Douglas B. Bamforth

Technological Efficiency and Tool Curation

Archaeologists frequently explain tool curation by its efficiency. Such explanations ignore the fact that curation is a complex activity and that its component parts are efficient in different ways. I argue that the nature and distribution of lithic resources critically affect technological efficiency and I discuss two aspects of curation, maintenance and recycling, asserting that they are responses to raw material shortages. Shortages result from regional geological conditions and from behavior patterns that restrict access to raw material in certain contexts. Ethnographic and archaeological examples support this hypothesis and highlight the relationship between subsistence-settlement organization, raw material distribution, and technology.

Ecology and human organization on the Great Plains

Resource Structure and Human Organization.- Grassland Ecology.- Ungulate Ecology.- Patterns of Forage Production on the Great Plains.- Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Climate and Bison Adaptations on the Great Plains.- Recent Population Movements on the Great Plains.- Ecological Relationships in Recent Plains Society.- Recent and Paleoindian Environments of the Southern High Plains.- Paleoindian Adaptations on the Great Plains.- Paleoindian Responses to Environmental Change on the Southern High Plains.- Summary and Conclusions.

Settlement, raw material, and lithic procurement in the central Mojave Desert

Abstract This paper explores the prehistoric use of two quarries in the central Mojave Desert. Technological analysis and cation-ratio dating of refitted core/flake sequences indicate that patterns of raw material selection, reduction strategies, and the range of objects produced at and removed from the sites remained essentially constant over time despite major changes in human mobility and settlement organization. Changes are evident in the rates at which the sites were exploited, the degree of reduction carried out at one site over time, and the kinds of products emphasized at one of the sites during one period. These results indicate that human use of these sites was conditioned by a range of factors, in addition to mobility strategies, including regional patterns of raw material quality and abundance and quarry location.

High-Tech Foragers? Folsom and Later Paleoindian Technology on the Great Plains

Archaeologists generally argue that early (ca. 11,000–8000 B.P. populations on the North American Great Plains moved over very large areas, relying on sophisticated, biface-based flaked stone technology and on extensive resharpening and recycling of tools to cope with unpredictable access to raw material sources. This paper reviews the development of this reconstruction and considers the degree to which data from assemblages of Paleoindian flaked stone tools support it. Published information implies that patterns of raw material use vary greatly over the Plains, that bifaces were not the centerpiece of Paleoindian technology, that there are no published efforts to document an unusual degree of resharpening or recycling, and that the data that are available on these topics do not suggest that either was important. Detailed analysis of one assemblage, from the Allen site in southwestern Nebraska, carried out with these issues in mind, shows similar patterns. The great difference between what the literature says about Paleoindian technology and the documented character of that technology suggests that Paleoindian lifeways were far more variable than current discussions suggest.

Cation-ratio and accelerator radiocarbon dating of rock varnish on Mojave artifacts and landforms

The first accelerator radiocarbon dates of rock varnishes are reported along with potassium/argon ages of lava flows and conventional radiocarbon dates of pluvial lake shorelines, in an empirical calibration of rock varnish K+ + Ca2+/Ti4+ ratios with age in the Mojave Desert, eastern California. This calibration was used to determine the cation-ratio dates of 167 artifacts. Although cation-ratio dating is an experimental method, some dates suggest human occupation of the Mojave Desert in the late Pleistocene.

Core/Biface Ratios, Mobility, Refitting, and Artifact Use-Lives: A Paleoindian Example

Abstract Low core/biface ratios are often linked to high mobility, and high ratios to more sedentary life styles. The Paleoindian Allen site assemblage exhibits low core/biface ratios among recovered artifacts and higher ratios among refitted sequences. This suggests that cores passed through the site more often than bifaces, but were rarely discarded there. This pattern probably reflects low failure and discard rates in core reduction relative to biface reduction along with brief site use. Core/biface ratios may thus change with increasing sedentism with no change at all in technology simply because sedentary communities produce and exhaust cores primarily at a single location. Variation in core/biface ratios in Paleoindian sites across the Great Plains considered in light of this conclusion suggests significant large scale patterns of variation in general terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene land-use patterns.

Ambiguous Use Traces and Blind Test Results: New Data

Blind tests of high-magnification microwear analysis have produced variable results, leading some researchers to doubt that there are differences in the appearance of the use-polishes on which the method relies. In this paper, we report the results of a blind test which was designed to (1) test further the hypothesis that different materials produce distinctive wear patterns on the edges of stone tools and (2) evaluate the effects on blind test results of classifying ambiguous wear traces as evidence of use on “unknown” materials. The success of our test indicates that it is indeed possible to derive accurate interpretations of stone tool uses from use-wear traces, but that this is possible only when such traces are interpreted cautiously. Both of these assertions are supported not only by the empirical results of this and other blind tests, but also by our current theoretical understanding of the process by which microwear polishes form.

EVIDENCE AND METAPHOR IN EVOLUTIONARY ARCHAEOLOGY

Evolutionary theory and terminology are widely used in recent archaeological work, and many evolutionary archaeologists have argued that the integration of such theory and terminology is essential to the future of our field. This paper considers evolutionary archaeology from two perspectives. First, it examines substantive claims that archaeology can study the operation of Darwinian evolution, either through a reliance on optimal-foraging theory or by linking the process of natural selection to archaeological data. It concludes that there are serious problems with both of these claims on Darwin: the relation between evolution and foraging theory has never been documented, and midrange arguments linking selection and archaeological data are unsustainable. Second, it argues that archaeologists rely metaphorically on evolutionary terminology to help make sense out of archaeological data. Although the use of evolutionary metaphor can be, and has been, problematic, it also offers a powerful conceptual framework for our research. However, this framework is only of one of a number of comparable frameworks that have been offered to our field, as a comparison of systems archaeology and evolutionary archaeology shows.

Historical Documents and Bison Ecology On the Great Plains

AbstractAlthough many anthropologists have studied the Plains bison using historical documents, such studies often do not consider the information needed to make ecological sense out of the data th...

The Windy Ridge quartzite quarry: hunter-gatherer mining and hunter-gatherer land use on the North American Continental Divide

Abstract Studies of hunter-gatherer activity at lithic raw material sources are relatively rare and largely descriptive, in part because archaeologists have viewed hunter-gatherer lithic procurement as a casual and low-cost activity. This paper presents the results of fieldwork at a hunter-gatherer quartzite quarry along the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado that suggests that this perspective is incorrect. Hunter-gatherer groups at the site quarried stone intensively, although they did not often transport this stone any great distance. This suggests that it is useful to reconsider the way we think about lithic procurement, and particularly that we rethink the concepts of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ procurement. The data presented here highlight the ability of quarry sites to expand our understanding of how mobile human groups used the landscape.