The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska

Acknowledgments

xv The research that this volume presents was carried out over much too long a period of time, and I need to begin by thanking my contributors for their patience. I hope it was worth the wait. Authors get the credit, but we could not have written what we did without the help of many people over the years. Tom Myers of the Nebraska State Museum (NSM) first gave me access to the Allen site collection, and Beth Wilkins at NSM graciously let me keep it longer than I was supposed to. George Corner at NSM helped with access to and analysis of the faunal collection from the Allen site. None of this work could have been done without money, and this came through the efforts of Bob Blasing at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, under Cooperative Agreements 9-FC-60-1060 with the University of Nebraska, Lincoln (UNL), and 3-FC-6002710 with the University of Colorado, Boulder. Bob also provided indispensable support on field visits to Medicine Creek. Practical help came from many places. First and foremost, Joyce Wike, coauthor of the original publication on the Allen site and widow of Preston Holder, the site’s excavator, unexpectedly presented me with a box containing Holder’s field notes, other excavation records, and a variety of profiles and maps, which had been in storage in her garage for many years. Much of what we have been able to do in this volume would have been impossible without these records (and thank you to Jim Gibson, then chair of the Anthropology Department at UNL, for telling her about our work on the collection). Steve Holen, now of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, first introduced me to Medicine Creek, and Bob and Shirley Linderholm ACKNOWLEDGMENTS welcomed us whenever we were able to spend time there. Undergraduates at the University of Nebraska, particularly Amy Koch, Todd Ahlman, and Todd Butler, did much of the initial counting and cataloging of the lithic assemblage. Nancy Hamblin collected most of the data on the faunal collection. Jeff Eighmy at Colorado State University offered temporary lab space while I was in Fort Collins. Artifact illustrations were done by Eric Carlson, Koni Fujiwara, and Mark Muniz; Mark also spent hours scanning and cleaning up digital images. The production of species-specific antisera for the blood residue analysis reported in chapter 10 was made possible by a University of Calgary Research Grant to Dr. Howard Ceri, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary (Ceri and M. Newman, principal investigators). We have all also benefited from intellectual help from our friends and colleagues (not to mention from commiseration over a project that seemed like it might never end). At one time or another, conversations with Peter Bleed, Cathy Cameron, Larry Conyers, Linda Cordell, Frank Eddy, George Frison, Matt E. Hill, Vance Holliday, Eric Ingbar, Mike Jochim, Peggy Jodry, Art Joyce, Bob Kelly, Marcel Kornfeld, Jason Labelle, Mary Lou Larson, Steve Lekson, Fred Sellet, Payson Sheets, Dennis Stanford, Barbara Voorhies, Peter Woodman, and no doubt others whom we do not mean to leave out have made this a better volume than it would have been without their help. Dave Meltzer did a particularly prompt and thoughtful review of the penultimate version of this volume, and his suggestions strengthened it greatly. David Holtby, now retired from the University of xvi / Acknowledgments New Mexico Press, watched over this volume up to its final acceptance; aspects of the process he oversaw are no doubt contributing to his present bliss. Lisa Pacheco and Elise McHugh oversaw the final production , and Elisabeth A. Graves did a meticulous job of copyediting. It is customary to apologize in settings like this to long-suffering spouses and children. I have worked hard to make this unnecessary, and I hope I have been successful. I will say, though, that, after reaching an agreement that Sean could not complain about her big project taking too long to finish, it is officially her turn. Finally, one of the greatest blessings of working on the Medicine Creek sites was the opportunity to get to know E. Mott Davis, whose work at Red Smoke and Lime Creek laid the basis for much of what we have written here. As this project gathered steam, Mott picked charcoal from sediment samples he had saved from his excavations, excavated through his files to find records of his visits to the Allen site that proved to be essential in resolving ambiguities in the other...