Shifting stones and changing homes: using toolstone ratios to consider relative occupation span in the northwestern Great Basin

Like Paleoindian populations elsewhere in North America, Pre-Archaic groups in the Great Basin are assumed to have been highly mobile and far ranging. This view is commonly based on analyses of lithic technology and source provenance studies. While these approaches have added to our knowledge of Pre-Archaic lifeways, they have rarely focused on occupation span – an aspect of hunter–gatherer behavior directly related to mobility. Here, I use the proportions of local and nonlocal toolstone in Pre-Archaic and later Archaic assemblages to consider occupation span with the assumption that assemblages should become increasingly dominated by local materials as occupation span increases. The results suggest that residential mobility was high and occupations short before 7500 radiocarbon years ago. Conversely, between 7500 and 1300 radiocarbon years ago, residential mobility decreased and many locations were occupied for extended periods. Occupation span once again decreased as residential mobility increased after 1300 radiocarbon years ago. These trends were likely influenced by changes in the environmental and demographic climate of the Holocene.     

Through the High Rock and beyond: placing the Last Supper Cave and Parman Paleoindian lithic assemblages into a regional context

Based on source provenance data derived from Paleoindian artifacts in the Great Basin, most researchers agree that early groups were mobile and far-ranging; however, current explanations of the behavior reflected by those data differ. Some models portray Paleoindians as residentially-mobile foragers while others portray them as wetland-tethered collectors reliant upon logistical forays. We consider the types of hunter-gatherer behavior that could produce trends in the X-ray fluorescence data from three Paleoindian assemblages in northwest Nevada, where abundant high quality obsidian essentially allows us to hold the effects of raw material availability constant between sites. We conclude that while it is difficult to differentiate between residential and logistical mobility using technological and sourcing data alone, we can nevertheless begin to understand the relative time-averaged importance of particular locations on the landscape and why such places attracted Paleoindians.