The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska

Ch 14: Beyond Medicine Creek

2 4 5 This volume began by arguing that the Allen site is particularly important in light of an ongoing and fundamental rethinking of the Paleoindian period on the Great Plains. As Hill et al. describe the traditional view of this period, “Sophisticated weaponry, use of non-local or exotic lithic raw materials for manufacture of stone tools, a ‘gourmet’ butchery strategy, and the ephemeral nature of most Paleoindian sites are usually taken together as evidence for wide-ranging group movement, presumably reflecting a settlementsubsistence strategy focusing on bison”; they describe this view as “monolithic” (2002:311). Almost nothing about the Allen site is consistent with this, and the degree of difference between the character of the site and the conceptual model that has dominated Paleoindian archaeology underscores the importance of the new perspectives that are rapidly emerging. This last chapter returns to this issue, considering some of the Allen site’s larger implications for Paleoindian archaeology, with two general emphases. First, it outlines a basis for integrating the site with the wider range of variation in Paleoindian sites on the Plains, including the Allen site. Second, it turns from our understanding of Paleoindian people to our understanding of the Paleoindian archaeological record that those people produced and considers some of the Allen site’s implications for the way we approach the early archaeology of the Plains. Paleoindian Lifeways and Land Use The Allen site data are almost entirely inconsistent with the traditional view of Paleoindian ways of life. As the site documents, Paleoindian technology was not dominated by bifaces or by bifacial cores, by extensive efforts to extend tools’ use-lives, or by anything like a universal large-scale reliance on the longdistance transport of raw material. This last observation implies that the best that can be said of past estimates of Paleoindian range sizes, estimates based largely on the material used for projectile points rather than on more comprehensive assessments of overall patterns of raw material use, is that they are tentative. Like many Paleoindian sites other than large bison kills, the Allen site was reused extensively over very long periods of time: the only Paleoindian sites that as a group consistently show a pattern of little or no site reuse Chapter 14 BEYOND MEDICINE CREEK The Allen Site and Plains Paleoindian-Period Ways of Life Douglas B. Bamforth With only kill-site materials available, no balanced view of Paleoindian culture was available. —Irwin-Williams et al. 1973:52 246 / Chapter 14 are large bison kill sites. Large animals, particularly bison, were surely important in the Paleoindian diet at the Allen site and likely provided most of the meat that the Paleoindian groups there ate, but these groups systematically relied on many other kinds of animals as well. Furthermore, in the Medicine Creek region at least, reliance on animals other than bison increased over time. Importantly, the Allen site evidence supporting all of these conclusions dates unequivocally from Folsom through late Paleoindian times: the site does not speak to Clovis ways of life, but the basic pattern evident at the site persists for the entire remainder of the Paleoindian period. But at the same time that the Allen site data directly challenge many existing generalizations about the Paleoindian period, they also highlight important aspects of the diversity of Paleoindian sites that any new synthesis needs to take into account. There are at least two factors that help to make sense out of this diversity: the possibility of seasonal variation in Paleoindian activities and the importance of temporal change in aspects of Paleoindian lifeways that go beyond changes in projectile point style. In addition, although considering both of these topics requires data drawn from the Plains as a whole, the Medicine Creek data also imply that there are likely to have been significant regional differences on the Plains, both in terms of variable human use of different areas and in terms of the possibility of that there were socially distinct groups in different areas of the Plains. Seasonal Patterns in the Paleoindian Archaeological Record? One way of organizing the variation in the Paleoindian database is by considering patterned variation in the organization of bison hunting, particularly the possibility that this organization varied seasonally. However, there are two important issues in addressing this. First, there can be little doubt that, like all human groups that have inhabited the Great Plains since the initial peopling of the region, Paleoindian hunters killed bison at all times of the year. Seasonality inferences are...