakes appear to have been removed in the late stages of biface reduction, implying that bifaces made from nonlocal stone also passed through the site. Finally, at least a few of the pièces esquillées may represent transported pieces that have been splintered

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by bipolar reduction to produce useful flakes, although, as noted earlier, this interpretation does not fit very well with all of these pieces. Other than the few nonlocal flakes just noted, only the projectile points among this range of objects are made of any material other than Smoky Hills jasper: one of these is made of Alibates agate from the Texas Panhandle and two others are made of unidentified nonlocal stone. It is important to note that this does not imply that all of the jasper artifacts are made from stone collected at Medicine Creek itself: Smoky Hills jasper can be found over much of southwestern Nebraska and northwestern Kansas. However, it certainly does not provide any evidence of group movement over large territories, and the tiny percentage of stone other than jasper in the assemblage can easily be accounted for by any of a number of mechanisms other than such movements, including trade and movements by individuals in search of mates or for other purposes (Gould, 1978; MacDonald, 1999). The implications of the technological data are somewhat more straightforward. Most often, the Paleoindian occupants of the site manufactured bifaces for reduction into finished knives and relied on cores, most often single platform block cores, for the great majority of their nonbifacial tools. They seem to have produced bifacial cores infrequently, and there is no evidence that such cores were ever themselves reduced into tools. The frequency of these tools coupled with the low frequency of cores in the site assemblage fits the pattern that has often been interpreted as evidence for a strategy of segmented production in which tools were produced in one place and transported without cores for use at other locations. However, the refit data indicate that, at least at the Allen site, this is illusory: cores are rare at Allen not because they were not produced and worked on site, but because they were not discarded there.

SYNTHESIS The overall patterns in the published data, and the detailed information from the Allen site, do not closely match the assemblage level expectations that the high-tech forager hypothesis implies. Before discussing these patterns, though, it is important to reiterate that very few studies have attempted systematically to assess this hypothesis. The notion that Paleoindian technology was designed first and foremost to economize raw material by extending tool use lives and minimizing transport costs has served more as the framework on which archaeologists rely to give meaning to their observations rather than as a hypothesis to be tested against those observations. Attempts to expand on the published analyses discussed here and to systematically assess this reconstruction may well reveal evidence that

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provides a better fit. Despite this possibility, though, some of the patterns in the available data are so clear that they are unlikely to be altered substantially by additional work. Because the argument that Paleoindian groups inhabited unusually large territories lies at the heart of the high-tech forager hypothesis, because this argument rests primarily on long-distance transport of raw material, and because the available data so clearly show great variability in such transport, I begin my discussion of these patterns with raw material use.

Raw Material Use and Mobility Stone can end up in archaeological sites distant from its source for many reasons, including direct transport from the source by either an entire social group or an individual and any of a number of varieties of long-distance trade. However, the Paleoindian literature (i.e., Hayden, 1982; Hofman et al., 1991; LeTourneau, 2000; Meltzer, 1989) has focused almost entirely on two of these—trade between local groups and direct procurement at the source by entire social groups—and has tended to argue that Paleoindian groups relied on either one or the other, although MacDonald (1999; also see Gould, 1978) has recently suggested that movements to source areas by individuals may also move small amounts of stone. Furthermore, Paleoindian archaeology on the Plains generally rejects the first of these and essentially assumes that even very small proportions of exotic stone were obtained through long-distance group movements, with such stone representing the last traces of a larger quantity of material that was originally in the assemblage. The possibility that stone might have moved by mechanisms other than, or in addition to, mobility almost never enters into recent discussions. The absence of attention to multiple mechanisms by which stone might have moved across the Plains during Paleoindian times seriously limits our ability to understand important aspects of Plains Paleoindian ways of life. For example, widespread exchange of small amounts of fine-grained raw material—blanks for bifaces and points—or finished points could help account for the discrepancies in many assemblages noted above between the raw materials represented among projectile points and among other kinds of flaked stone tools. The investment of skill evident in many Paleoindian points fairly clearly indicates that these artifacts were special in some sense. It may be that points were made from exotic stone more often than other tools not only for practical reasons—it is easier to complete a Paleoindian point in finer-grained than in coarser-grained stone, and the exotics present in Paleoindian sites are always fine-grained—but also for social or symbolic reasons.

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Certainly, the possibility that a small amount of Edwards Plateau chert from central Texas is present at the Lindenmeier site in northern Colorado (Hofman et al., 1991) is incompatible with any reasonable model of regular human movements across the Plains. Similarly, ongoing analysis of the Lime Creek collection has identified one large bifacially modified flake—not a finished tool, but a piece that could serve as a blank for a point—that is made from stone that does not appear to occur on the Great Plains. Instead, this stone is macroscopically indistinguishable from Bridger Basin (or “tiger”) chert, found in northwestern Colorado and southwestern Wyoming, some 700 km away across the Rocky Mountains. It strains credulity to suppose that the habitual range of any human group extended across this distance. Some form of exchange is almost the only feasible means of accounting for the presence of these artifacts, and the fact that the Lime Creek artifact is unfinished suggests that stone may have moved in blank form. The likelihood that trade does not account for all access to raw material in no way precludes some movement of stone among groups in different areas: many hunter–gatherer groups participated in exchange networks that moved small amounts of materials, including stone, over regions much larger than the regions those groups exploited directly (i.e., Weissner, 1982). The incentives for exchange among Paleoindian groups probably differed from those of more recent groups, but the incentives for exchange among these recent groups also varied. We might thus expect that raw material frequencies in Paleoindian sites reflect a combination of several processes including, but not limited to, group movements to source areas. This possibility has important implications both for research that focuses solely or largely on projectile points and for drawing out the implications of raw material use at large bison kill sites, whose tool assemblages consist mainly of projectile points. Differences in raw material use between points and other classes of tools imply that analyses of raw material use at kill sites may often produce different reconstructions of Paleoindian use of the landscape than similar analyses of other kinds of sites, and contrasts between the kinds of stone present in kill and other kinds of sites located near one another in several parts of the Plains are consistent with this. On the Southern Plains, the assemblage from the Plainview kill site (Knudson, 1983) is made almost entirely from Alibates agate found some 120 km to the north. However, the assemblage from Lubbock Lake, located in the next drainage to the south of Plainview, shows a diverse mix of stone, including substantial quantities of granular local material (Bamforth, 1985). In eastern Colorado, Area 1 at Jurgens is associated with a large bison kill and produced an assemblage dominated by exotics; Area 2 appears to be a small, short-term camp and produced an assemblage dominated by local stone (Wheat, 1979). In the Southern Black Hills of eastern Wyoming and western South Dakota, many

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artifacts (particularly points) associated with bison bone beds at the Agate Basin site are made from stone from distant sources, but tools from the Ray Long site a short distance to the east are almost all of local material (Frison and Stanford, 1982; Wheeler, 1995). These differences may result from a variety of factors, including systematic use of the most easily flakable stone for projectile point production, aggregation of groups from distant areas for communal hunts, or, as just noted, circulation of raw material for certain kinds of tools among neighboring groups (cf. Bamforth, 1991a; Reher and Frison, 1980, pp. 130–135). Interpreting even large proportions of nonlocal stone in intact non–killsite assemblages, though, can be complex. Ingbar (1994), for example, notes that the interaction among raw material locations, speed of group movement, and rate of toolkit depletion is likely to be particularly important in this context. However, it is also essential to understand the processes that formed the assemblage being analyzed, and particularly to recognize the distinction between assemblages representing single occupations and aggregate assemblages representing the accumulation of multiple occupations. Witthoft (1952), for example, seems implicitly to have viewed Shoop more or less as the result of a single encampment of a newly arrived group. Thus, he argued that the great difference between the dominance of exotic material there and the dominance of local eastern Pennsylvania material in collections of isolated fluted points from the area around the site reflects the fact that the newcomers at Shoop did not know, or perhaps had only very recently discovered, the locations of local stone. If this argument is correct, it does not necessarily imply that the distance from Shoop to the Onondaga chert quarries represents the habitual scale of movement for the occupants of the Shoop site. Instead, it suggests that the Shoop site pattern may result from a historically anomalous and presumably very rapid movement into new territory. In contrast, raw material patterns in assemblages that accumulated on reused surfaces as a result of multiple site visits are more likely to represent at least a general picture of habitual access to quarries. Archaeologists often refer to Plains Paleoindian sites as if these sites represent individual rather than aggregate occupations (i.e., Hofman et al., 1990). This assumption is likely to be correct in the case of many large bison kills, a fact that has important implications for intepreting the assemblages from these sites (Bamforth, 1991a,b). However, the common association of Paleoindian sites with buried soils (see, for example, Holliday’s [1997] summary of Paleoindian sites on the Southern High Plains) implies that this is likely to be incorrect in many, or even most, cases. The patterns summarized for most of the sites considered here are therefore likely to represent a fairly good picture of the overall pattern of Plains Paleoindian raw material use.

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Only the Southern High Plains, a region with almost no local sources of even moderately fine-grained stone, shows a fairly uniform reliance on large amounts of stone from distant sources. However, even here this pattern is strongest at Blackwater Draw, in the interior portions of the region: at least one site near its edge (Lubbock Lake) shows an increase in the frequency of stone from distant sources in post-Paleoindian assemblages. The Paleoindian levels at Lubbock Lake include Edwards chert from central Texas and Alibates agate and Tecovas jasper from the northern part of the Texas Panhandle, but they also include significant amounts of relatively low quality (and sometimes extremely low quality) stone from local gravels and outcrops (Bamforth, 1985). This local material is much less common after the Paleoindian period: Archaic and later assemblages from Lubbock Lake are composed primarily of Edwards chert (Bamforth, unpublished data; Johnson, 1987). We might, then, interpret the Paleoindian occupants of the site as having moved to a smaller, not a larger, territory than later groups, and argue that they imported exotics out of necessity. An absence of long-distance raw material transport in a site, of course, does not preclude movement of human groups over large territories. However, as discussed above, the inference that Paleoindian groups did uniformly move over large territories is founded in the recognition of long-distance transport of large amounts of stone at sites like Shoop and Blackwater Draw that were discovered early in the history of Paleoindian research. The links that have been forged since that time between Paleoindian technology and “high mobility” depend substantially on taking this mobility as a given. If widespread evidence is inconsistent with widely accepted views of Paleoindian technological organization, and Paleoindian groups show variable reliance on long-distance transport of stone, perhaps it is time to rethink this issue (see Bement [1999, pp. 168–172] for an approach to doing just this). Many of the sites with the lowest proportions of nonlocal raw material are located very close to abundant sources of fine-grained, easily flakeable stone and show extensive evidence of early stages of tool production (i.e., Bobtail Wolf, Hell Gap, the Medicine Creek sites). In part, the dominance of local stone at such sites reflects the abundance of debris produced during the early stages of manufacture. However, such sites also produce finished tools, at least some of which must have been discarded when worn blades were replaced in their respective hafts. A dominance of local material in this class of artifacts, as can be seen most clearly at the Allen site, is strong evidence of local movement in the area around the site. The virtual absence of nonlocal stone in any form at Hell Gap suggests a similar conclusion. Finally, the increase in exotic stone at Lubbock Lake at the end of the Paleoindian period implies that the Paleoindian/Archaic transition was

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more complex than is often suggested, and other data are consistent with this. For example, the Early Archaic levels at Cherokee Sewer in Iowa are dominated by nonlocal stone, while the Paleoindian levels at the site are not (Anderson, 1980). Similarly, Early Archaic (Calf Creek Complex) sites in Oklahoma (Duncan, 1995) show far higher frequencies of exotic stone than Paleoindian sites in that area. If raw material frequencies monitor mobility range, the data indicate that Paleoindian ranges varied greatly across the Plains and were not uniformly larger than the ranges of later Plains hunters and gatherers. A Calf Creek biface from Oklahoma with a width/thickness ratio of 7.92 (Splawn, 1995) also suggests that the “demise” of flintworking skill at the end of the Paleoindian period may not have been as complete as the archaeological literature often suggests.

Bifaces, Cores, and Technological Organization The overall data suggest strongly that Paleoindian technology is best described as largely, although certainly not exclusively, a core/flake-based rather than a fundamentally biface-based industry. The evidence supporting this includes the kinds of cores recovered from Paleoindian sites, the regular occurrence of core reduction debris even on sites that have produced no cores, and the very frequent use of core-struck flake blanks for reduction into a wide variety of tools. The refitting data from Allen, showing that many more cores were flaked on the site than were discarded there, indicate that cores are often invisible in Paleoindian sites because many of these sites were occupied for a period of time that was shorter than the use life of a core. Bamforth and Becker (2000) discuss this in detail, and show that some regions of the Plains appear to produce cores more frequently than other regions, implying that patterns of site occupation (or, perhaps, reoccupation) may have varied across the Plains. The Allen site data in particular also do not fit well with widely accepted links between reconstructed patterns of tool production and group movements. The occupants of the Allen site clearly transported bifaces and other tools, but the bifaces appear to have been reduced at the site almost to finished form, and the tiny sample of nonlocal debitage clearly indicates transport of that material as essentially finished bifaces that are too small to serve as cores and that would be ruined by attempts to do so. The refitted sequences from the site make it clear that cores were worked but not discarded there, and hence must have been transported alongside of these other items, and the presence of exhausted but not recycled cores in the collection suggests that, like every other class of flaked stone artifact represented at the Allen site, cores were rarely, if ever, used for multiple purposes. Arguments

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that Paleoindian hunters enhanced their mobility by reducing the weight of transported toolkits by segmenting production—producing tools in advance, carrying them instead of cores, and maximizing their use lives—are inconsistent with these data. Such arguments rest, in part, on the assumption that the inventory of artifacts discarded at a site faithfully represents the relative frequency of the artifacts used at that site, and this assumption is clearly incorrect for mobile groups, as Binford’s Nunamiut work (Binford, 1977; also see Yellen, 1977) shows clearly (Bamforth and Becker, 2000). One simple inference suggested by the Allen site pattern is that cores were produced near raw material sources, carried and used as groups moved away from those sources, and, often, discarded as exhausted (and sometimes, perhaps, barely recognizable) pieces at other sources. Such a pattern would produce an archaeological record in which primary core reduction debris and exhausted cores would be found most often near source areas and would be less common in sites away from these areas. This is exactly the pattern that Lothrop (1989) describes in New York in connection with the distinction between the Potts assemblage, which contains no cores but has many corestruck tools, and the Corditaipe assemblage, which includes both primary reduction debris and exhausted cores. While Lothrop interprets this pattern as an example of segmented reduction, the Allen site refitting data imply that it may also result from core transport.

When is a Paleoindian: Change Over Time? Finally, this discussion has considered the aggregate pattern of Folsom and later Paleoindian technology without addressing the possibility that this technology changed over time. Several studies have argued that there were probably significant changes over time in overall patterns of Paleoindian land use on the Plains (Bamforth, 1988; Blackmar, 2001), and it is possible that technology changed as well. Kelly and Todd (1988) specifically focused on the “Early Paleoindian” occupants of North America, and explicitly link their arguments to the conditions encountered by the initial migrants into the New World, although they drew substantially on data from much later portions of the Paleoindian period on the Plains. However, use of the term “Early Paleoindian” on the Plains often refers to both the Clovis and the Folsom periods, and thus extends from approximately 11,500 to 10,100 B.P. (Holliday, 2000). The general typological similarity between Clovis and Folsom fluted points and the distinct change in point technology in later, unfluted, Paleoindian points presumably underlie this usage, and the distinction this suggests between Folsom and later occupations might imply substantial changes in larger areas of adaptation, including

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technology. However, the patterns documented here are as characteristic of Folsom technology as they are of later periods of time. For example, Folsom sites show the same overall pattern of raw material use as later Paleoindian sites, with sites like Hanson producing almost no nonlocal stone and only sites like Shifting Sands, located in a region where no stone can be found, showing extensive long-distance transport of raw material for artifacts other than projectile points. “Phantom cores,” cores represented by debitage but not discarded in the site, are indicated in the Folsom assemblages at Blackwater Draw and Hanson as well as in later sites, and both Folsom and later assemblages show extensive reliance on core-struck rather than biface-struck blanks. Although there are no Folsom diagnostics at the Allen site, occupation there clearly dates to both Folsom and Late Paleoindian times, and refitting and other data there document the importance of cores throughout the entire Paleoindian period. The Allen site data also show the same absence of tool recycling and limited resharpening in all levels, and evidence for tool recycling at other sites is virtually entirely limited to projectile points regardless of their age. Similarly, the overall pattern of site use and organization of technology at Lubbock Lake does not appear to change from Folsom to later Paleoindian times (Bamforth, 1985). The one characteristic that may set Folsom technology apart from later Paleoindian technology is the possible use of large bifacial cores during this period. Such cores may perhaps have been designed to produce large, flat flakes that were particularly suitable as blanks for Folsom points (cf. Boldurian, 1991; Boldurian and Hubinsky, 1994). However, until at least one of these cores can be definitively dated to a Folsom context, this possibility is little more than speculation. Substantial technological change from Folsom to later Paleoindian times other than a shift from fluted to unfluted projectile points is thus difficult to see in the data considered here.

CONCLUSIONS: PALEOINDIAN TECHNOLOGY AND PALEOINDIAN LIFEWAYS Paleoindian flaked stone technology in North America generally and on the Great Plains specifically is clearly distinctive in at least some ways from flaked stone technology in other times and places. However, considering technological patterning systematically at the level of whole-site assemblages rather than concentrating on a limited portion of the inventory of Paleoindian material culture suggests that we have overemphasized this distinctiveness. Recognizing this, the data discussed here have implications both for Paleoindian lithic analysis and for our current understanding of Paleoindian ways of life.

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This evidence particularly implies that many important aspects of current reconstructions of Paleoindian ways of life on the Plains need to be reconsidered. Data on raw material use do suggest that Paleoindian flintknappers generally avoided lower quality stone, but these data show great variation in the long-distance raw material transport, potentially implying similar variability in territory size: Paleoindian groups do not seem universally to have moved over unusually large ranges. Similarly, there is no evidence currently available to suggest that Paleoindians relied to any great degree on bifacial cores that were ultimately intended to be used as tools, or that they made any great efforts to extend tool use lives through extensive resharpening and recycling. The likelihood that Paleoindian ways of life varied significantly across the Plains suggests the possibility of regional social or other differences, and there is some evidence in support of this. For example, there appear to be differences in projectile point style between the Northern and Southern Plains (Bamforth, 1991a; Knudsen, 1983), although these are poorly known at present. The Allen site projectile point assemblage also shows stylistic links to the more western Plains, but includes fairly small, lanceolate, concave-based points that have not been found to the west. In addition, the classic flat, flake-based end scrapers made on the Plains for at least 11,000 years are unknown at the site. Instead, the Allen site knappers made tools that Holder and Wike (1949) refer to as “trapezoidal scrapers,” a class of tools that is very similar to Clear Fork gouges and Dalton adzes from the eastern and southern Plains and adjacent areas (Bamforth in press-a). These possible stylistic differences suggest eastern–western Plains distinctions as well as those between the north and the south. Maximizing tool use lives has also been interpreted as a response to uncertain access to raw material as a result of unpredictable movements across the landscape. However, the absence of evidence for extensive resharpening and recycling of Paleoindian tools indicates that we should also reconsider this issue. In fact, extremely regular patterns of Paleoindian group movements have been reconstructed in the context of research that specifically emphasizes the high-tech forager model. For example, Ingbar (1992) suggests that the assemblage from the Folsom-age Hanson site represents an accumulation of debris from an unknown number of site occupations. However, all of the raw material that is not available in the immediate vicinity of the site comes from the Big Horn Mountains to the east, suggesting consistent movements from that direction into the Hanson site area. Similarly, Hofman (1991) reconstructs a pattern of Folsom movement on the Southern Plains so repetitive that it can be reconstructed simply by looking at projectile points from a handful of sites scattered over the entire 1000 calendar-year duration of the Folsom period (or 700 radiocarbon years [Holliday, 2000]).

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Recognizing that many—or even most—Paleoindian sites are aggregates of many occupations, the available raw material data suggest rather repetitive as well as fairly local movements in many areas. The persistent use of the Medicine Creek drainage throughout the entire course of the post-Clovis Paleoindian period (and similar patterns of use at other localities in other parts of the Plains; for example, at Hell Gap [Irwin-Williams et al., 1973], Lubbock Lake [Bamforth, 1985; Johnson, 1987], Blackwater Draw [Hester, 1972] and Agate Basin [Frison and Stanford, 1982; Hill, 2001]) also suggests rather predictable use of specific points on the landscape for thousands of years. The argument that Paleoindian groups were “technology-focused” rather than “place-focused” (Kelly and Todd, 1988) does not fit well with the Folsom and later archaeological record on the Plains. The local availability of raw material is probably one factor governing the reuse of localities like Medicine Creek and Hell Gap. However, there is a similar pattern of persistent site use at the Lubbock Lake site and Blackwater Draw, which are not near sources of easily flakeable raw material. Furthermore, other evidence for differential use of specific areas of the Plains crosscuts patterns of raw material availability (Bamforth and Becker, 2000). At the same time, Paleoindian groups seem to have used many localities very briefly (e.g., the Mill Iron site; Frison, 1996) or at intervals of hundreds of years (e.g., Carter/Kerr-McGee; Frison, 1984). Undifferentiated, monolithic views of Paleoindian land use cannot accommodate variation like this. In contrast to the largely undifferentiated cultural landscape implied by the high-tech forager model, patterns like these suggest that the Early Holocene Great Plains were a social and adaptive mosaic whose structure is only beginning to be discernable. Some places on the Plains were used over and over again for thousands of years, perhaps many times within the life of a single individual; others were used only occasionally. Human groups may have moved over large distances in some regions and much smaller distances in others, and, as at Medicine Creek and Hell Gap, these regional differences appear to have persisted for millennia. As earlier sections note, one reason for the absence of evidence supporting many aspects of the high-tech forager hypothesis is likely to be the absence of attempts to systematically assess whether or not that hypothesis is correct. However, such analyses need to take into account the ways in which postdepositional processes affect lithic assemblages in much the same way that Paleoindian faunal analysis has. Akoshima and Frison (1996) stress the role that high-magnification microwear analysis can play in obtaining taphonomic information, but this is only one aspect of this problem. Trampling and other natural processes can and do modify flakes in ways that mimic intentional retouch by humans, and we need to be able to identify artifacts with these modifications in our analyses. Systematic microwear analysis is

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one means of doing this, and such analysis would make important contributions to this area of work, but taphonomic issues are important at every level of analysis. Paleoindian archaeology’s widespread emphasis on the most spectacular of components of lithic assemblages, particularly projectile points and extremely rare and exceptionally large or thin bifaces, and not on the more mundane majority of Paleoindian tools, obscures the fact that important aspects of Paleoindian technological organization do not differ greatly from the organization of later groups. This is not to say that important differences do not exist between Paleoindian and other ways of life and the technology these ways of life relied on: such differences are not difficult to discern. However, very high levels of generalization in our descriptions overemphasize these differences at the expense of a holistic representation of the organization of the overall technology we hope to reconstruct. A focus on systematic analysis of whole assemblages, including unmodified flakes, will provide us with a more detailed, and more accurate, picture of Paleoindian lifeways. Furthermore, as patterns of geographic and temporal variation within the Paleoindian period become more widely recognized, such analysis will better prepare us to make sense out of them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for comments from Angela E. Close, Phillip LeTourneau, David Meltzer, Mark Muniz, and an anonymous reviewer. Analysis of the Allen site collection was funded by the Bureau of Reclamation. Like the rest of our work at Medicine Creek, this paper is dedicated to the memory of Edward Mott Davis (1918–1998).

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