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107 Chapter 7 Determining a Cultural Affiliation for the CW Cache from Northeastern Colorado Mark P. Muñiz • Lacking a projectile point or solid radiocarbon date, archaeologists often face a significant probleminestablishingaculturalaffiliationforsurface -​ collected stone artifact assemblages. When these kinds of assemblages are recovered in regions where surface and near-surface deposits may contain significant antiquity, the assemblage may conceivably date to any one of a number of prehistoric cultures that span millennia. This situation describes the context from which the CW cache was originally recovered. The CW cache was found as a tight surface concentration eroding from the margin of a playa located on private land in north central Lincoln County, Colorado, approximately 28 km northeast of Limon (Figure 7.1). The cache was collected by two individuals who visited the site about six years apart in the 1990s and eventually reported the find to Steve Holen (then curator of archaeology, Denver Museum of Nature & Science) in 2004. Although the collectors indicated generally where the cache came from, they did not pinpoint the exact physicallocation .Thelocalewasnotradiocarbondatedbecause the years that passed between the discovery and reporting allowed the original matrix to erode away. The general morphology of the artifacts suggested a possible Clovis affiliation, but the lack of a diagnostic projectile point hampered initial attempts to make a more certain determination. In cases where a surface assemblage lacking projectile points is made up of bifaces, a careful analysis of the morphology, production strategy, and metric attributes compared to other bifaces from known cultural contexts may reveal a probable cultural affiliation. This is because strategies for manufacturing bifaces and projectile point preforms can involve culturally unique methods for thinning the biface, shaping the outline form, and finishing the base (e.g., Whittaker 1994). The probability of determining a cultural affiliation may be further increased when additional lines of evidence are considered, such as the geomorphic context of the find site, the raw materials used, how the artifacts have weathered over time, and long-term cultural patterns of landscape utilization. An inherent problem with using the approach outlined above to determine a prehistoric cultural affiliation for the CW cache, or any similar assemblage, is the possibility of independent invention or stochastic variation that coincidentally results in similar morphologies for bifaces made by different cultures at different times. For example, large, well-made bifaces have been documented at Paleoindian, Woodland, and Late Prehistoric sites. Large Paleoindian bifaces have been found in Clovis caches (e.g., Anzick, Crook County, Fenn, Simon) and at other sites such as Agate Basin, Big Black, Bobtail Wolf, Blackwater Draw, Gordon Creek, Kriesel, Lime Creek, and Tim Adrian (Anderson 1966; Boldurian 1991; Bradley 1982; Breternitz et al. 1971; Carr and Boszhardt 2003; Frison and Bradley 1999; Hicks 2002; Jones and Bonnichsen 1994; Mehringer 1988; O’Brien 1984; Root et 108 Chapter 7 al. 1999; Tankersley 1998, 2002; Wilke et al. 1991; Woods and Titmus 1985; Wormington 1957). Typically these Paleoindian sites date between about 9,500 and 11,000 radiocarbon years before present. Following the Paleoindian period, examples of large Archaic bifaces come from the Eva site in western Tennessee (Lewis and Lewis 1961:51 –53). Woodland specimens have been documented in northeastern Iowa (Logan 1976:116–117) and the Illinois River Valley (Montet-White 1968). The long Mississippian “swords” (Kneberg 1952; Lewis and Kneberg 1958) are examples of some of the most skilled stoneworking in the North American precontact archaeological record. Closer to Colorado, Late Plains Archaic and Shoshone groups of Wyoming made large, skillfully crafted bifacial knives (Frison 1991b:129, 133, 134). Late Prehistoric groups in Kansas and Nebraska also produced large, thin, finely made bifaces (Steinacher and Carlson 1998:243; Wedel 1986:107). Reynolds (1990) illustrated large, thin ceremonial bifaces included with Smoky Hill phase Central Plains Tradition (CPT) burials at the Whiteford site in central Kansas, and Fosha (1993) published another example of this biface type recovered from site 39CH212 in South Dakota. Basham and Holen (2006) reported on the Late Prehistoric Easterday II cache recovered from the Riverside Reservoir in northeastern Colorado. These Late Prehistoric sites in Colorado, Kansas, and South Dakota date between about A.D. 900 and 1500. Given that finely made bifaces were produced by both Paleoindians and Late Prehistoric peoples living in the same region over 8,000 years apart, we must ask, are there recognizable attributes of the CW cache that can be used to associate it with a specific prehistoric culture? Figure 7.1. Map of biface cache sites...

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