Texas : a World Unto Itself

[uniface]

Better late than never, I guess (said with egg on face)

I had been operating under the assumption that lamellar core-&-blade technology (except for the Hopewell era) was pretty much restricted to (and diagnostic of) the Paleoindian era.

Then Neanderthal pointed out that, in and around Texas, it continued (sometimes) into the Jarrell Phase (Early Archaic) there.

Now Pleo, at arrowheadology, has posted pics. of re-touched blades from the Toya (Woodland -- I think) era there (even later than Hopewell) that convince me that I was totally FOS as far as Texica & that area in general are concerned.

It probably isn't cool to recommend that people go there to look at them, since you have to register to see the pictures, but if you're finding stuff in or around Texas you're assuming is Paleo (or you relied on my opinion that it must be), I'd seriously consider doing so for the educational value. The thread is Clovis Cores in the Arrowhead & Indian Relics section of the Forum there.

 

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[Neanderthal]

Ahhh...even worse! Core and blade technology was employed by MANY Natives and cultures. Are you sitting down? Even through historic (yes, you read that correctly), Indians used core / blade technology.

I have been meaning to put up some pictures of different ones from known context, but haven't had the time.

Here is the problem, as I see it. Many "experts" have focused their studies in primarily one area, category, time period, whatever. However, by failing to familiarize themselves with everything, they miss out on the big picture. To coin an old idiom, they can't see the forest for the trees. Often, people don't bother studying other cultures and types for comparative purposes..and that's VERY important.

George Frison has done a ton of extensive work on certain sites that we are all familiar with. He is a wealth of information, and I highly respect his opinion and work. Let's say he finds that "Bubba" knives generally are flaked transversely from left to right. People automatically assume that all knives that are flaked transversely from left to right have to be Bubba knives. Should they do that? No. It's as erroneous as saying squirrels have bushy tails, so everything with a bushy tail must be a squirrel. HA!

For some reason, paleo time period has caused more misconceptions (to my knowledge) than any other. Here are some popular myths that I see perpetuated often involving the paleo and some others.

1. Outre Passe Transverse Flaking - There is a misconceived notion that Paleo people had a monopoly on this. Untrue. Many cultures employed it - it worked well! Often, it can be the result of good quality material (obsidian especially) and good control during the thinning process.

2. Crude / ugly = older- Please! As a general rule, you won't determine age by how rudimentary a point is. It's more of a measure of the knappers skill, material utilized, or what the piece was exposed to.

3. Patina = older - No. The amount of staining or deposits on a piece is more dependent on the environments the materials were exposed to. Some material weather or mineralize much different than others in certain exposures. I could go into a long dissertation about fingernails and iron deposits, but won't.

4. Parallel = paleo - False. Often earlier cultures did employ certain flaking techniques more than others. However, many pieces can be parallel, transverse, oblique, chevron flaked from many different time periods. For instance, some of the finest oblique parallel flaked knives you will see were made by the Wichita groups.

5. Ground base - It's often thought that ground base means early. Not always so! Basal grinding was utilized by later groups also. McKean are late archaic and you will see them often with ground bases (Duncan) and killer flaking. Neosho (Mississippian) will have ground base, as well as some Dickson (Hopewell/ Woodland) and there are many more. In fact, did you know that on some sites Snyders affinis have ground bases? You won't that in any publication, but it's true.

5. Turtles make good hockey pucks - OK, this one is entirely true.

Damn, I completely lost my train of thought! LOL, I had several more that I wanted to mention, but completely got sidetracked. Blame the cat under the desk, it bit me. I think it's trying to tell me to shut up.

 

[uniface]

Here is the problem, as I see it. Many "experts" have focused their studies in primarily one area, category, time period, whatever. However, by failing to familiarize themselves with everything, they miss out on the big picture. To coin an old idiom, they can't see the forest for the trees. Often, people don't bother studying other cultures and types for comparative purposes..and that's VERY important

I should probably leave this well enough alone, having said what I had to say the first time. But there are a couple things about this that bother me.

For one, nearly any "expert" in any field is necessarily a specialist in one fairly narrow area. An ear, nose & throat doctor's knowledge of gall bladders is probably confined to what he remembers about them from med school. A computer system security expert may not be the best website designer, and so on.

Confining it to archaeology, nobody has a blanket familiarity with a field that spans (minimum) 20,000 years and an entire continent. Nor is there any reason, even assuming it would be possible, for anybody to pursue one, seeing as Cliff Dweller pottery sequencing is pretty irrelevant to Hopewell interaction patterns in Ohio or Early Archaic ecological adaptions in Virginia. Especially given that the archaeological frontiers that occupy peoples' attention are increasingly remote from the points-&-tools perspective of collectors in general.

Then there's the problem of coming up with the data that would enable this kind of comparison to be made, and trying to determine (flying blind) the extent to which a generalization from one area holds in another (your point, above). Although uniface tools are kind of the red-headed stepchildren of archaeology insofar as illustrations and discussion of them in resources available to avocationals go (the points-to-tools ratio is probably at least 50:1), there are still enough on them available to form an impression of what they were, when they were made, and where they're found, from Nova Scotia east to Michigan and, in and west of the Appalachians, down to northern Alabama. Within this (necessarily limited) area, prismatic blade technology is a Paleo horizon marker -- possibly surviving into Early Archaic in altered forms (a moot point dependant on how "Early Archaic" is defined).

As an example, survey the huge collection of Ohio tools Dorkfish has posted, looking for a typical Paleo example. Out of several hundred, there are maybe five "possibles." If people there continued to make them, he'd have a slew of them. Having lived seven miles from Gary Fogelman, and seen multiple-thousand-piece collections from Pennsylvania and Ohio come and go, for years, the overall picture is the same. And congruent with the blanket statement in the Kentucky State Archaeological Survey report that core-&-blade technology there ended when Clovis (proper) morphed into Gainey and similar Middle Paleo assemblages. (It came back with Hopewell, but that's been covered).

Now look for internet-available coverage of this technology from west of the above area. Everything you can find on it is Paleo (Gault, Blackwater Draw, et al.). That this technology persisted in Texas and the High Plains is apparently well known to some collectors there. But not (in anything I've been able to find, at least) illustrated and explained. Back east here, you have to intuit it from isolated bits of data like the vague similarity of some Dakota endscrapers to paleo forms. This being the case, having someone tell you that there's nothing temporally diagnostic about "paleo" uniface forms, without providing either an accessible resource stating this or illustrating a few examples showing this from a known, post-paleo context just comes across the way the belief in some circles in Illinois that everybody made endscrapers, and there's no way to tell them apart does -- as a lazy and unfounded generalisation. Especially when, in an area you're intimately familiar with (central Pennsylvania), the archaeological record is devoid of them for thousands of years on end.

When you pointed out that, based on your familiarity with it, the Texas retouched blade looked like something from the Jarrell Phase in the area it came from, that went immediately into the mix. Then, when you confirmed what Pete Bostrum's site mentioned (that western Hopewell blades were sometimes large and re-worked), that went into the mix as well. Thus the (?) question mark in the response to the blade cache posting 11KBP recently put up.

Especially in a context like this where people are sharing information, when there's a problem with inadequate data, the solution is providing the information necessary to resolve it. The way Pleeo did at Arrowheadology. It probably took him all of two minutes. I asked, he put the pictures and context up, and that was that. Case closed.

 

[joshuaream]

Uniface,

Don't change your name yet... Matt is absolutely right (except about turtles), that said I think it is often possible to recognize paleo core blade technology from later forms, and I think the same goes for Clovis outre passe flaking. Is it an absolute ID, certainly not, but there are very few of those out there anyway.

I can't give you exact metrics for it, but generally speaking I think Clovis bladelets look different than later examples (to me they look larger, less regular, had a different use, etc...) And I think the type of core they often used was a working biface or at least a shallower core vs a perfect steep polyhedral core that produces perfectly uniform bladelets. The attached pictures are of a core that came from a documented clovis site. The thinner edge has spots between blade flakes with a lot of use polish, and areas with less polish right at the flake (showing that it was used as a core, a tool, a core again, etc.) The core part I think is a bit funny, because in the illustrations most people use a classic hopwell or mexican obsidian looking core, but the reality of the pictured artifacts is quite different.

The same goes for Outre Passe flaking. Yes, it can happen to any knapper and was probably used by any skilled knapper to thin a piece, but Clovis peoples did it slightly differently and more consistently. It's more than just a flake that crosses the midline, to me clovis outre passe flakes look a little flatter, a little wider and often terminate in a spatulate shape (they feather out.) They are often taken at angles that no normal knapper would attempt. Why, because I think they wanted the long flake as well as thinning the biface, when later cultures just wanted to thin a biface. It's a bit more empirical than many people like, but clovis bifaces just look more "clovisy" than other bifaces. That big chert knife that Larson posted earlier this month looked rather early to me, the shape, the flaking, the size, etc.

You've probably read it, but check out Wm Dickens PhD thesis. This link should work, if not let me know and I'll email you a PDF. Aside from some pretty pictures showing a great range of clovis artifacts from the Gault site, he spends about 100 pages on core blades. None of them look Hopewell to me, or even really like later Texas/Oklahoma examples.

http://txspace.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/4658/etd-tamu-2005C-ANTH-Dickens.pdf?sequence=1

Better late than never, I guess (said with egg on face)

I had been operating under the assumption that lamellar core-&-blade technology (except for the Hopewell era) was pretty much restricted to (and diagnostic of) the Paleoindian era.

Then Neanderthal pointed out that, in and around Texas, it continued (sometimes) into the Jarrell Phase (Early Archaic) there.

Now Pleo, at arrowheadology, has posted pics. of re-touched blades from the Toya (Woodland -- I think) era there (even later than Hopewell) that convince me that I was totally FOS as far as Texica & that area in general are concerned.

It probably isn't cool to recommend that people go there to look at them, since you have to register to see the pictures, but if you're finding stuff in or around Texas you're assuming is Paleo (or you relied on my opinion that it must be), I'd seriously consider doing so for the educational value. The thread is Clovis Cores in the Arrowhead & Indian Relics section of the Forum there.

 

[Neanderthal]

Uniface, I believe you're completely missing my point. It's not the credentials or findings of experts in any field, it is how people interpret their findings. Of course certain traits can be defined as belonging primarily to certain groups. However, a person has to be careful before assuming (that's a very key word here) that those traits ONLY can be found in that context. In other words, it's best to err on the side of precaution rather than unintentionally mislead.

Let me give some examples of true events that may help clarify better what I'm trying to say. A friend, and well known archaeologist, was examining a point. He stated that the point was for certain a type that he was familiar with. In fact, he was more familiar with this type than probably anyone else. After all, he is the one who named that point type and spent many a year excavating the type site itself. I expressed that It most likely wasn't that type. He was very convinced that it was. It was identical in every way, manufacture, form, etc. That was, until I told him where it was from (the other side of the United States). The point came from a much later dated context. Until he knew this information, he was convinced it was something else.

Another instance. The Sweetwater Biface is well known as being one of the (if not THE) thinnest flint artifact recovered. More than one person has looked at it and stated that it is of very early manufacture. In fact, one of the people states Folsom (Ultra-Thin). Now, this persons word is to be respected on that subject. In fact, they have done more research on the Folsom Ultra-Thin knife than most anyone. These people are convinced that it's much earlier and there's no way it can be a late piece. However, they weren't familiar with the later culture that it is most likely attributed to. Until you finally show them casts or examples of large heat-treated Caddoan knives, and then a light goes off.

How about a well-versed Caddoan pottery connoisseur being duped by a Chinese Qu-Jing piece? Hell, it looked just like a Cordmarked Caddo jar, so that's what it must be..right?

I'm not saying that certain cultures didn't have techniques and traits that they used more than others, they did. I'm not saying it's impossible to tell a paleo piece in certain instances. I'm not saying it's a waste of time to study any certain tools or artifacts, or that we can't learn from or even define them. I'm saying we have to be very careful about what we state or even insinuate as fact, when often it isn't. Generalities are often much more accurate. Also, just because it is published does not mean it encompasses the whole of the subject or is even precise. You'll find that the written word (regardless of how academic it is made to appear) is often comprised of nothing but opinions. However, some are far better than others.

While nobody may know everything there is about the history of the Americas, there are some that seem to have a better grasp on it. With your thirst for knowledge, I have no doubts that your interest in different cultures will also expand. For me personally, a whole new world opened up for me by studying artifacts from coast-to-coast. I love seeing Joshua's Meso-American posts, Larson's perishables....everyones! I don't care where they're from, it's all good to me! Good luck. I've typed way over my quota for the month...I'm done.

 

[uniface]

Hi Joshua. Thanks. No danger of a name change any time soon

The core you posted (thanks also) is a typical one. Everybody pictures the conical ones (when he can come up with one), creating a false impression of what they were doing, and how. But Tony Baker asked the Gault site people back in 2004 what percentage of their cores were conical, and the answer he got was only a small minority of them. The rest were like yours. (He included this in his second article on Handaxes).

That Thesis is a good one ! There's also another one, published commercially, that I may get someday (books are so freaking expensive, and there are so many of them !) In general, I wish there were more examination of the blades themselves -- especially of the edgework on those that were deliberately modified. It's tough, as the amount of re-sharpening/re-working ("curation") varies inversely with the distance from the quarry site. And with places like Gault being quarry/reduction sites, the impression is created that they typically used them and discarded them when this was just what they did when there was another, new one handy to use with less effort (human nature).

The whole controversy reminds me of a Mark Twain bon mot (from memory) : "The labors of modern investigators have cast considerable darkness on the subject and it is likely that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it." We want more certainty than the limitations of the data can support, so we end up over-analysing what we have to the point where we're adrift in a sea of but on the other hand speculation. Which is about where one branch of "the professional community" is now with pre-Clovis. Like Matt says, you can miss the forest for the trees.

The "solution" on this end is to just drop having to do with stuff from west of the Mississippi River (a couple of Texas pieces are being repatriated as I write this). This simplifies everything

 

[uniface]

Matt -

Good post, with a lot of valuable information & food for thought. Thanks !

That said, I still insist that the key to solving a particular quandry like this one is simply posting illustrations of similar material from known, post-Paleo contexts, like Pleeo did. Without that, we'd wrangle over it 'til doomsday, getting nowhere because we'd be dealing with abstractions (ideas) rather than directly with artifactual data. This is a big hitter.

People had mouth battles for years over the possibility of there being people in the new world as far back as the pleistocene. Then Blackwater Draw was found and "marketed" correctly. At which point that particular issue was laid to rest in one fell swoop. All the words and what-ifs 100 people working full time can generate aren't worth, in the final analysis, what one piece of solid evidence is.

That, and coming to a better estimate of geographic boundaries, which is where I messed up. In Kentucky, cores and prismatic blades disappear for a long time when Clovis is replaced by Gainey and its relatives. That's one reference point. I've cited that before -- not because the guy who said so is a big deal in the field, or even because peer-review would have (presumably) caught it if it were in error, but because the guy who wrote it (and the people behind him) are familiar with what's found there, and what's not. Similarly, Adovisio wrote that, within the Ohio Valley at least, any time a post-Clovis knapper produced an outrepasse flake (on a finished artifact), it was by accident.

Those are fact-based conclusions. And, IMHO, reliable. Again -- not because they were written by big deals, but because the writers making these generalisations are familiar enough with the artifacts found in within the areas they're writing about to make generalisations like this. From that geographically limited-context perspective, whether or not outrepasse flaking is a useful technology or what an Archaic knapper in Utah may have been doing there is irrelevant.

Here in the east, western analogues are about all people have to go by with Paleo, since bones, antler &c. simply don't survive in most soils in most situations. It's a habit of thought that turns out to NOT be a two-way street. Our paleo is like yours, but it doesn't follow that artifacts that would be paleo here necessarily also are where you live.

At the risk of running this completely into the ground (assuming I haven't already) : "could have been" lines of thought, unsupported by evidence, sets my bulls_hit detector off. While it can be useful as a check against imagination running wild, there could be giant squid living in Lake Erie. My grandmother could have assasinated President Kennedy. The world could be controlled by space aliens behind the scenes. &c.

I gotta run. Thanks for making me think.

 

[uniface]

"Seco" at Arrowheadology" says,

"There are several very large polyhedral Clovis blade cores from
northern Bexar County, published in La Tierra some years ago. But,
like you, I have seen none from the SW Edwards Plateau. In some of
these narrow stream valleys, perhaps the earliest cultural deposits were
long away stripped away by high velocity floods (as with Seco Creek
today after 4" of hard rain). We also found that to be the case in
river valleys like the Frio, where the earliest stuff is either very (very)
deeply buried in alluvium...or just gone through natural stream processes.

"Toyah blade cores are sometimes polyhedral, and are usually small. A very
nice one was found at a Toyah site in San Saba County, TX (published in the
Bull of the Texas Archeol Soc 1963, Vol. 44, Green and Hester "Finis
Frost site" --- which appeared in a King of the Hill episode when Hank
and Co. found a site in their front yard. The smarmy archaeologist that
visited Hank talked of working at the Finis Frost site. Which means that
Mike Judge, writer and creator, read the BTAS Bulletins owned by his
father, New Mexico archaeologist Jim Judge!).

"There are also polyhedral blade cores, very small, in Rockport sites
near Corpus Christi, especially along Oso Creek. Shafer and I published
this blade technology in Plains Anthropol. way back in 1971 or so. Same
age as Toyah, mas o menos."