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289 C HA PT E R N I N E The Prehistoric Archaeology of the Great Basin Pre-Clovis Sites in the Great Basin The Clovis archaeological phenomenon provides the earliest widespread evidence we have for people in North America (chapter 4). Dating to between 11,200 and 10,800 years ago, Clovis is best known from the Plains and Southwest and is marked by very distinctive lanceolate, concave-based fluted projectile points (figure 4-3). These distinctive stone points are also famous for having frequently been found associated with the remains of extinct Pleistocene mammoths. Claims of pre-Clovis sites have been made for most parts of North America. The Great Basin is no exception. Not only does this region contain the Calico site and Fort Rock Cave, the latter with a 13,200-year date from the very bottom (chapter 3), but it also contains a wide variety of other sites that have been claimed to be pre-Clovis in age. All but one of these has been soundly rejected by virtually all professional archaeologists. Tule Springs, in southern Nevada, provides an excellent example of the rejected sites. Although the site was at one time argued to contain archaeological materials more than 28,000 years old, substantial excavations done in the 1960s showed conclusively that the artifacts here date to no more than about 11,000 years ago. The same excavations led to the important research (discussed in chapters 6 and 8) by Peter Mehringer and Vance Haynes, among others, on the latest Pleistocene and Holocene environments of the Las Vegas Valley. While the Great Basin is not exceptional in having a significant number of sites that have been held by some to be pre-Clovis in age, it is alone in North America in containing one site that clearly does predate Clovis: the Paisley Caves, discussed in chapter 3, dated to about 12,350 years ago (figures 3-2 and 9-1). Even though this is the case, it is also true that the Great Basin archaeological record is entirely silent between the time people stopped at Paisley to do what they did there and about 11,200 years ago. Then, the archaeological record begins again, and it begins with a richness that is in some important ways hard to match in other parts of North America. The Latest Pleistocene and Early Holocene Great Basin Fluted Point Sites Fluted points are fairly common in the Great Basin. Some of these are fluted from base to tip and look very much like Folsom points from the Great Plains and Southwest, which date to between 10,900 and 10,200 years ago (see chapter 3). However, most Great Basin fluted points tend to look more like classic Clovis points than like anything else. As a result, the term “Clovis” was at one time routinely applied to both the points and to the sites that contain them, and sometimes still is. Doing that, however, almost automatically implies that the Great Basin examples are the same age as those from elsewhere—that is, between 11,200 and 10,800 years ago. This is a jump that many Great Basin archaeologists are unwilling to make. There is a very good reason for that. Archaeologists Charlotte Beck and Tom Jones have analyzed a large series of Great Basin fluted points in great detail, measuring just about everything on these points that could be measured and comparing the results to classic Clovis points. Their results confirmed what many had suspected but had never shown: that many Great Basin fluted points are quite different from those that mark Clovis. They are often shorter and thinner and have a wider and deeper (more concave) base. These results suggested to them that most of these points are likely to be younger than their Clovis relatives in the Plains and Southwest, perhaps appearing late in Clovis times or even contemporary with Folsom. To mark 290 GREAT BASIN ARCHAEOLOGY this important difference, I simply refer to them as Great Basin fluted points (figure 9-2). Fluted points are known from most, but not all parts of the Great Basin. In fact, it is easier to specify the major areas from which they are poorly known—the high-elevation valleys of central Nevada and the Bonneville Basin—than to list the places that have provided them in some number. This is not to say that the people who made these points did not visit these areas. William Davis and his...

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