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29 CHAPTER 3 Introduction to the Organization of Clovis Lithic Technology at Excavation Area 8 Clovis lithic assemblages are characterized by a distinctive biface and blade technology . These assemblages also have a diverse array of unifacial and bifacial tools (Collins 1999a, 2007; Collins and Lohse 2004; Huckell 2007; Stanford 1991; Tankersley 2004). What is currently known about Clovis technology has been pieced together from many sites in different environmental settings across the continental United States. The assemblages from these sites are typically small and specialized , reflecting the types of sites from which they derived (e.g., kill, camp, and cache sites). What is conspicuously absent from the gamut of Clovis site types are primary lithic procurement and manufacturing localities with good context. These sites should have discarded tools, cores, and preforms broken or abandoned at different stages of reduction, as well as other debris relating to manufacture, making it possible to decipher the technological strategies employed in tool production. The Gault site was a quarry for the acquisition of toolstone, a workshop where old tools were discarded and new tools were made, and a camp where Clovis groups resided and conducted daily activities. Here we focus on the lithic assemblage from Excavation Area 8, where nearly 67,000 artifacts were recovered. The majority of this assemblage relates to projectile point and blade production. The data suggest that, during Clovis times, Excavation Area 8 was a workshop. Here, we recovered complete and broken bifaces in all stages of reduction, from primary bifaces to finished projectile points. Blades of many types and the by-products of blade manufacture including cores, core-tablet flakes, and crested blades were found. Much of the flaking on bifaces and blade cores is well executed on some pieces; others show hinge and step fractures and stacked arrays that could not be removed. This variation is likely a reflection of the variable skill levels among experienced knappers and represents the mistakes made during biface and blade manufacture. However, some of this variation may be the result of inexperienced (novice) knappers (Collins and Lohse 2008). Analysis of the Clovis artifacts revealed no technological differences between the biface (Dickens 2005), blade (Dickens 2005; Minchak 2007), endscraper (Wiederhold 2004), flake tool (Pevny 2009), and debitage (Pevny 2009) assemblages recovered from Units 3a and 3b. Also, we found the same types of artifacts in both geological units, indicating that similar activities took place at Excavation Area 8 while these geological units were deposited. We classified the Clovis artifacts from Units 3a and 3b into 30 categories. All artifact types are numerically more abundant in Unit 3a than Unit 3b (table 5). The 30 CHAPTER 3 microdebitage (flakes and flake fragments 2.5 cm). Although microartifacts are usually defined as microscopically identifiable pieces (Sherwood 2001:327–329), we assigned the cutoff between macro- and microdebitage—2.5 cm—arbitrarily based on the amount of material collected from the Clovis strata, as well as research objectives . The size limitation corresponds to the size of piece-plotted artifacts. All debitage underwent aggregate analysis to address questions of technology and site formation processes. Flakes were passed through standard geological sieves, FIGURE 24. Hammerstone AM4-G-1231 was recovered from Unit 3b. It is a naturally rounded, quartzite stream cobble that is fractured and battered on both ends. FIGURE 25. Two artifacts showing linear incisions in the limestone cortex as a result of being used as abraders: (a) wedge-shaped blade core AM329-D-834; (b) cortical flake fragment AM167. 38 CHAPTER 3 with eight flake size categories defined (table 7). In total, 62,874 pieces of microdebitage (size categories 3–8) are included with the 3487 pieces of larger macrodebitage (size categories 1 and 2) in the following discussion. We used fractal analysis (Brown 2001; Brown et al. 2005; Carr and Bradbury 2004) to examine the size-frequency distribution of debitage from Units 3a and 3b. The proportion of large to small flakes provides information on initial versus later stages of reduction. A fractal plot of the natural log transform of flake size (x axis) against the log of the cumulative flake frequency (y axis) creates the trend line shown in figure 26. The fractal dimension (Df ) is the negative of the slope of the line. As the slope of the line becomes steeper the fractal dimension increases, indicating a later stage of lithic reduction (Brown 2001). It has been demonstrated experimentally that lower values for the fractal dimension result from earlier stages of reduction, such...

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