Medicine Creek: Seventy Years of Archaeological Investigations

6. The Paleoindian Occupation of the Medicine Creek Drainage, Southwestern Nebraska

The three Medicine Creek Paleoindian sites (Allen, Lime Creek, and Red Smoke; Figure 1.1 or 5.1) occupy an uncomfortable niche in Plains archaeology. When these sites were discovered in 1947, Paleoindian archaeology was in its infancy: chronological issues were unresolved, culture-historical sequences were poorly understood, and little could be said about human ways of life beyond the observation that Paleoindians appeared to be hunters who made sophisticated projectile points and subsisted, at least in part, on extinct species of large game. In this context the identi¤cation of the deeply buried sites at Medicine Creek occasioned national publicity (Davis [n.d.] details this), and the sites¤gured prominently in overviews of the Plains up through the 1960s (e.g., Wedel 1964). However, the incomplete publication of Allen and Red Smoke, problematic radiocarbon chronologies, and the geographic shift of Paleoindian research to focus on large-scale bison procurement on the western and northwestern Plains pushed the Medicine Creek data into the shadows, and overviews of the Plains written since the 1970s often do not even mention that the sites exist (e.g., Fagan 1995; Wedel 1978b). The neglect of the Medicine Creek sites is particularly unfortunate because, as I argue here, they have important implications for our understanding of the Paleoindian occupation of the Great Plains in general. This chapter focuses on two aspects of the Medicine Creek sites. First, there is fairly dramatic variation in assemblage content from site to site, despite the fact that these sites overlap substantially in time and are virtually within sight of one another. There are very few localities in North America where it is possible to examine early Holo6 The Paleoindian Occupation of the Medicine Creek Drainage, Southwestern Nebraska Douglas B. Bamforth cene intersite variation at such a local scale, and I will argue that this variation re®ects, at least in part, local differences in the settings of these sites on the early Holocene Medicine Creek landscape. The existence of such variation has important implications for the ways Paleoindian archaeologists synthesize their data. Second, I will also emphasize the importance of differences between the Medicine Creek data and the better-known northwestern and western Plains sites, arguing that the evidence from Medicine Creek gives us a glimpse of large-scale regional variation in early Holocene ways of life, a topic rarely considered in existing syntheses of the Paleoindian period. Site Settings and Chronology Allen (25FT50), Lime Creek (25FT41), and Red Smoke (25FT42) are three of a total of ¤ve sites exposed in remnants of the early Holocene terraces (Terrace T 2 [May, this volume; Schultz et al. 1948, 1951]) identi ¤ed at Medicine Creek; the others are the Spillway (25FT51) and Siebecker (25FT101) sites. A sixth relatively early site, the Stansbie site (25FT102) is in the later, probably mid-Holocene, T-1 ¤ll. Of these six, Allen, Lime Creek, and Red Smoke were extensively excavated and are the focus of this paper; the remainder were tested and produced very limited collections (Davis 1962). Cutbank erosion along Medicine Creek itself has destroyed Allen and probably Siebecker; the Spillway site is probably intact, just below the Medicine Creek Dam. Lime Creek is below the lake level but is buried under recent alluvium and is, for practical purposes, intact but physically inaccessible, and at least part of Red Smoke is intact and well above the level of the lake. The current status of Stansbie is uncertain, but it is well upstream from the lake and is presumably intact. The terrace ¤lls in which these sites were found accumulated over most of the early and middle Holocene and appear to represent fairly level inhabitable surfaces that probably stretched for miles along Medicine Creek and its tributaries. The three substantially excavated sites (Allen, Lime Creek, and Red Smoke) thus almost certainly represent small windows into what were once extensive potential occupation areas . However, these sites differ in their setting within the drainage and in the depositional environment in which artifacts accumulated; the “windows” these sites represent therefore document the kinds of archaeological materials that accumulated at three rather different locales within the Medicine Creek/Lime Creek area. Paleoindian Occupation of Medicine Creek / 55 Physical Setting: Local Environment The three sites at issue here are located along an environmental gradient running away from the main axis of Medicine Creek into the adjacent uplands. The Allen site was located on Medicine Creek itself, about a...