Witt Site | |
Nearest city | Kettleman City, California |
---|---|
Area | 10 acres (4.0 ha) |
NRHP reference No. | 71000141 [1] |
Added to NRHP | May 6, 1971 |
The Witt Site is an archaeological site near Tulare Lake in Kings County, California. It was found by Donald Witt, who collected artifacts of concave points, crescents, and fossilized elephant, bison, and horse bones. The site was apparently a good location for ambushing large mammals coming to the lake. [2]
Included in artifacts obtained from the Witt Site in private collections were fluted "Clovis culture-like" points, stemmed points, and crescents believed to reflect Paleoindian occupations. Subsequently, the Witt Site was seen as being one of three major Clovis localities known in California. Since the late 1980s, other private collections from the site have been described and some limited excavations have been conducted. According to a 2019 article published in the journal PaleoAmerica, analysis of the fluted points now suggest that any Clovis presence was probably less than believed and that most of the early material from the Witt Site indicates an occupation by Western Stemmed Tradition groups. [3]
The location address of the Witt Site is restricted. [4]
A 10-acre (4.0 ha) area at the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. [1]
In the History of Mesoamerica, the stage known as the Paleo-Indian period is the era in the scheme of Mesoamerican chronology which begins with the very first indications of human habitation within the Mesoamerican region, and continues until the general onset of the development of agriculture and other proto-civilisation traits. The conclusion of this stage may be assigned to approximately 9000 BP, and the transition to the succeeding Archaic period is not a well-defined one.
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.
The Meadowcroft Rockshelter is an archaeological site which is located near Avella in Jefferson Township, Pennsylvania. The site is a rock shelter in a bluff overlooking Cross Creek, and contains evidence that the area may have been continually inhabited for more than 19,000 years. If accurately dated, it would be one of the earliest known sites with evidence of a human presence and continuous human occupation in the New World.
The Adams County Paleo-Indian District is an archaeological site near Sandy Springs in Green Township, Adams County, Ohio, United States.
The Thunderbird Archaeological District, near Limeton, Virginia, is an archaeological district described as consisting of "three sites—Thunderbird Site, the Fifty Site, and the Fifty Bog—which provide a stratified cultural sequence spanning Paleo-Indian cultures through the end of Early Archaic times with scattered evidence of later occupation."
J&J Hunt Site (8JE740) is an inundated prehistoric archaeological site located 6 km off the coast of northwestern Florida. The site which was discovered in 1989 is located in 3.7 to 4.6 m of salt water in the Gulf of Mexico along the PaleoAucilla River. In prehistory the site had at least two different occupations: a Late Paleoindian-Early Archaic and Middle Archaic. The J&J Hunt site was a major focus of the PaleoAucilla Prehistory Project conducted by Michael K. Faught.
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).
The DEDIC or DEDIC/Sugarloaf Site is a paleo-Indian Clovis-era archaeological site in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. It encompasses an area of the Connecticut and Deerfield River valleys containing evidence of relatively large-scale human habitation dating back some 10,000 years. It is located in the general vicinity of Mount Sugarloaf. Part of it is set on the lip of a ravine, apparently a site that the natives used as a kill site, since it served as a choke point in the movements of large animals. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
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.
The Naco Mammoth Kill Site is an archaeological site in southeast Arizona, 1 mile northwest of Naco in Cochise County. The site was reported to the Arizona State Museum in September 1951 by Marc Navarrete, a local resident, after his father found two Clovis points in Greenbush Draw, while digging out the fossil bones of a mammoth. Emil Haury excavated the Naco mammoth site in April 1952. In only five days, Haury recovered the remains of a Columbian Mammoth in association with 8 Clovis points. The excavator believed the assemblage to date from about 10,000 Before Present. An additional point was found in the arroyo upstream. The Naco site was the first Clovis mammoth kill association to be identified. An additional, unpublished, second excavation occurred in 1953 which doubled the area of the original work and found bones from a 2nd mammoth. In 2020, small charcoal fragments were found adhered to a mammoth bone from the site. AMS radiocarbon dating produced a mean date of 10,985 ± 56 Before Present.
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.
The Holcombe Site, also known as Holcombe Beach, is a Paleo-Indian archaeological site located near the intersection of Metropolitan Parkway and Dodge Park Road in Sterling Heights, Michigan, United States. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1970.
Shawnee-Minisink Site is a prehistoric archaeological site located in Smithfield Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania in the upper Delaware Valley. It was the site of a Paleoindian camp site. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.
Hell Gap is a deeply stratified archaeological site located in the Great Plains of eastern Wyoming, approximately thirteen miles north of Guernsey, where an abundant amount of Paleoindian and Archaic artifacts have been found and excavated since 1959. This site has had an important impact on North American archaeology because of the large quantity and breadth of prehistoric Paleoindian and Archaic period artifacts and cultures it encompasses. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016.
John Bertram Broster is an American archaeologist formerly serving as the Prehistoric Archeological Supervisor at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology, Department of Environment and Conservation. He is best known for his work on the Paleoindian period of the American Southwest and Southeast, and has published some 38 book chapters and journal articles on the subject.
The Quad site is a series of Paleoindian sites and localities in Limestone County near Decatur, Alabama. It was first reported by Frank Soday in 1954, and later findings were also documented by James Cambron, David Hulse and Joe Wright and Cambron and Hulse. The Quad Locale can seldom be viewed at current lake levels, even during normal winter pool, due to extensive erosion, but is considered one of the most important and well known Paleoindian sites in the Southeastern United States.
The Heaven's Half Acre complex is a concentration of Paleoindian sites situated on a series of Pleistocene terraces overlooking a sinkhole in northeastern Colbert County, Alabama, near the town of Leighton. Over one hundred and fifty fluted points have been recovered on these sites, making it one of the most dense fluted point localities in North America.
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Nobles Pond site is a 25-acre archaeological site near Canton in Stark County, Ohio, and is a historical site with The Ohio Historical Society. It is one of the largest Clovis culture sites in North America. At the end of the Ice age, about 10,500 to 11,500 years ago, a large number of Paleo-Indians, the first people to live in Ohio, camped at the site. Artifacts on the site, primarily excavated by volunteers, provide insight into how they made and used tools, obtained materials, and how they lived.
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.