High-Tech Foragers? Folsom and Later Paleoindian Technology On The Great Plains

P1: GKZ/HGI-HGA P2: FpQ/FTT QC: GNI
Journal of World Prehistory [jowo] PP403-368458 March 9, 2002 16:36 Style le version Nov. 19th, 1999
Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2002 (
C
2002)
High-Tech Foragers? Folsom and Later
Paleoindian Technology on the Great Plains
1
Douglas B. Bamforth
2
Archaeologists generally argue that early (ca. 11,0008000 B.P.) populations
on the North American Great Plains moved over very large areas, relying on
sophisticated, biface-based aked stone technology and on extensive resharp-
ening and recycling of tools to cope with unpredictable access to raw material
sources. This paper reviews the development of this reconstruction and con-
siders the degree to which data from assemblages of Paleoindian aked stone
tools support it. Published information implies that patterns of raw mate-
rial 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 avail-
able 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 huntergatherer archae-
ology: food production came late to the continent, and in some areas did
not appear until European contact. Of the range of huntergatherer ways
of life documented in North America, though, that dated to the earliest,
1
A 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: bamforth@spot.colorado.edu.
55
0892-7537/02/0300-0055/0
C
2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation
56 Bamforth
or Paleoindian, period (11,8008000 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 rst identied. Sites dated to the earliest
portionof this periodonthe Plains, the Clovis period(11,80010,800 B.P.), are
extremely rare, but later parts of the period are better documented. Archae-
ological research into post-Clovis Paleoindian ways of life on the Plains is
dominated by studies of aked stone tools and faunal material (particularly
bison bone). This paper focuses on the rst of these, arguing that widely
accepted interpretations of the organization and adaptive signicance of
Paleoindian lithic technology are inconsistent with the character of Paleoin-
dian assemblages and that recognizing this has important implications for
understanding Paleoindian ways of life on the Plains.
To address these issues, I rst briey summarize the current synthe-
sis of these ways of life and the development of current perspectives on
Paleoindian aked stone technology that are integral to this synthesis. I then
discuss the currently available data fromthe 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 informa-
tion incompletely, I consider one specic 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 pri-
marily on analyses of faunal remains and aked 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 stud-
ies of bison bone beds that appear to represent cooperative efforts to take
entire herds of animals. Such bone beds are known throughout the west-
ern Plains, and tend to share a number of distinctive features (see Bement
[1999], Frison[1982a], Hill [2001], andMcCartney [1991] for summaries; also
see Frison [1974], Stanford [1978], Wheat [1972]). For example, Paleoindian
hunters appear to have rarely reused specic localities for their large kills:
Folsom and Later Paleoindian Technology 57
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
NorthwesternPlains, were carriedout most ofteninthe winter. Furthermore,
these kills show no evidence for intensive processing of carcasses: frequent
nds of large unbutchered parts of animals (often of entire articulated skele-
tons) 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 aked stone tools.
Paleoindianstoneworking is markedby extremely nely made, large, lanceo-
late 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 so-
phistication(Bradley, 1991; Hayden, 1982). As Goodyear (1989) pointedout,
Paleoindian intknappers often selected homogeneous, ne-grained, easily
akeable stone and neglected less workable material even when it was lo-
cally available and widely used in later periods of time. Most Paleoindian
sites contain at least some stone from distant raw material sources, and Pa-
leoindian archaeologists have emphasized transport of such stone over long
distances (Hofman et al., 1991; Wilmsen, 1974). Paleoindian tools, particu-
larly projectile points, also sometimes show evidence of resharpening and
of recycling from one form to another (Wheat, 1979; Wilmsen and Roberts,
1984).
Kelly and Todds 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 Todds arguments to the entire Paleoindian period. This synthesis sees
the presence of exotic stone in Paleoindian sites as evidence of group move-
ment over very large territories, and interprets the lack of reuse of kill sites
as evidence for an unpredictable pattern of land use in which specic loca-
tions 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)
58 Bamforth
is difcult to accommodate to this argument, and Todd et al. (1990) suggest
that it may result from taphonomic factors, although no such factors have
been identied. Amore 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 t well with the prevailing
synthesis.
The remainder of this paper thus summarizes current views of Pale-
oindian technology linked to this interpretation of the overall pattern of
Paleoindian land use and briey considers the development of these views
over the latter half of the twentiethcentury. It thenturns toassess these views
against what is known about Plains Paleoindian assemblages, rst consider-
ing the published data and then turning to focus on one specic 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 Goodyears (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 n-
ished pieces, while bifaces are argued to have been partially reduced for
transport and used rst as cores and later as blanks for nished knives or
projectile points.
This patternoften referred to as segmented (or serially seg-
mented) reduction (Ingbar, 1994; Lothrop, 1989; Nelson, 1990)is seen
as a way to reduce the weight of the transported toolkit while ensuring ac-
cess 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 akeable 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 rely-
ing on bifacial cores as sources of new tools and for later reduction into
nished 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.
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. Witthofts work
at the Shoop site in eastern Pennsylvania (Witthoft, 1952) and MacDonalds
work at the Debert site in Nova Scotia (MacDonald, 1968) have been par-
ticularly important in this context.
Witthofts analysis contains the seeds of much of the high-tech forager
hypothesis. Shoop is a surface site that was intensively collected by both am-
ateurs and professionals over a number of years, producing a collection of
some 900 artifacts, including nearly 50 uted 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 reect the occupation of the site
by the earliest migrants into the area, prior to their discovery of local int
sources (although the presence in the collection of a small number of uted
point preforms made from more local stone is inconsistent with this argu-
ment). His analysis also documented, albeit impressionistically, great differ-
ences 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 unmodied akes from the site and the high rates of
apparently used and retouched pieces indicate intensive use of rawmaterial.
Finally, Witthoft identied 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 stoneoften of unknown originin all
of the assemblages he examined.
At Debert, MacDonald (1968) conrmed a number of Witthofts ob-
servations, modied some of his arguments, and added several important
interpretations. As at Shoop, the Debert assemblage was made almost en-
tirely fromnonlocal material, obtained in this case approximately 50100 km
to the west of the site. Debert also showed strong typological similarities to
Shoop, particularly in scraper types. However, MacDonald also identied
pi` eces esquill ees (splintered pieces) as a major component of the collec-
tion, and argued that Witthoft had mistaken similar artifacts at Shoop for
the exhausted remnants of blade cores (although Meltzer [personal com-
munication, 2001] notes that there are true blades in the Shoop assem-
blage). Pi` eces esquill ees at Debert appear to have been made on several
60 Bamforth
kinds of blanks, including akes, core fragments, and exhausted end scrap-
ers. MacDonald also argued that a small number of large bifaces at Debert
were usedas cores andthat the akes drivenfromthemwere commonly used
as blanks for side scrapers, with the bifaces themselves ultimately being re-
duced into uted points or knives. He suggested that such a pattern was well-
suited to lifeways involving extensive movements away from raw material
sources.
Witthofts and MacDonalds 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 ar-
tifact style and technology over large areas, possibly the entire continent.
The basic technology that many archeologists have inferred from these data
involves fairly efcient use of raw material, with this efciency evident in
heavy resharpening of at least some tool categories, examples of tool recy-
cling, 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 efcient use of stone was a response to this, and that reliance on high-
quality raw material reected a need for easily akeable 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 pi` eces esquill ees as
evidence of recycling, viewing them as exhausted tools reduced by bipo-
lar 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 Todds 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 signicant quan-
tities 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 pro-
foundly different from that represented in collections of uted 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 im-
portant aspects of Paleoindian ways of life. More recently, Tankersley (1998)
documentedsubstantial variationinthe frequencies of nonlocal rawmaterial
among eastern uted point sites.
Second, Lothrop (1989) systematically assessed patterns of tool pro-
duction and recycling at the Potts site in New York, and presented data on
these issues from ve other sites as well. Lothrops analysis documented a
pattern of production of bifaces for use as tools, not as cores, and predomi-
nant reliance on nonbifacial cores. He also noted that pi` eces esquill ees, 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 Lothrops 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 stud-
ies that are most central to the development of the high-tech forager model
tendtorely onselective evidence pertaining tothe most distinctive aspects of
Paleoindian technology and rarely make systematic assemblage-level inter-
site comparisons. This approach to Paleoindian technology follows a com-
mon 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) exemplies
this very clearly.
For example, neither Witthoft nor Goodyear drew any distinction be-
tween 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 MacDonalds argument (MacDonald, 1968) that Witthoft
failed to recognize pi` eces esquill ees illustrates. Similarly, MacDonalds bifa-
cial cores are difcult to distinguish from midstage biface rejects, and it is
not clear how he identied the uses to which akes struck from such cores
were put. Goodyear (1989, p. 8) also notes the absence of systematic stud-
ies of tool recycling, but subsequent research has continued to rely on his
arguments without making any signicant attempt to address this gap in the
literature. In fact, pi` eces esquill ees are not necessarily recycled tools in all
cases: many archaeologists interpret them as wedges rather than as cores
(Meltzer, 1988).
In contrast, Meltzers and Lothrops more detailed syntheses of data
from whole assemblages outline a richer and more variable picture of Pa-
leoindian technology than previous analyses have provided and indicate
clearly that the eastern data do not uniformly t the expectations of the high-
techforager hypothesis. DatafromtheGreat Plains yieldsimilar conclusions.
62 Bamforth
PLAINS PALEOINDIAN ASSEMBLAGES
Most analyses of Paleoindian aked 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 in-
terpretation of the patterns in the data from bison bone beds, but it is clear
that these data derive from detailed, systematic studies of whole collect-
ions 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 Paleoin-
dian 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 sur-
face 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
fromthe Plains. Table I lists the sites that have contributedinformationtothe
discussion below, distinguishing between Folsomand 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 reected 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 intknappers,
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 discus-
sion documents, projectile point collections from more general activity sites
Table I. Sites Providing Information for This Paper (See Fig. 1 for Site Locations)
Culture-historical
Site association Key references
Folsom or Contemporary
1. AdairSteadman Folsom Tunnell, 1977
2. Agate Basin Folsom Frison and Stanford, 1982
3. Allen none Bamforth, 1999
Bamforth and Becker, 2000
4. Blackwater Draw Folsom Boldurian, 1990
Hester, 1972
5. Bobtail Wolf/Big Black Folsom Root, 2000; William, 2000
6. Carter/KerrMcGee Folsom Frison, 1984
7. Cooper Folsom Bement, 1999
8. Elida Folsom Hester, 1962
9. Hanson Folsom Frison and Bradley, 1980
Ingbar, 1992
10. Hell Gap Folsom/Goshen Irwin-Williams et al., 1973
Sellet, 1999
11. Lake Theo Folsom Harrison and Smith, 1975
12. Lindenmeier Folsom Wilmsen and Roberts, 1984
13. Lubbock Lake Folsom Bamforth, 1985
Johnson, 1987
14. Mill Iron Goshen Frison, 1996
15. Shifting Sands Folsom Hofman et al., 1991
Late Paleoindian
2. Agate Basin Agate Basin/Hell Gap Frison and Stanford, 1982
3. Allen none Bamforth, 1999
Bamforth and Becker, 2000
4. Blackwater Draw multiple Hester, 1972
6. Carter/KerrMcGee Agate Basin/Hell Gap/Cody Frison, 1984
16. Cherokee Sewer none Anderson, 1980
17. Dempsey Divide multiple Thurmond, 1990
10. Hell Gap Cody Knell, 1999
18. Horner Cody Frison and Todd, 1987
19. Jurgens Cody Wheat, 1979
20. Lime Creek Cody Bamforth, 1999
Davis, 1954, 1962
13. Lubbock Lake Plainview/Firstview Bamforth, 1985
Johnson, 1987
21. MacHafe Cody Knudson, 1983
22. Packard Agate Basin Wyckoff, 1974
23. Plainview Plainview Knudson, 1983
24. Pumpkin Creek multiple Wyckoff and Taylor, 1974
25. Ray Long Angostura Wheeler, 1995
26. Red Smoke none Bamforth, 1999
Davis, 1954
27. Rex Rodgers none Hughes and Willey, 1978
28. Ryans Cache 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.
64 Bamforth
Fig. 1. Locations of sites that provided data for this paper. Numbers refer to sites listed
in Table I.
often show signicantly 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 gen-
eral, may overrepresent both the overall level of intworking skill manifest
during the Paleoindian period and the degree to which Paleoindian groups
reliedondistant sources of stone. Alater sectionof 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 op-
erationalizing these expectations can be difcult. First, if the argument that
Paleoindian groups ranged over exceptionally large areas is correct, rawma-
terial fromdistant sources shouldbe commoninPaleoindianassemblages, or
shouldoccur ina formthat indicates it was once common(e.g., wornout 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 stud-
ies (tools should often show evidence of having been reworked from one
form to another). Use of bifaces rst 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 pro-
vide 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 unnished 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 pos-
sibility that a single object can be both obviously complicates this problem.
Ultimately, identifying an object as a core depends on demonstrating that
akes 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 akes, 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 akes. Cross sections should be thin relative to their width,
and more regular and closely spaced ake scars should be associated with
66 Bamforth
relatively thinner pieces. Particularly in the later stages of reduction, such
production produces relatively large numbers of akes. Considerations like
these are always important to successful biface production, but they are
particularly critical in production of uted points (where the conguration
of the uted surface strongly affects breakage rates) and of very thin bifaces.
In contrast, bifacial cores should show an overall bifacial pattern of aking,
but should bear large ake scars that do not carefully shape surfaces. Such
cores should also show irregular edge angles and congurations, 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 briey summarizes
that analysis.
Anypatternof reductionwill occasionallyproduceakes that arepoten-
tially useful as tools, even when it is not directed toward that goal. However,
unnished Paleoindian bifacial tools are argued to have served systemat-
ically as cores prior to being reduced into nished 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 identied at the Mitchell Locality at Blackwater
Draw are bifacial, but Boldurian (1991, p. 292) specically notes that akes
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 aking 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, whichwouldmake their original formdifcult or impossible toidentify.
However, patterns of bifacial tool production, particularly near rawmaterial
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 akes 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
efciency, appear to have been made predominantly on ake blanks that
were less than a centimeter thick (Flenniken, 1978), making it essentially
impossible for Folsompoint preforms to serve as cores without ruining them
for subsequent reduction. Data on the dimensions of nished retouched
pieces are rare, but the limited available information, and illustrations of
such artifacts, indicate that retouched tools made on akes 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 reduc-
tion that produced a given ake blank. When analysts do this, it is clear that a
great many, and, where specic tabulations are available, often the great ma-
jority, of Paleoindian ake blanks were not struck from bifaces (Boldurian,
1991, p. 292; Bradley, 1982, pp. 184185; Frison and Bradley, 1980, p. 30; Root
et al., 2000, pp. 248249). It is also likely that the available data overestimate
the frequency of retouched pieces and utilized unmodied akes made on
biface akes. Many Paleoindian assemblages, and most Folsomassemblages,
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 akes are particularly easy to dam-
age accidentally, and the kinds of tools that are commonly identied on such
akes (e.g., gravers, raclettes, used akes, 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 ex-
posedonthe groundsurface for anextendedperiodof time (Kreutzer, 1996).
Direct evidence of surface exposure in the lithic assemblage can be seen in
re damage and patination on many artifacts (Akoshima and Frison, 1996;
68 Bamforth
Bradley and Frison, 1996). Two of the three artifacts classied as gravers at
Mill Iron show no use traces of any kind; both of these are tiny (roughly
2.0 cmin maximumdimension) fragments of biface thinning akes. The pro-
jection identied 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 nished 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 ake edges exposed on the
ground surface.
Discussions of bifacial cores in Paleoindian sites have tended to em-
phasize a small number of exceptionally large examples from probable
Paleoindiancontexts. Thebest knownof theseis Franks biface(Boldurian,
1991; Boldurian and Cotter, 1999), recovered from the surface of the Black-
water 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 as-
semblage context; in fact, LeTourneau (2000, pp. 164185) argues convinc-
ingly 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 akes used as blanks for Folsom points at the site (Boldurian
and Hubinsky, 1994). Similar cores also appear to have produced a small
number of akes recovered, also from a chronologically mixed surface as-
semblage, at the Shifting Sands site in West Texas (Hofman et al., 1990).
Franks biface shows no evidence of any attempt to reduce it into a nished
tool; instead, the irregulararity of its edges and its overall pattern of aking
suggest that it is probably an exhausted core. The unpublished and as yet
undated Busse cache from western Kansas (D. Busse, personal communica-
tion, 2000) also includes spectacularly large, probably Paleoindian, bifaces,
along with other tools and large, useable unmodied akes, some of which
can be tted 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 akes struck from unnished 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 rst used bifaces of any kind as cores and later reduced
them into nished points or knives. Instead, Paleoindian tools, including
projectile points andother bifaces, appear tohave beenmade predominantly
onakes struckfromnonbifacial cores (andevidenceis increasingthat Clovis
knappers often relied on true blades; Collins, 1999). The low frequencies of
anykindof coreinPaleoindiansites aresurprisinginlight 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 aked 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 rawmaterial use by any group of stone
tool users needs totake intoaccount the natural distributionof suchmaterial.
On the Plains, akeable stone is unevenly distributed and varies widely in
quality. Bedrock sources of stone (obviously) occur where bedrock contain-
ing akeable 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 rawmaterial, 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 southwest-
ern 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,
akeable stone in these contexts tends to occur in small fragments and can
be highly fractured.
Oneresult of this unevendistributionof material is that largeparts 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 stone-
toolusing 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 nd nonlocal raw material in many times
and places, and it is not difcult to nd examples of this in non-Paleoindian
contexts (i.e., Holen, 1991). This implies that it is necessary to document
70 Bamforth
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 showgreater amounts of such stone than later
sites.
Paleoindian assemblages in many areas of the Plains contain almost no
evidence for long-distance transport of signicant amounts of raw material.
For example, all three of the Medicine Creeksites insouthwesternNebraska,
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 out-
side 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 int (Root et al., 2000;
William, 2000), and Mill Iron and MacHafe in Montana are dominated by
stone available no farther than 70 km distant (Francis and Larson, 1996;
Knudson, 1983). Raw material identications at the Ray Long site in west-
ern South Dakota are imprecise, but Wheelers descriptions (Wheeler, 1995)
suggest that nearly 90% of the retouched pieces are made from quartzite
and chalcedony available close by. More condently, 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 akeable stone is uncommon,
show somewhat more complex patterns. Raw material identications 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 fromlocal 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 propor-
tion 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 vary-
ing 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 kmaway and another roughly 200 kmaway. However, the debitage from
Area 1 here is dominated by the rst of these, while over 80% of that from
Area 2 is of relatively low quality locally available material.
On the Southern Plains, nonHigh Plains sites in the eastern Texas Pan-
handle 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 Paleoindian-
agesites farther east inOklahoma(Wyckoff, 1964; Wyckoff andTaylor, 1971)
and south in central Texas (Tunnell, 1977), although the wide availability of
Edwards Plateau chert in this last area makes exotic stone difcult to iden-
tify: 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 east-
ern NewMexico (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). Non-
local materials, particularly Edwards chert, do occur in nonHigh 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 showa 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. Sim-
ilarly, although virtually none of the Hanson site collection is made from
stone from distant sources, relatively more distant (but still fairly local) ma-
terial 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 int and
porcellanite) comprise 35.2%of thepoints (86of 158) but makeuponly7.1%
(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 avail-
able) quartzite is more frequent in the points than in the remainder of the
assemblage (Wheat, 1979, pp. 126127).
72 Bamforth
Resharpening and Recycling
Maximizing tool use lives by designing them for multiple uses, exten-
sively resharpening them, and recycling them from one form to another
lies at the heart of the inference that Paleoindian technology is designed
to make efcient 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. 143144) points out that certain
kinds of knapping errors that are fairly common in Folsom point manufac-
ture can mimic patterns that are often interpreted as resharpening.
Wheats analysis of the Jurgens site collection is perhaps the most de-
tailed study (Wheat, 1979) of this: many of the Jurgens points were clearly
resharpened. This study also identies wear traces on the edges of the Jur-
gens 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. 172174) also indicate that points were sometimes converted into
other forms, although some of the artifacts identied as examples of this at
Lindenmeier are production failures rather than tools broken in use. Pi` eces
esquill ees, the class of artifact most often cited as evidence of tool recycling in
eastern Paleoindian assemblages, are rarely identied in Plains assemblages.
When they do appear on the Plains, pi` eces esquill ees appear to have been
wedges, not cores (Bradley and Frison, 1996; Frison, 1982b). The blanks for
these artifacts have not been identied (but see the Allen site data below).
It is difcult to draw more holistic assessments of the degree to which
Paleoindian tools were maintained and recycled. Tools like hafted end scrap-
ers were certainly resharpened regularly, but tools like these were resharp-
ened on the Plains until they fell out of use during the post-Contact period.
Retouched, possibly resharpened, tools are common in Paleoindian assem-
blages, but, again, there is nothing particularly distinctive in this observation.
However, Frison and Bradley (1980) and Bradley (1982) classied the as-
semblages from the Hanson and Agate Basin sites according to Fran cois
Bordes Middle Paleolithic typology (Bordes, 1961; Deb enath and Dibble,
1994), and these classications offer a means of at least tentatively assessing
overall degrees of assemblage resharpening.
Dibble (1984, 1995) argues that, at least for side scrapers, resharpen-
ing of worn edges is one important factor structuring Bordes typology.
In Dibbles view, the rst stage of resharpening is manifest in single-edged
scrapers (Types 9 through 11); somewhat more extensive resharpening pro-
duces double-edged scrapers (Types 12 through 17), and maximal res-
harpening produces convergent, transverse, and d ejet e scrapers (Types 18
through24). The Bordes typology was designedtodescribe a technology that
was almost certainly organized in very different ways than was Paleoindian
technology and I refer to Dibbles 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 ty-
pology 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 Basinage collection from the Agate Basin site;
Table II) show low frequencies of the most heavily retouched categories of
tools (convergent, transverse, and d ejet e scrapers). If Dibbles 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 reect 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 akes clearly indicate an absence of attention to re-
juvenating tools. Systematic high-magnication 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 Classied Into the Three Basic Groups of
Bordes Middle Paleolithic Tool Types
Agate Basin site
Tool class Hanson site Folsom Agate Basin
Single scrapers 61 16 16
Double scrapers 18 9 19
Convergent/transverse/d ejet e scrapers 9 3 8
Note. Data from Frison and Bradley (1980, p. 15) and Bradley (1982, p. 184).
74 Bamforth
by denition), and 35 (71.4%) of these edges are unmodied and thus unre-
sharpened. 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 resi-
dential site, but the collection is signicant nevertheless: despite being lo-
cated in an exceptionally raw-materialpoor 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 difcult to nd on unmodied edges.
These 107 used pieces also included a total of only 123 used edges, and only
3 showedtraces of more thanone kindof 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 poten-
tially 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, re-
sulting 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 fromrawmaterial
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; akes
stuck fromany formof 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: uted point preforms in particular
were almost certainly too thin to reliably have produced useful akes. Where
specic kinds of cores have been identied as sources of tool blanks, a variety
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, pri-
marily points and end scrapers, and Indian people on the Plains resharpened
this latter class of tools well into the 1800s. Several lines of evidence indi-
cate, albeit tentatively in some cases, that Paleoindians tended to discard
their tools without extensive resharpening, and often without any resharp-
ening 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; pi` eces esquill ees on the Plains appear to be
wedges, not cores. Finally, the frequency of exotic stone in Paleoindian as-
semblages 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
withinassemblages betweenrawmaterials representedinpoints andinother
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 hypoth-
esis. 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 specic 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 t this reconstruction. However, even bearing
this in mind, a number of lines of evidence are strongly discordant with tra-
ditional expectations, and additional analyses are unlikely to alter this. I thus
turn to one specic 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).
76 Bamforth
Table III. Frequencies of Worked Stone at the Allen Site
Blank type Material Recycled
a
Artifact category N Flake Tabular ?/other Jasper Other N %
Bifaces
b
Stage 1 2 0 1 1 2 0 0 0.0
Stage 2 46 3 7 36 46 0 6 13.0
Stage 3 40 5 1 34 40 0 1 2.5
Stage 4 10 0 1 9 10 0 0 0.0
Points 9 2 0 7 6 3 1 11.1
Point preforms 20 4 1 15 20 0 0 0.0
Beveled tools
c
19 8 2 9 19 0 0 0.0
Bevelled tool preform 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0.0
Cores 19 0 0 19 19 0 0 0.0
Edge-modied 82 59 3 20 82 0 0 0.0
Perforators 5 3 0 2 5 0 0 0.0
Pi` eces esquill ees 9 3 0 6 9 0 n/a
Other 18 2 4 12 18 0 0 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 ve pi` eces esquill ees 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 unmodied akes (Table III summarizes the over-
all assemblage content, along with data relevant to the topics addressed be-
low). The excavations there also recovered 12 hammerstones, 8 fragments
of grinding stones, 76 bone tools, approximately 3600 bones that could be
identied at least to the genus level and thousands of additional bone frag-
ments; eld 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 briey summarize that discussion here.
Allen Site Bifaces
There are two basic classes of bifaces in the Allen site assemblage: bifa-
cial cores (n = 2) and unnished 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 transformtheminto any other form. The other bifaces represent
Stages 1 through 4 in Callahans classication, with Stage 4 being the nished
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
Fig. 2. Bifacial cores from the Allen site.
78 Bamforth
Table IV. Mean Dimensions (mm) for Stage 2, 3, and 4 Bifaces
From the Allen Site (Complete Measurements Only)
Stage
2 3 4
Length
Mean 63.5 68.1 82.9
SD 18.0 15.3 4.5
N 15 11 2
Width
Mean 48.8 43.1 40.9
SD 7.9 9.3 10.9
N 23 34 5
Thickness
Mean 20.0 14.7 11.3
SD 6.0 4.6 4.0
N 43 42 8
W/T ratio 2.40 2.93 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
dened reduction pattern, and often bear traces of bipolar aking. Although
all of these cores are made from locally abundant Smoky Hills jasper (see
below), the smaller cores are uniformly made from more homogeneous,
ner-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 identiable are made on akes; 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
identiable biface blanks are tabular). Although bifaces from all stages of
reduction are present on the site, they are uniformly too small to have served
as the parent pieces for the tools made on ake blanks. The mean width
for retouched pieces that were denitely made on akes 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 arenearlyas largeas thediscardedbifaces inthecollection(compare
with the values in Table IV). Only 19 of the retouched pieces retain their
striking platforms, but 15 (78.9%) of these show at, 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 programof sampling for microwear analysis of the Allen site collec-
tion focused on retouched pieces and included very few unmodied akes:
unmodied but used edges are thus certainly underrepresented in the sam-
ple. 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 identied by high-magnication microwear anal-
ysis ontools other thanthose that are retouchedby denition, 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 modications
to the tools that would result from multiple rounds of resharpening: most
retouched edges appear simply to have been straightened or otherwise min-
imally accommodated to use. Use of a single edge for more than one pur-
pose 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
pi` eces esquill ees, 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 difcult to view many of the Allen
site pi` eces esquill ees as the result of extending the use lives of nished tools.
Seven of these artifacts have a wedge-like cross section. Three of these seven
were made on unmodied akes, three were made on thin unnished biface
fragments, and one was made on a piece whose original form is unclear.
80 Bamforth
Fig. 3. Retted 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
productionof these items. Anadditional twopieces, bothmade onfragments
of unnished bifaces, have a blockier cross section that would not be suitable
for wedging. These pieces may have been used as cores, although the akes
removed from them appear to be too small for use.
Seven other fragments of broken, unnished bifaces were also put to
other uses. Two such fragments are scored with deep grooves and were prob-
ably used to scrub biface or other edges during tool production, while three
others showbattered and/or worn corners produced fromhammering, peck-
ing the surfaces of grinding stones, or burnishing some unknown object(s).
Two others have akes driven either down a broken edge or from a bro-
ken edge, although none of the akes so driven appears to have been large
enough for use. Other than these, no artifacts in the collection showevidence
of any form of recycling.
With the exception of the reworked point, though, it is difcult to see
these examples as recycling in the sense in which this term is widely used.
They certainly do not represent use of a nished 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: evi-
dence for such scavenging, in the formof 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 out-
crops in abundance within a kilometer of the site, as well as in many of the
tributaries of the Republican River in southwestern Nebraska and north-
western Kansas. Exotic stone, including Madison chert from eastern
Wyoming, Alibates agate from the Texas Panhandle, Nehawka chert from
easternNebraska, several kinds of stone fromsecondary sources inthe Platte
River gravels north of the site, and a few pieces of stone of unknown non-
local 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 akes out of the total of over 11,000). It is found
among the retouched pieces only among the nished projectile points (three
of the nine nished projectile points from the site are made of nonlocal
material, including the only object in the collection made from Alibates
agate).
Retting, Debitage, and Reduction Strategies
Despite the frequency of bifaces in the overall assemblage, retting
of the Allen site material reveals a very different pattern of production
and transport. The ratio of cores (including bifacial cores) to nished and
unnishedbifaces inthe retouchedportionof the collectionis 0.15. However,
retted core-struck sequences outnumber retted 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
82 Bamforth
Allen site transported cores rather than only nished or partially nished
tools (Bamforth and Becker [2000] discuss this in detail). In passing, the
difference between the frequencies of cores in the assemblage and of core-
struck sequences in the retted 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 en-
tirely 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 ap-
pears to have been directed toward the production of nearly nished 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 Ingbars elegant model (Ingbar, 1994) shows, it is dan-
gerous to interpret raw material frequencies directly as evidence for terri-
tory size: by holding territory size and rawmaterial source locations constant
and varying rates of tool depletion and speed of movement across the land-
scape, 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, retting makes it clear that, at minimum, cores and bi-
faces were both carried away. Projectile points, nished 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 akes appear to have been re-
moved in the late stages of biface reduction, implying that bifaces made
fromnonlocal stone also passed through the site. Finally, at least a fewof the
pi` eces esquill ees may represent transported pieces that have been splintered
by bipolar reduction to produce useful akes, although, as noted earlier, this
interpretation does not t very well with all of these pieces.
Other than the few nonlocal akes 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 Panhan-
dle and two others are made of unidentied 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 ter-
ritories, 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 straight-
forward. Most often, the Paleoindian occupants of the site manufactured
bifaces for reduction into nished 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 fre-
quency of these tools coupled with the low frequency of cores in the site
assemblage ts 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 ret
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 informa-
tion from the Allen site, do not closely match the assemblage level expecta-
tions that the high-tech forager hypothesis implies. Before discussing these
patterns, though, it is important to reiterate that very few studies have at-
tempted systematically to assess this hypothesis. The notion that Paleoindian
technology was designed rst 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 obser-
vations. Attempts to expand on the published analyses discussed here and
to systematically assess this reconstruction may well reveal evidence that
84 Bamforth
provides a better t. Despite this possibility, though, some of the patterns in
the available data are so clear that they are unlikely to be altered substan-
tially 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 vari-
ability 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 fromits 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 Paleoindianliterature (i.e., Hayden, 1982; Hofmanet al.,
1991; LeTourneau, 2000; Meltzer, 1989) has focusedalmost entirely ontwoof
thesetrade between local groups and direct procurement at the source by
entire social groupsand 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
alsomove small amounts of stone. Furthermore, Paleoindianarchaeology on
the Plains generally rejects the rst of these andessentially 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 ne-grained raw
materialblanks for bifaces and pointsor nished points could help ac-
count for the discrepancies in many assemblages noted above between the
raw materials represented among projectile points and among other kinds
of aked 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 reasonsit is easier to complete a Paleoindian
point in ner-grained than in coarser-grained stone, and the exotics present
in Paleoindian sites are always ne-grainedbut also for social or symbolic
reasons.
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 identied one large bifacially modied akenot a
nished tool, but a piece that could serve as a blank for a pointthat 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
unnished suggests that stone may have moved in blank form.
The likelihood that trade does not account for all access to rawmaterial
in no way precludes some movement of stone among groups in different
areas: many huntergatherer 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 frequen-
cies in Paleoindian sites reect a combination of several processes including,
but not limited to, group movements to source areas.
This possibilityhas important implications bothfor researchthat 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 land-
scape than similar analyses of other kinds of sites, and contrasts between the
kinds of stone present inkill andother kinds of sites locatednear 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
86 Bamforth
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 akable 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. 130135).
Interpreting even large proportions of nonlocal stone in intact nonkill-
site assemblages, though, can be complex. Ingbar (1994), for example, notes
that the interaction among raw material locations, speed of group move-
ment, 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 aggre-
gate 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 ma-
terial there and the dominance of local eastern Pennsylvania material in
collections of isolated uted points from the area around the site reects 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 repre-
sent 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 assump-
tion 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
withburiedsoils (see, for example, Hollidays [1997] summaryof 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.
Only the Southern High Plains, a region with almost no local sources
of even moderately ne-grained stone, shows a fairly uniform reliance on
large amounts of stone from distant sources. However, even here this pat-
tern 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 fre-
quency 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 signicant amounts of relatively low
quality (and sometimes extremely low quality) stone from local gravels and
outcrops (Bamforth, 1985). This local material is muchless commonafter 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. How-
ever, as discussedabove, the inference that Paleoindiangroups diduniformly
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 tech-
nology 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 vari-
able reliance on long-distance transport of stone, perhaps it is time to rethink
this issue (see Bement [1999, pp. 168172] 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 ne-grained, easily akeable
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 reects the abundance of debris produced during
the early stages of manufacture. However, such sites also produce nished
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
88 Bamforth
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 intworking
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/ake-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 ake blanks for reduction
into a wide variety of tools. The retting data from Allen, showing that
many more cores were aked 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 t well with widely ac-
cepted 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 nished form, and the tiny sample of nonlocal debitage clearly indicates
transport of that material as essentially nished bifaces that are too small to
serve as cores and that would be ruined by attempts to do so. The retted
sequences from the site make it clear that cores were worked but not dis-
carded 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 aked stone artifact represented at the
Allen site, cores were rarely, if ever, used for multiple purposes. Arguments
that Paleoindian hunters enhanced their mobility by reducing the weight of
transported toolkits by segmenting productionproducing tools in advance,
carrying them instead of cores, and maximizing their use livesare incon-
sistent 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 in-
correct for mobile groups, as Binfords 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 rawmaterial sources, carried and used as groups moved
away fromthose sources, and, often, discarded as exhausted (and sometimes,
perhaps, barely recognizable) pieces at other sources. Such a pattern would
produce anarchaeological recordinwhichprimarycorereductiondebris 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 core-
struck 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 retting 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 signicant 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) specically 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 termEarly Paleoindian on the Plains often refers
to both the Clovis and the Folsom periods, and thus extends from approxi-
mately 11,500 to 10,100 B.P. (Holliday, 2000). The general typological similar-
ity between Clovis and Folsom uted points and the distinct change in point
technology in later, unuted, Paleoindian points presumably underlie this
usage, and the distinction this suggests between Folsom and later occupa-
tions might imply substantial changes in larger areas of adaptation, including
90 Bamforth
technology. However, the patterns documented here are as characteristic of
Folsom technology as they are of later periods of time.
For example, Folsomsites showthe same overall pattern of rawmaterial
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 retting and other data there document the
importance of cores throughout the entire Paleoindianperiod. The Allensite
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 pat-
tern 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, at
akes 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 denitively dated to a Folsom context, this possi-
bility is little more than speculation. Substantial technological change from
Folsom to later Paleoindian times other than a shift from uted to unuted
projectile points is thus difcult to see in the data considered here.
CONCLUSIONS: PALEOINDIAN TECHNOLOGY
AND PALEOINDIAN LIFEWAYS
Paleoindian aked stone technology in North America generally and
on the Great Plains specically is clearly distinctive in at least some ways
from aked stone technology in other times and places. However, consid-
ering technological patterning systematically at the level of whole-site as-
semblages 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.
This evidence particularly implies that many important aspects of cur-
rent reconstructions of Paleoindian ways of life on the Plains need to be
reconsidered. Data on raw material use do suggest that Paleoindian intk-
nappers 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 uni-
versally 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 signicantly 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 South-
ern 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, lanceo-
late, concave-based points that have not been found to the west. In addition,
the classic at, ake-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 easternwestern Plains distinctions as
well as those between the north and the south.
Maximizing tool use lives has also been interpreted as a response to un-
certain 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 move-
ments have been reconstructed in the context of research that specically
emphasizes the high-tech forager model. For example, Ingbar (1992) sug-
gests that the assemblage from the Folsom-age Hanson site represents an
accumulation of debris from an unknown number of site occupations. How-
ever, 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 con-
sistent movements from that direction into the Hanson site area. Similarly,
Hofman (1991) reconstructs a pattern of Folsommovement on the Southern
Plains so repetitive that it can be reconstructed simply by looking at projec-
tile points froma handful of sites scatteredover the entire 1000 calendar-year
duration of the Folsom period (or 700 radiocarbon years [Holliday, 2000]).
92 Bamforth
Recognizing that manyor even mostPaleoindian 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 en-
tire 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], LubbockLake [Bamforth, 1985; Johnson, 1987],
Blackwater Draw[Hester, 1972] andAgateBasin[FrisonandStanford, 1982;
Hill, 2001]) also suggests rather predictable use of specic points on the land-
scape for thousands of years. The argument that Paleoindian groups were
technology-focused rather than place-focused (Kelly and Todd, 1988)
does not t well with the Folsom and later archaeological record on the
Plains. The local availability of raw material is probably one factor govern-
ing 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, whicharenot near sources of easilyakeablerawmaterial.
Furthermore, other evidencefor differential useof specic areas of thePlains
crosscuts patterns of raw material availability (Bamforth and Becker, 2000).
At the same time, Paleoindian groups seemto have used many localities very
briey (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 sup-
porting 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-magnication microwear analysis can play in obtaining tapho-
nomic information, but this is only one aspect of this problem. Trampling
and other natural processes can and do modify akes in ways that mimic
intentional retouch by humans, and we need to be able to identify artifacts
with these modications in our analyses. Systematic microwear analysis is
one means of doing this, and such analysis would make important contri-
butions to this area of work, but taphonomic issues are important at every
level of analysis.
Paleoindian archaeologys widespread emphasis on the most spectac-
ular 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 as-
pects 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 difcult to discern. How-
ever, very high levels of generalization in our descriptions overemphasize
these differences at the expense of a holistic representation of the organiza-
tion of the overall technology we hope to reconstruct. A focus on systematic
analysis of whole assemblages, including unmodied akes, will provide us
with a more detailed, and more accurate, picture of Paleoindian lifeways.
Furthermore, as patterns of geographic and temporal variation within the
Paleoindianperiodbecome more widely recognized, suchanalysis 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 (19181998).
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