The Western Stemmed Tradition: Problems and Prospects in Paleoindian Archaeology in the Intermountain West

ABSTRACT

We review some of the current problems and prospects in ongoing Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) studies and highlight recent discoveries at important sites in the Intermountain West. While the region has traditionally not been the focus of peopling of the Americas studies, it has received considerable attention in recent years due to the discovery of WST points and other artifacts in Clovis-aged deposits. Fieldwork at sites in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and Utah has produced WST assemblages dated to the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene and generated new fine-grained datasets capable of addressing longstanding questions about WST technology, chronology, and subsistence. Collectively, these efforts have helped to refocus North American Paleoindian studies on the Intermountain West and the role that it played in the peopling of the Americas.

KEYWORDS:

• Peopling of the Americas
• Western Stemmed Tradition
• Paleoindian archaeology
• Intermountain West
• Desert West

Acknowledgements

Most of the sites described here are located on public lands and we thank both the appropriate land managers and indigenous populations on whose land the sites are located for providing us with the opportunities to conduct research. Nevada State Museum, UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History, and Favell Museum staff assisted with the analysis of the Smith Creek Cave, Fort Rock Cave, and Cougar Mountain Cave collections, respectively. Richard Rosencrance and Jordan Pratt shared unpublished data from Cougar Mountain Cave and Weed Lake Ditch/Nials. The ideas put forth in this paper were largely developed during the Wilson Workshop, a meeting devoted to WST research organized by the Center for the Study of the First Americans (Texas A&M University), Hakai Institute, and University of Victoria. Two anonymous reviewers provided helpful feedback on our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey M. Smith is an Associate Professor and Executive Director of the Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit in the University of Nevada, Reno’s Department of Anthropology. He obtained his PhD from the University of Wyoming in 2010. His current research interests include the Western Stemmed Tradition, Great Basin archaeology, lithic technology, and the peopling of the Americas.

Daron Duke is a Principal Investigator at Far Western Anthropological Research Group, for which he also serves as Director of its Desert Branch in Henderson, Nevada. He has worked in the Great Basin and California for 25 years, specializing in hunter-gatherer archaeology, lithic economy, XRF sourcing, and obsidian hydration dating. He received a PhD in Anthropology in 2011 from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Dennis L. Jenkins is a Senior Research Archaeologist II and Director of the Northern Great Basin archaeological field school at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon where he earned his PhD in 1991. His research interests include first colonizations of North America, Northern Great Basin archaeology, obsidian sourcing and hydration, and Great Basin settlement-subsistence patterns.

Ted Goebel is professor of Anthropology and endowed professor of First Americans Studies at Texas A&M University, and he serves as associate director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans. He has led field archaeological projects exploring Paleoindians in Alaska and the Great Basin, as well as Paleolithic humans in northeast Asia.

Loren G. Davis is a Professor of Anthropology at Oregon State University where he serves as Executive Director of the Keystone Archaeological Research Fund. He earned his PhD at the University of Alberta, examining the nature of the late Pleistocene-early Holocene cultural transition in the lower Salmon River canyon of western Idaho. He led excavations at the Cooper's Ferry site in 1997 and from 2009 to 2018.

Patrick O'Grady is a staff archaeologist for the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History. He earned his PhD at the University of Oregon in 2006, and his research interests include Great Basin archaeology, zooarchaeology, and early colonization of the Americas.

Dan Stueber is based in Portland, Oregon, where he does lithic technological analysis, replication and consultation. He has taught courses in lithic technology and analysis for University of Victoria, University of Oregon, Oregon State University and Portland State University. His present research is focused on the technology of Western Stemmed Tradition points and late Lower Paleolithic stone tool technologies of the Levant.

Jordan E. Pratt is a PhD candidate at Texas A&M University and the Center for the Study of the First Americans. She earned her BA at the University of Oregon Clark Honors College in 2015. Her research interests include lithic technological organization, the peopling of the Americas, and Great Basin archaeology.

Heather L. Smith received her PhD in Anthropology from Texas A&M University in 2015 and now serves as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Eastern New Mexico University. Her research interests include human adaptation and dispersals in the late Pleistocene, the adaptive role of lithic technology during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, and quantitative methods of material culture analyses with an emphasis on geometric morphometrics, GIS, geoarchaeology, evolutionary archaeology, and cultural transmission. Dr Smith specializes in the transmission of Paleoindian lithic technology between areas south of the late Pleistocene ice sheets and the Arctic.

ORCID

Jordan Pratt http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4989-0393

Heather Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1031-0478

Notes

1 We recalibrated all radiocarbon dates presented here using the OxCal 4.3 online program with the IntCal13 curve. Given that researchers use a variety of programs to calibrate radiocarbon dates, some of which are periodically updated, some of the date ranges presented here may differ slightly from those presented elsewhere. We also rounded all calibrated dates to the nearest decade.