Chipped-stone crescent

Last updated
A lithic chipped-stone crescent tool. Lithic crescent tool.png
A lithic chipped-stone crescent tool.

Chipped stone crescents are a class of artifact found mainly associated with surface components of archaeological sites located in the Great Basin, the Columbia Plateau, and throughout California. Although their distribution covers a large portion of the western United States, crescents are often found in similar contexts in close proximity to water sources including playas, lakes, rivers, and mainland and island coast lines. Crescents are generally thought to be diagnostic to the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene (approx. 12,000-8,000 years before present [YBP]) and are representative of assemblages that include fluted and stemmed projectile points.

Contents

The exact purpose of crescents is unknown, but scientists suggest they may have been hafted as a projectile point, or used as part of a throwing stick. [1]

Crescent morphology

Crescents are a type of artifact or group of artifacts that are somewhat morphologically diverse, but typically consist of a chipped-stone tool that is bilaterally symmetrical, bifacially pressure flaked, may have winged edges, and typically have edge-grinding. [2] [3] [4] Crescents are typically found as part of surface assemblages as opposed to well-dated subsurface contexts, and lack good chronology which would indicate if the degree of morphological variability represents changes over time, or if the differences represent regional expressions. [3] Crescent morphology has been subdivided into three groups including lunate, winged, and eccentric crescents. Lunate crescents typically have a curved/convex proximal lateral edge with a generally straight to convex distal lateral edge. [2] Winged crescents are characterized by convex proximal lateral edge and a concave distal lateral edge. [2] Some eccentric crescents have been described as being shaped like animals such as bears, while others consist of serrated or barbed edges. The most common materials crescents are made of include chert, chalcedony, and jasper—all strong and durable lithic materials that are not as brittle as obsidian; however, although its rare, some crescents are made of obsidian. [2] [5] [4]

Temporal and spatial distribution

Chipped-stone crescents are found within the western United States, primarily as part of surface assemblages throughout the Great Basin, the Columbia Plateau, and in California – primarily along the mainland and Channel Island coastlines, as well as the San Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert. [2] Crescents are associated with archaeological assemblages dating from the Terminal Pleistocene-to the Early Holocene (12,000-8,000 calibrated years before present [cal BP]) and tend to disappear from the archaeological record after 7,500 cal BP. [2] [6] Of the thousands of crescents documented to date in the western United States, approximately 94 percent of the sites in which they were discovered are within 10 kilometers of large existing or extinct bodies of water including wetlands, marches, rivers, and pluvial lakes. [3] [7]

In the Great Basin, crescents are often found in artifact assemblages characterized as belonging to the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST), which is composed of artifact classes that would indicate an economy focused on big-game hunting. [2] [5] [4] These WST assemblages represent a timeframe spanning from approximately 12,000-8,500 cal BP, which spanned the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocenea period of cooler and wetter climate that supported hundreds of pluvial lakes throughout the Great Basin. [5] [7] Many WST assemblages are found on the remnant landforms of pluvial lakes; however, there are some that are found in caves far from known bodies of water. [5] [4]

In California, the known distribution of crescents extend along the coast from Sonoma County in the north to northern Baja in the south, in addition to inland settings in the southern San Joaquin Valley where crescents have been recovered along shorelines of extinct lakes. [6] Approximately one-third of the crescents recovered from coastal California sites come from Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands. [6] [4] Though many crescents found on the islands are associated with surface artifact scatters, there are those that have been recovered from stratified subsurface deposits from which diagnostic artifacts, such as the Channel Island Barbed projectile point, as well as with faunal assemblages comprising waterfowl, seabirds, marine mammals, and fish. [4]

Within the San Joaquin Valley, thousands of crescents have originated from sites located on the shoreline of Tulare Lake, which covered much of the southern portion of the valley. [5] Similarly, crescent fragments have also been found in subsurface deposits dating to 7,600-8,200 cal BP associated with sites on the shoreline of extinct Buena Vista Lake, also located in the southern San Joaquin Valley. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microlith</span> Stone tool

A microlith is a small stone tool usually made of flint or chert and typically a centimetre or so in length and half a centimetre wide. They were made by humans from around 35,000 to 3,000 years ago, across Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. The microliths were used in spear points and arrowheads.

Lunate is a crescent or moon-shaped microlith. In the specialized terminology of lithic reduction, a lunate flake is a small, crescent-shaped flake removed from a stone tool during the process of pressure flaking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clovis point</span> New World prehistoric projectile

Clovis points are the characteristically fluted projectile points associated with the New World Clovis culture, a prehistoric Paleo-American culture. They are present in dense concentrations across much of North America and they are largely restricted to the north of South America. There are slight differences in points found in the Eastern United States bringing them to sometimes be called "Clovis-like". Clovis points date to the Early Paleoindian period, with all known points dating from roughly 13,400–12,700 years ago. As an example, Clovis remains at the Murry Springs Site date to around 12,900 calendar years ago. Clovis fluted points are named after the city of Clovis, New Mexico, where examples were first found in 1929 by Ridgely Whiteman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Upper Paleolithic</span> Subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age

The Upper Paleolithic is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago, according to some theories coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity in early modern humans, until the advent of the Neolithic Revolution and agriculture.

The Calico Early Man Site is an archaeological site in an ancient Pleistocene lake located near Barstow in San Bernardino County in the central Mojave Desert of Southern California. This site is on and in late middle-Pleistocene fanglomerates known variously as the Calico Hills, the Yermo Hills, or the Yermo formation. Holocene evidence includes petroglyphs and trail segments that are probably related to outcrops of local high-quality siliceous rock.

The San Dieguito complex is an archaeological pattern left by early Holocene inhabitants of Southern California and surrounding portions of the Southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. Radiocarbon dating places a 10,200 BP (8200 BCE) date consideration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fort Rock Cave</span> United States historic place

Fort Rock Cave was the site of the earliest evidence of human habitation in the US state of Oregon before the excavation of the Paisley Caves. Fort Rock Cave featured numerous well-preserved sagebrush sandals, ranging from 9,000 to 13,000 years old. The cave is located approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west of Fort Rock near Fort Rock State Natural Area in Lake County. Fort Rock Cave was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1961, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fort Rock–Christmas Lake Valley basin</span> Endorheic pluvial lake in Oregon

Fort Rock–Christmas Lake Valley is a basin of a former inland sea that existed in that region from Pliocene through late Pleistocene time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blackwater Draw</span> Dry stream channel in New Mexico, US

Blackwater Draw is an intermittent stream channel about 140 km (87 mi) long, with headwaters in Roosevelt County, New Mexico, about 18 km (11 mi) southwest of Clovis, New Mexico, and flows southeastward across the Llano Estacado toward the city of Lubbock, Texas, where it joins Yellow House Draw to form Yellow House Canyon at the head of the North Fork Double Mountain Fork Brazos River. It stretches across eastern Roosevelt County, New Mexico, and Bailey, Lamb, Hale, and Lubbock Counties of West Texas and drains an area of 1,560 sq mi (4,040 km2).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windust Caves Archaeological District</span> Historic district in Washington, United States

The Windust Caves (45-FR-46) are a series of nine caves eroded into a basalt cliff on the north side of the lower Snake River in Franklin County, southeastern Washington. The caves were excavated from 1959 until 1961 by a crew led by Harvey S. Rice. The site contains cultural artifacts dating back over 10,000 years and is culturally associated with other sites in the Columbia Basin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Huaca Prieta</span> Archaeological site in Peru

Huaca Prieta is the site of a prehistoric settlement beside the Pacific Ocean in the Chicama Valley, just north of Trujillo, La Libertad Province, Peru. It is a part of the El Brujo Archaeological Complex, which also includes Moche (culture) sites.

The Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA), is a website dedicated to the compilation of projectile point and other relevant data pertaining to Paleoindian site assemblages across the Americas. As of April 2011, the PIDBA database contains information pertaining to locational data (n=29,393), attribute data (n=15,254), and image data on Paleoindian projectile points and other tools in North America and also includes bibliographic references, radiocarbon dates, and maps created making use of database and GIS data. The PIDBA site provides a database that is useful in studying stylistic and morphological variability, lithic raw material usage and procurement strategies, geographic distributions of technology, and land use strategies during the Paleoindian period, which took place prior to ca. 11,450 cal year BP. The PIDBA database also serves a function as an intermediary between academic and advocational archaeologists in the collection and integration of primary projectile point data. Overall, the PIDBA project aims to compile data from multiple sources into a comprehensive database, while simultaneously seeking out and including new data. The PIDBA website contains a large amount of primary data collected and donated by researchers and advocational archaeologists from all over the Americas ranging from metric measurements to the type of chert any particular piece is made from. It is the voluntary contributions of primary data from these researchers that makes PIDBA possible. While it is understandable that researchers would like to fully examine and publish on their data, the site's philosophy is that it is important to disseminate information freely, so that other researchers can work with it. This allows researchers to make new discoveries that they perhaps would not be possible otherwise.

Dust Cave is a Paleoindian archaeology site located in northern Alabama. It is in the Highland Rim in the limestone bluffs that overlook Coffee Slough, a tributary of the Tennessee River. The site was occupied during the Pleistocene and early Holocene eras. 1LU496, another name for Dust Cave, was occupied seasonally for 7,000 years. The cave was discovered in 1984 by Dr. Richard Cobb and initially excavated in 1989 under Dr. Boyce Driskell from the University of Alabama.

The Swan Point Archeological Site is located in eastern central Alaska, in the Tanana River watershed. It is one of a collection of sites in the area that have yielded the oldest evidence of human habitation in the state, in addition to megafauna no longer found in Alaska, such as wapiti (elk), bison, and woolly mammoth. Finds co-located with human artifacts at the site have given radiocarbon dates of 14,000 years, indicating the site was occupied around 12,000 BCE. Swan Point is the oldest archaeological site in the Americas whose age is not disputed.

Kansyore pottery is a type of ancient East African pottery.

The coastal migration hypothesis is one of two leading hypotheses about the settlement of the Americas at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. It proposes one or more migration routes involving watercraft, via the Kurile island chain, along the coast of Beringia and the archipelagos off the Alaskan-British Columbian coast, continuing down the coast to Central and South America. The alternative is the hypothesis solely by interior routes, which assumes migration along an ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lake Panamint</span>

Lake Panamint is a former lake that occupied Panamint Valley in California during the Pleistocene. It was formed mainly by water overflowing through the Owens River and which passed through Lake Searles into the Panamint Valley. At times, Lake Panamint itself overflowed into Death Valley and Lake Manly.

The Scotts Valley Site (CA-SCAR-177), also known as the Lake Carbonera Site, is an archaeological site which has been documented as one of the oldest human settlement sites in Central California. Dated at 12,000-9,000 years before present, it is located in Scotts Valley, California, in the United States, at what was once a large pluvial lake.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cooper's Ferry site</span> Archaeological site in Idaho, U.S.

Cooper's Ferry is an archaeological site along the lower Salmon River near the confluence with Rock Creek in the western part of the US state of Idaho, and part of the Lower Salmon River Archeological District. It is 17 kilometres (11 mi) south of the town of Cottonwood and 63 kilometres (39 mi) upstream from the Snake River. Various lithic and animal remains from the Pleistocene to early Holocene ages have been found there. The site is on traditional Nez Perce land, and known to the tribe as the historical village of Nipéhe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western Stemmed Tradition</span>

The Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) is a Paleoindian archaeological culture known from the Intermountain West of North America, particularly the Great Basin and the Columbian Plateau, spanning from over 13,000 years Before Present to around 8,500 years Before Present. Unlike Clovis and related traditions, the stone projectile points produced by the Western Stemmed Tradition are unfluted. Other types of tool produced by WST peoples include stone crescents. The Western Stemmed Tradition has a wide variability in tool morphology, and is divided up into a number of chronologically separated subtypes, including the Haskett, Cougar Mountain Parman and Windust. Some of the oldest sites of the tradition are at Cooper's Ferry in Idaho and Paisley Cave in Oregon, dating to the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial.

References

  1. Dennis Cassinelli. "The mysterious Great Basin crescents". Denniscassinell.com. Retrieved 2022-09-02.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Tadlock, W. Lewis (1966). "Certain Crescentic Stone Objects as a Time Marker in the Western United States". American Antiquity. 31 (5): 662–675. doi:10.2307/2694491. JSTOR   2694491.
  3. 1 2 3 Dale, Graham. "Studying Crescentics: Form or Function". Mammoth Trumpet. 25: 1–3, 6–7.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Smith, Geoffrey M.; Pattee, Donald D.; Finley, Judson; Fagan, John; Pellegrini, Evan (2012). "A Flaked Stone Crescent from a Stratified, Radio-Carbon Dated Site in the Northern Great Basin". North American Archaeologist. 35 (3): 257–276. doi:10.2190/NA.35.3.c. S2CID   129501690.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Moss, Madonna; Erlandson, Jon (2013). "Waterfowl and Lunate Crescents in Western North America: The Archaeology of the Pacific Flyway". Journal of World Prehistory. 26 (3): 173–211. doi:10.1007/s10963-013-9066-5. S2CID   161949450.
  6. 1 2 3 Erlandson, Jon; Braje, Todd (2014). "Five Crescents from Cardwell: Context and Chronology of Chipped Stone Crescents at CA-SMI-679, San Miguel Island, California". Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly. 40: 35–46.
  7. 1 2 Sanchez, Gabriel; Erlandson, Jon; Tripcevich, Nicholas (2016). "Quantifying the Association of Chipped Stone Crescents with Wetlands and Paleo shorelines of Western North America". North American Archaeologist: 1–31.