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Publications (172)
The geoheritage importance of the stones used in the construction of buildings in urban landscapes has been documented by several scholars around the world. Building stones can provide an ex situ cross-section of a region’s geodiversity and illuminate its cultural significance. Research at the historic Maxey Homestead (1902–1907), located along the...
Aztlanolagus agilis is a small Pleistocene rabbit known by limited remains from Florida and western North America. It generally is distinguished from other leporines by its small size and the complexity of the five enamel reentrant pattern in the lower third premolar (p3). Early Pleistocene forms can exhibit a simpler pattern comparable to the Blan...
Kincaid Shelter (Uvalde County, Texas) contains a sequence of vertebrate and cultural remains spanning from the late Pleistocene to Historic. Kincaid Shelter perhaps is best known for its Paleoindian component, including a cobblestone floor interpreted as a Clovis habitation surface. Zone 3 lacustrine sediments are beneath that cobblestone floor an...
San Josecito Cave (2250 m elevation) is located nearby Aramberri, Nuevo León, northeastern Mexico, with excavations occurring in 1935–1941 and 1990. It is a paleontological cave and the significance of its faunal data rests in the understanding of the Quaternary ecosystems of the Mexican Plateau and the Southern Plains. This significance is underpi...
Aerial photogrammetry is increasingly being used to discover, document, and interpret the cultural heritage of landscapes. Information on the constructed cultural heritage left behind by the first cattle ranchers in the American West is being lost as the land is transformed and modified, and stewardship of the land changes across generations. An un...
The eastern escarpment breaks of the Southern High Plains of Texas are both a geomorphic and ecotonal transition zone from the high plains surface to the Rolling Plains below. The geoarchaeological record on the Southern High Plains surface is well documented, but few studies have investigated the sediments, soils, and geochronology of the eastern...
The eastern escarpment of the Southern High Plains (USA) is today a semi-arid erosional landscape delineated by canyon breaks and topographic relief. A series of buried soils were identified, described, and sampled at 19 soil profile localities exposed along terraces of the South Fork of the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River (South Fork) and...
Based on data from analyses on previously-reported carbon stable isotope data from dental enamel and dentine from tusks reported in the literature, diets were inferred for the gomphothere genera Amebelodon, Cuvieronius, Gomphotherium, Rhynchotherium, Serbelodon, and Stegomastodon (Proboscidea, Gomphotheriidae) that inhabited the Americas during the...
Excavations led by Texas State Archeologist Curtis Tunnell from 1969-1974 identified Adair-Steadman (41FS2) as a Folsom period tool production workshop primarily aimed at producing Folsom points. The Lubbock Lake Landmark’s regional research program continued the exploration of Adair-Steadman through five annual 1-day surveys from 2015-2019. An Unm...
Cattle ranching is an important part of the heritage of the American West, yet few archaeological studies focus on this industry. Many aspects of ranching-related work are ephemeral, leaving on the landscape only small traces of these past activities. Survey on an historical ranch (established 1882) along the eastern escarpment of the Llano Estacad...
Plainview is a Paleoindian bison kill on the Southern High Plains (USA). This study examines whether the Plainview bison represent a chronologic marker, tests three models regarding the season of kill(s), and explores site size and number of kill events. Size difference in early Holocene southern grasslands bison is a matter of biogeographic variat...
Folsom-age (10,800-10,200) hunter-gatherers were the quintessential travelers in North American prehistory. They annually crossed hundreds of miles on foot following ancient bison herds. The stone tools that they crafted to hunt and butcher these ancient bison were some of the most exquisite and technically complex tools ever made in the Americas....
The Pleistocene and modern mammal faunas of southern North America strongly differ in taxonomic makeup, distribution, and physiognomy. The former faunal complexes are part of the ancient landscape in which early peoples may have interacted. Customarily, differences between the Pleistocene and modern faunas have been attributed to climate change
or...
Ogallala Formation layers and clasts of silcrete, locally known as Macy silcrete, are documented throughout an 83,000-acre research area located along the Southern High Plains eastern escarpment in northwestern Texas (USA). A behavioral landscape perspective has been used to determine how silcrete was incorporated into hunter-gatherer lithic techno...
The Williamson-Plainview site and the better known Milnesand site are two ancient bison (Bison antiquus) kill sites exposed during drought and wind erosion in the 1950s. The two sites are less than 500 m apart and remarkably similar, both extensive bone beds with scores of unfluted lanceolate Paleoindian projectile points: 85 Plainview and 47 Milne...
The Plainview Paleoindian artifact style was first recognized in 1947, after numerous projectile points were found during excavations of a bison kill site near Plainview, Texas. In the decades that followed, however, Plainview became something of a catch-all category with artifacts from across the continent being lumped together based merely on gro...
Cowhead Mesa is located along the eastern escarpment of the Southern High Plains near Post, Texas. Survey and excavation on top of the mesa have uncovered evidence for multiple occupations that span at least 3000 years. Multiple occupations on highpoints and rock art incised into the sandstone walls, marks Cowhead Mesa as a significant place on the...
Adair-Steadman (41FS2) is one of only a few Folsom aged (10,800–10,300 14C yr BP) sites located near (∼5 km) a high-quality lithic material source in North America. The large number of preforms (n = 130), channel flakes (n = 287), and projectile points (n = 58) has led many researchers to assume Adair-Steadman was a “gearing up” locality. This stud...
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH) states that North America was devastated by some sort of extraterrestrial event ~12,800 calendar years before present. Two fundamental questions persist in the debate over the YDIH: Can the results of analyses for purported impact indicators be reproduced? And are the indicators unique to the lower YD boun...
Data from the blind splits collected at Lubbock Lake, strata 1C, 2A, 2B.
(DOCX)
The Lake Theo site is one of a handful of excavated Folsom-aged bonebeds on the Southern Plains. Despite the importance of this site, only limited research has been conducted on the collection. This limitation is a consequence of most of the bones being housed in sediment blocks removed from the field. This study makes use of recent efforts that ha...
Macy Locality 100, located on the Southern High Plains in West Texas, has produced a diverse faunal assemblage associated with radiocarbon-dated late Pleistocene alluvial deposits. Cheek teeth representing the jumping mouse Zapus (Rodentia, Zapodidae) provide the first record of jumping mice from the region. They are identified as Zapus hudsonius b...
Diet and habitat inferences were determined using stable isotopes for six species of proboscideans that inhabited the Americas during the Pleistocene. For North America, Mammuthus columbi (Elephantidae) was a mixed C3/C4 diet animal and inhabitant of open areas, while Mammut americanum (Mammutidae) exclusively fed on C3 plants and preferred closed...
In northwest Texas, USA, between the Southern High Plains to the west and the Central Lowlands to the east, lies a geographic boundary known as the “Escarpment Breaks” or “Caprock Canyonlands.” The canyonlands contain abundant springs, lithic resources, shelter, and plant and animal food sources that attracted hunter-gatherer groups. A geoarchaeolo...
A database of 128 measured incised butchery marks (i.e., the classic cut mark) was the basis for exploratory statistical tests of length and width measurements from late Pleistocene mammoth localities and an early Holocene bison locality The tests reveal several trends. The initial approach uses univariate descriptive statistics, regression, and AN...
Erosion and weathering are destructive processes that shape the archaeological record, leaving relatively young cultural materials over-represented at the land surface. Archaeologists often accept this taphonomic or preservation bias as a limitation to archaeological knowledge. Yet, archaeologists base human population estimates on radiocarbon freq...
Isotopic data (δ13C and δ18O) for 25 enamel samples from Mammuthus columbi for 13 Mexican localities are provided. On average, the samples provide evidence of a mixed C3/C4 diet. The population consists of six individuals with an exclusive C4 plant diet, and 19 with some consumption of C3 plants. Latitude, longitude, and elevation do not have an af...
The Paso Otero Locality is a cluster of archaeological sites within the middle
Río Quequén Grande basin located in the northern coastal plain of Argentina.
The valley fill is Holocene alluvial, eolian, and palustrine sediment, including
the top of the Guerrero Member (∼10,000 14C yr B.P.), upper Río Salado
Member (∼3000 14C yr B.P.), and lower La P...
In South America, generally accepted dates place humans in coastal Chile and Patagonia ca. 13,000 BP and sites no older than ca. 11,000 BP are common in other areas. Gomphotheres become extinct in the late Pleistocene, probably after humans arrived and as climate changed. However, bone dates suggest that in many regions of South America, especially...
Lubbock Lake (Southern High Plains of Texas) contains a cultural, faunal, and floral record within a virtually complete geological record spanning the past 11 100+ years. More than 88 archaeological occurrences have been excavated from five major stratigraphic units. The Paleoindian record (11 500–6500yr BP) begins with Clovis-age occupation (ca. 1...
Tahoka-Walker (41LY53) is a multi-component Paleoindian and Late Archaic campsite located along the margins of a playa near the town of Tahoka on the Southern High Plains of Texas. Three discrete concentrations of artifacts observed while mapping the surface distribution of artifacts suggest separate activity areas. A spatial analysis of the distri...
The recovery of a cache of lithic bifaces (the Bouchier Cache) is reported from an ecotonal area located between the southern High Plains (Llano Estacado) and Central Lowlands (western Rolling Plains). The homogenous nature of the bifacial cores suggests that the cache represents a resource stockpile, and, therefore, is important to understanding h...
North American bison undergo a dramatic decrease in body size during the Late Quaternary. While a change in size has long been recognized, the rate and timing of diminution recently has become defined better for Southern Plains bison. Questions regarding what force drove the decrease in body size, however, continue to generate new hypotheses and th...
Mexico's Pleistocene terrestrial mammal record includes 13 orders, 44 families, 147 genera and 280 species, thus is comparable to the Recent one, but shows greater ordinal and family diversity. Post-Pleistocene extinction chiefly involved meso- and megabaric species. The mammal, palynologic and paleosol records are strongly time and space biased in...
Analysis of the overall fossil record for specific regions in order to examine paleobiological data requires assembling enormous amounts of information in databases. Geoinformatics involves the management and analysis of such databases. A case in point is the Quaternary Mexican mammal database, currently composed of more than 15,000 records for 12...
Ogallala gravels are an important lithic material source for stone tool manufacture across the Great Plains. The lithology of eight gravel sample locations along the eastern escarpment of the Southern High Plains has been examined to quantify the composition and variability in Ogallala deposits. In addition, three Ogallala gravel quarry sites have...
Based on elevated concentrations of a set of "impact markers" at the onset of the Younger Dryas stadial from sedimentary contexts across North America, Firestone, Kennett, West, and others have argued that 12.9 ka the Earth experienced an impact by an extraterrestrial body, an event that had devastating ecological consequences for humans, plants, a...
Cooper, a Folsom arroyo-trap bison kill site in northwest Oklahoma is composed of three large-scale kill episodes. The bison bones have been examined for butchering evidence and exploring the butchering pattern. Damage categories to cortical bone are indentation, cut mark, helical fracture, and impact blow. The 99 elements damaged are from 36 carca...
The Cowhead Mesa petroglyphs hold insights into Historic Native American and Anglo-American Culture for the Southern Plains region of North America. To preserve this history, a combination of 3-D long-range laser scanning and high-resolution digital photography has been used to record one large main panel 21 m long and nine smaller panels. Separati...
Lithic analysis on the southern High Plains traditionally has focused on behavioral inferences based in part on the geographic relationship between disparately distributed high quality toolstone sources. These sources often are used as a proxy for behavior by which hunter-gatherer mobility within the wider region can be modeled based on the presenc...
Results of the investigation of paleontological blue and gray bone fragments of small vertebrates coming from stratigraphic layer 770 at San Josecito Cave (Nuevo Leon. Mexico, dating between 28000 and 19000 years BP), are presented. Structural and elemental analyses combining X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR),...
As a feasibility study, samples of mammoth bone from four localities across the North American grasslands were analyzed to assess preservation and provide an initial overview of the diagenetic history at each of the different sites. The localities encompassed different landscape settings, climates, and environments from the period ca. 12,300 to 11,...
The Lubbock Lake Landmark is located on the Southern High Plains of Texas in Yellowhouse Draw that is part of the upper Brazos River basin. The Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Lubbock Lake fish assemblages represent the first known Quaternary paleoichthyofauna for the Southern High Plains. None of the remains show evidence of cultural utilizati...
Preservation decisions often have to be made regarding the long-term status of deeply buried sites. However, the opportunity to evaluate these decisions practically, decades later, is rare. The Nash site, on the Southern High Plains of the USA, is one site where reinvestigation has permitted the assessment of a well-stratified site after an interve...
In viewing the Llano Estacado (Figure 5.1) as a whole, a landscape approach is taken to provide the basis for further research. This current synthesis encompasses the physiography, biota, and cultural record of the Llano Estacado with the objective of integrating and placing that broader record within the framework of a landscape approach. The geol...
A Mexican Quaternary mammal database is presented with more than 15,000 records, representing 12 orders, 43 families, 146 genera, and 274 species, known from over 770 localities. One third of these taxa no longer occur in Mexico, either because they are extinct or because they occur in different areas. The order Notoungulata is extinct worldwide, w...
The interpretation that a rock has been subjected to cultural utilization is a basic element of hunter-gatherer research. The fracture mechanics of the flaked stone tool production process are well understood and the material residues are routinely identified during fieldwork. Conversely, non-percussion processes such as hot-rock technology, which...
Late Paleoindian typology on the southern High Plains has suffered from overlapping definitions and subjectivity in assigning individual projectile points to types. To address perceived projectile point variability in the region, assemblages from several localities on the southern High Plains are examined for statistical differences in shape. Digit...
