Medicine Creek: Seventy Years of Archaeological Investigations

7. Medicine Creek Is a Paleoindian Cultural Ecotone: The Red Smoke Assemblage

The southwestern Nebraska Paleoindian Red Smoke site (25FT42) is in the upper reaches of a gallery-forested river that ®ows east to the Mississippi, in a sheltered, well-watered niche abundant in deer, small game, vegetable foods, and local high-quality knappable tabular stone (Smoky Hill jasper). It is a westward penetration into the High Plains, where bison were plentiful but water and good tool stone were less abundant. An estimated 98 percent of the ®aked stone tools found in the Red Smoke assemblage are of local jasper. The most common artifacts are debitage, bifaces re®ecting several stages of reduction, and bifacial cutting and chopping tools. The site’s Zone 88 assemblage is dated to between 9000 and 8700 rcybp. The site appears to re®ect ®aked stone reduction activities while people were camped at the site, which was adjacent to exposed jasper bedrock. Most of the well-reduced Red Smoke bifaces are fragments that exhibit unregimented 1-cm-wide facial ®ake scars. A dozen or more alternate beveled Zone 88 points (that may have served as both projectiles and knives) have strong stylistic similarities to the Dalton materials found in the Mississippi River drainage farther east and south, and two of these Red Smoke tools are identical in material, technology, and reshaped form to the two artifacts found at the Meserve site in eastern Nebraska. Two “Eden” point midsections, one of Alibates agatized dolomite and the other of Hartville Uplift quartzite, are associated. There is also one relatively complete point, which may or may not be of local jasper, with regimented parallel oblique ®aking. Most of the points are stylistically and technologically similar to tools from the Lime Creek and Allen sites just east of Red Smoke, to the Clary Ranch and Scottsbluff 7 Medicine Creek Is a Paleoindian Cultural Ecotone The Red Smoke Assemblage Ruthann Knudson sites in the North Platte valley to the northwest, and even to the Ray Long (Angostura) site assemblage on the Cheyenne River in western South Dakota. A few Red Smoke tools display similarities to artifacts from the Hell Gap site, an ecotonal quarry workshop and habitation site on the Wyoming boundary of the High Plains, and with bison kill sites, such as Claypool and Frasca, west of Red Smoke. Comparable point styles are also found at the Packard site in Oklahoma and the Acton site in Texas. Following Irwin, the Medicine Creek and North Platte valley Paleoindian sites discussed here are labeled the Medicine Creek complex. Detailed analysis of the Red Smoke assemblage and site is incomplete, but some thoughts of patterns are offered. The Red Smoke Site The Red Smoke site in southwestern Nebraska is a deep, well-strati¤ed Late Paleoindian (sensu Haynes 1969) and later record of human adaptations to the early Holocene environment in what appears to have been both a natural and a cultural ecotone. The site is located on Lime Creek, a tributary to Medicine Creek; Medicine Creek is itself a major tributary to the Republican River in the Missouri River drainage of the Central Plains of North America. The site may have been found by 1929 (Howe 1929:Figure 8.5, site no. 12), but it was not generally known until 1947. It was investigated from 1948 through 1953 as part of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s (USBR) post–World War II Medicine Creek Reservoir (Harry Strunk Lake) construction project (Kivett and Metcalf 1997). The Medicine Creek project included research on three Paleoindian sites along Lime Creek, including the Allen site (25FT50) and its Frontier complex, near the con®uence of Lime and Medicine Creeks; the Lime Creek site (25FT41), just upstream on that tributary; and the Red Smoke site, farther west up Lime Creek. Research at Red Smoke was conducted by the University of Nebraska State Museum under a cooperative agreement with the National Park Service Midwest Regional Of¤ce, Omaha, coordinated with the Smithsonian Institution’s Missouri Basin Project (Davis 1951, 1952, 1953a, 1953b, 1954a:Appendix, 1954b; Schultz and Frankforter 1948). The Archaeological Conservancy (Stewart 1998–1999) acquired the site from private landowners in 1998. This author visited the site several times in the early 1970s (Davis 1977; Knudson 1974b), and again during the 1997 Medicine Creek Reservoir anniversary, and noted few impacts to the postexcavation site other than natural erosion and erosion caused The Red Smoke Assemblage / 85 7.1. Topographic map of the middle part of...